‘The sisterhood of ill repute': Inside Amanda Knox and Monica Lewinsky's friendship

Telegraph

7 hours ago

It's the scandal-survivor equivalent of the superhero team-up. Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s placed her at the centre of a media firestorm, has partnered with Amanda Knox on a new TV drama. The series recounts Knox's hellish experience of being wrongfully convicted of the murder of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher, and becoming a tabloid sensation under the moniker 'Foxy Knoxy'.
Lewinsky, 52, was instrumental in bringing the eight-part Disney+ series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox to the screen. As she explained to The Hollywood Reporter in a joint interview with Knox, 38, this week, she read about Knox's desire to make a film version of her 2013 memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, and pitched the idea to her contact at 20th Television.
It's indicative of Knox and Lewinsky's deep bond. While their appalling experiences of unwanted notoriety occurred in different times, places and under very different circumstances, there are numerous parallels between their traumatic pasts and how they have both fought to reclaim their stories.
Their close friendship dates back to 2017, two years after the overturning of Knox's conviction by Italy's Court of Cassation. Knox had spent four years in prison following her wrongful conviction for the 2007 murder of her Perugia flatmate, and fellow exchange student, Kercher.
As Knox recounts in her 2025 book Free: My Search for Meaning, she was preparing for her first-ever public speaking engagement in Seattle in 2017, and she was 'terrified'. Lewinsky, also a speaker at the event, invited her up to her hotel room to chat. 'I expected to be starstruck,' Knox writes. 'Instead, what I found, almost immediately, was a big sister.'
Lewinsky made her tea and offered valuable advice, Knox writes. But most importantly, she didn't ask crass questions such as 'What was prison like? What's it like to be famous?', which Knox regularly endured from strangers who felt they knew her after reading a decade's worth of press coverage. Instead of expecting Foxy Knoxy, 'it was Amanda she'd invited for a cup of tea'. Knox adds: 'It's a lot easier to make such connections when the other person has been in your shoes.'
Although Knox's ordeal began with the horrific murder of an innocent young woman, while Lewinsky's stemmed from the sexual infidelity of the Leader of the Free World, both women were unwilling inductees into a certain club. Their infamy transcended crime and politics, respectively, and turned them into pop culture punch-lines, referenced in Hallowe'en costumes and rap songs. 'I call us the sisterhood of ill repute,' writes Knox. 'I didn't even realise I belonged to this club until I met another member: Monica Lewinsky.'
In both cases, the reporting of their stories was gendered, judgmental and rabidly salacious – what we now recognise, with the benefit of hindsight, as an extreme form of 'slut-shaming'. The Italian police and prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, who painted Knox as a wanton ' luciferina ' (she-devil), argued that Kercher's death had occurred during a satanic threesome perpetrated by Knox. Lurid newspaper stories were run about a supposedly heartless Knox buying lingerie (with her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito) in the days following Kercher's murder. In fact, as she told ABC News in 2013, Knox needed to buy underwear because she didn't have access to her clothes.
When a prison doctor falsely informed Knox that she was HIV-positive and she subsequently listed her sexual partners in her diary, that information was leaked to the media, as was the fact that police had found a vibrator in her washbag. But the crowning tabloid glory was the discovery of Knox's MySpace page and her nickname 'Foxy Knoxy' – which actually referred to her skills on the football pitch, but became a titillating femme fatale shorthand. She was portrayed in stark contrast to the virtuous Kercher, the victim in this supposed vicious act of girl-on-girl violence.
Prosecutor Mignini claimed that Kercher was shocked by Knox's promiscuity, and that the latter decided to involve her 'in a violent sex game' which then led to murder. He theorised: 'For Amanda, the time had come to take revenge on that 'simpering goody two-shoes.'' Knox, he summed up, was 'dirty on the inside'.
Lewinsky also faced rabid misogyny in the reporting of her affair with President Clinton, with the tabloid press and gleeful male comedians salivating over the sordid details. Knox even admits that she absorbed that image of Lewinsky. In her 2025 book, she writes: 'If you'd asked me about it in high school, I probably would have said, 'Oh yeah, Monica. The blowjob lady.''
Appearing on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in 2019, Lewinsky described the response as 'a s---storm,' adding: 'It was an avalanche of pain and humiliation.' Oliver revisited some of the nastiest coverage, including a cartoon featuring phallic microphones pointed at Lewinsky's face, and the relentless barrage of jokes from late-night host Jay Leno. Those ranged from a snide quip about it being so humid people's clothes were 'stickier than Monica Lewinsky' to holding up a mock-Dr Seuss book titled The Slut in the Hat.
It's no wonder that Lewinsky identified with Knox. Speaking to ABC's Good Morning America this week, Lewinsky described her as 'another young woman who had […] been feasted on, on the world stage', while Knox said: 'We were both interrogated. We've both been viciously turned into caricatures of ourselves in the media.' Lewinsky noted that it had been devastating for their families, too.
What's fascinating, though, and somewhat counter-intuitive, is that both women have actively chosen to become public figures once again. In 2014, Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair that she was sticking her head 'above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative'. She became an anti-bullying campaigner and tweeted the MeToo hashtag, explaining in 2018, again in Vanity Fair, that she now understood her relationship with Clinton was an 'abuse of power'. She also gave a Ted talk in 2015 on the price of shame.
Lewinsky acted as a co-producer on a 2021 TV drama about her ordeal, not unlike Knox's current series. Impeachment: American Crime Story starred Beanie Feldstein as Lewinsky and Clive Owen as Clinton. Lewinsky now has own her podcast, Reclaiming, with high-profile guests including Miley Cyrus, Brooke Shields and, this week, Knox.
Knox, meanwhile, has authored two memoirs, receiving an estimated £3m advance for the first one – although reportedly that money was urgently needed to cover her legal fees. She's also a public speaker, including for the Innocence Project, and she took part in a self-titled 2016 Netflix documentary.
She and her husband, the author Christopher Robinson, share details about their lives on their podcast Hard Knox, even documenting Knox's first pregnancy (the couple have two children). Yet she told the New York Times in 2021 that she initially kept her daughter's birth secret, explaining 'I'm still nervous about the paparazzi bounty on her head'. This new Disney+ drama will surely garner even more attention.
When challenged about this seeming contradiction, especially the irony that they have essentially joined the very media industry that was once their enemy, Lewinsky told The Hollywood Reporter it was 'complicated', while Knox said: 'Media isn't bad by definition; it's a tool that can be used for good or evil. Having been on the wrong side, you appreciate the power of sharing information.' Both Knox and Lewinsky are now taking back that power – and they are doing it together.