Amanda Knox: The controversy generated by the new American series that was condemned and then acquitted of the murder of her roommate

After spending almost four years in prison for a crime of which they had declared innocent, Knox and Sollecito managed to cancel their conviction and were released in 2011.

Both were convicted again in a new trial in 2014, before being finally acquitted by the Supreme Court of Italy in 2015.

Meanwhile, Guede turned 13 of a 16 -year sentence and was released in 2021.

Knox suffered a terrible judicial error: the Supreme Court ruled that the investigation presented “flagrant failures”, while the European Court of Human Rights ordered Italy to pay US $ 21,500 in 2019, after finding failures in the initial interrogation of the police.

He also suffered a media judgment: together with the main Italian prosecutor of the case, Giuliano Mignini, presented it as a sexual pervert – “Foxy Knoxy”, as the sensationalist press delighted to call it – who, as initially argued by the Prosecutor's Office, orchestrated Kercher's murder with the two men in an orgy of satanic inspiration that went wrong.

Finally, Knox and Sollecito were exonerated, largely because DNA evidence that linked them to the scene also turned out to be defective.

Since that time, Knox has talked openly about his experiences in Italy and the hatred and the ridiculous he suffered worldwide since his unfair conviction.

Your first book, Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (“Waiting to be heard: a memory”), was published in 2013, and in March this year he published Free: My Search For Meaning (“Free: My search to find meaning”).

A 2016 Netflix documentary, Amanda Knoxhe deepened in the terrible experience of Knox, presenting extensive interviews with her about how she was treated.

Now, the miniseries “Amanda Know: a twisted story” again highlights what he suffered. However, after two memo books, a documentary and several podcasts (one called Hard Knox), it is difficult to understand what it really intends to achieve.

As for the tone, the drama – over the showrunner KJ Steinberg, producer of series such as This is Us y Gossip Girl– It is inconsistent.

Knox (performed with dedication by Grace Van Patten) is presented in a light and jocular way as a peculiar student, who has fun in exaggerated scenes with kercher and then makes inappropriate comments and black humor about the events that take place during research and trial.

Sometimes, history is excessively romantic. He even tries to emulate the movie Amélie —The Knox and Sollecito (Giuseppe de Domenico) claim to have seen the night of Kercher's murder – with colorful vignettes and magical realism: see the scene in which a group of stuffed bears applauds to Knox, as a child, acting as a clown.

In fact, Steinberg declared The Seattle Times: “The tribute to Amélie It was an excellent way for the public to meet Amanda, the person, before he was defined in the public imaginary as the distorted version. “

The clichés also abound: from voices that appear and disappear during a scene in which a witness is interrogated in a police interview room, until a clumsy metaphorical moment that shows a bird trapped inside, unable to escape.

However, after the flagrant injustice of being incriminated by a murder he did not commit, it is understandable that Knox would like to clarify the story once again and “recover” his narrative.

Something that many famous women have managed to do through numerous documentaries, podcasts and dramatizations of pop culture during the last decade, who have thrown new light on celebrities and female figures of the 90s such as Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Monica Lewinsky and Tonya Harding, who were wrapped in scandals that demonized them publicly.

Interestingly, Lewinsky is an executive producer of “Amanda Know: an twisted story” together with Knox herself, after having co -produced the miniseries of Ryan Murphy of 2021, Impeachment: American Crime Storywhich tells the story of his romance with the then US president Bill Clinton from his perspective.

Some of these projects, such as Lewinsky's drama, have been carried out with the participation of their protagonists, while others, such as Pam and Tommy From Hulu, on the scandal of the sexual video of Pamela Anderson, they have been done without it.

However, as Jessica Bennett raises in The New York Times On this subgenre of productions that “claim the narrative”:

“It is no secret that humans love to consume show, and we love a show even more when it involves women and sex. But at what time do the fictitious representation of that show become and our way of seeing it as bad as if we were seeing the first -hand action?”

Knox has declared that the series intends to highlight that the true murderer was Guede, which is valid, since Guede received an accelerated trial and was convicted of the murder outside the public eye, without being subject to the same intense media scrutiny as Knox.

Recently declared a Newsweek: “No one cares about the guy who murdered my roommate. I think that is very indicative of what happened at that time, and what has always happened with this case, which is the idea that it was not even really about Meredith.”

“The truth about what happened to him and the truth about the person who committed him were completely lost in the sake of a scandalous story.”

However, dramatization is wrong. This sad story has two victims, but when focusing on Knox's experiences, Margina's death, altering the delicate balance of a case where a victim never lived to tell her own story.

The last two episodes, full of self -complacency, highlight it. He spent a lot of time to exaggerated scenes in which Knox is face to face with his prosecutor Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli) in a church in Italy, confronting him for his firm conviction that she committed the crime.

Surprisingly, this encounter really took place in Perugia in 2022. In the series, melodramatically, Mignini ends up crying and telling heaven: “God sees us suffer from both.”

Even in the brief tribute to Kercher at the end of the series – a homemade video -style assembly of a smiling kercher (played by Rhianne Barreto), laughing and doing nonsense in Italy – Knox is once again the center of attention.

He says in voiceover: “It was the fate that Meredith was at home that night and not me. I was lucky,” and he continues: “I hate having to search in a decade of my trauma just to find memories of her. I never had the opportunity to cry it … I'm going back. I cry for both of them.”

It could be argued that the fact that Kercher's sister – speaking in the name of the family – would not want to have anything to do with this production had to take Knox, Lewinsky and the others involved in the creation of the series to question the entire project, especially if it was done at the expense of the other aggrieved victim.

In statements a The New York Times In 2022, Lewinsky declared frankly that he would have preferred that the dramatization of his interactions with Clinton did not exist at all.

“I hope it is the last time,” he said about the count of his history.

However, as explained in 2021 to the same newspaper, if a television series was going to be created – and if it was not Ryan Murphy's, it would eventually be another – wanted to be present, to have a certain sense of control. “It is much better to live this as part of something,” he said, “to desperately try to find out what is in the series.”

However, this ability to intervene is not something that Kercher's family has had.

Remembering the events in Italy almost two decades ago, Knox recently declared The Guardian that “Meredith became the footnote of a story where I was the central figure.”

Unfortunately, the Knox series falls into the same problem.

This is an adaptation of a story originally published in BBC Culture. If you want to read the original, in English, do Click here.

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