Amanda Knox was just 20 years old in 2007 when she made headlines as the American exchange student in Perugia, Italy, whose British roommate Meredith Kercher was found dead in their apartment.
Knox spent four years behind bars, convicted and reconvicted of murder before Italy's highest court finally cleared her in 2015. Throughout her ordeal, the media demonized her as "Foxy Knoxy."
Now, her wrongful conviction story is dramatized in an eight-part series for Hulu. Knox is an executive producer of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, having teamed up with another woman with a controversial past: Monica Lewinsky.
In the series, Knox is played by actress Grace Van Patten, who says in a voiceover, "Many people think they know my story, but finally it's my turn to tell it."
The series shows how the events affected Knox, her family and Kercher's family, as well as Knox's then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who was also imprisoned and later exonerated. The story includes the point of view of the Italian magistrate Giuliano Mignini, who Knox calls "my prosecutor."
"Me and my prosecutor are still in contact today," the real-life Amanda Knox tells NPR. "I've been receiving text messages from him this morning."
We meet Knox at a West Hollywood hotel, where she sits barefoot on a sun-filled windowsill. Fresh-faced with no makeup, her hair is tied in a topknot, and she sports a small tattoo on her shoulder.
"People who have seen the series," she says, "their sort of immediate feedback is, whoa, it was more intense than I was thinking it was going to be."
For years, Knox has worked to reclaim her narrative; she wrote two memoirs and was interviewed for a Netflix documentary in 2016. For this new Hulu series, she even co-wrote the final episode.
"Ultimately, the thing that I was seeking after having been ostracized and vilified and literally imprisoned was human connection," she says. "And I wanted people to relate to my experience. I wanted them to say, 'I understand.'"
Knox says she hopes to convince those who still believe she and Sollecito were involved — even though a man named Rudy Guede was the only person definitively convicted in the murder. He was released from prison in 2021.
After years of feeling misunderstood, Knox says she gave her first public talk in 2017. "I was terrified of saying the wrong thing," she recalls. "Or even if I said the right thing, everyone would find the wrong way of taking it, or that no one would listen to me or that I would be booed offstage."
Knox says she sought advice from someone else who was speaking that day: Monica Lewinsky.
"She invited me up to her hotel room and gave me a pep talk and gave me some tea and checked in and just really big sister'd me through that experience," Knox says.
Lewinsky is the former White House intern whose relationship in the late 1990s with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton turned into a public sex scandal. Lewinsky was in her early 20s when the relationship started; she's now 52. Knox says though their circumstances were different, she and Lewinsky had much in common, including being interrogated by authorities at a young age. (Knox for 53 hours over five days by Italian police, Lewinsky for 11 hours by the FBI and prosecutors from the Office of Independent Counsel.)
"She was vilified and sexualized and made to feel like she was worthless and her only choice was to disappear," Knox says of Lewinsky. "All of those things are also what I went through."
In a studio at NPR West, Lewinsky says Amanda Knox's story resonated with her. "I just had so much compassion for what she had gone through," Lewinsky says. "Look, I made a bad choice; Amanda did, you know, nothing. And I made a bad choice, which I fully own."
Lewinsky is now an anti-bullying activist and a podcaster with a master's degree in social psychology. She says she wants people to understand the lasting damage of being sexually shamed, scrutinized and ridiculed in public.
"Women, especially young women, are collateral damage, when internalized misogyny gets spewed out in the newspapers or in the news or is clickbait," she says. "That's important for us to remember."
After years of silence, Lewinsky reentered public life by writing a 2014 Vanity Fair article titled "Shame and Survival." The following year, she delivered a TED Talk on "The Price of Shame."
Then Lewinsky co-produced the limited series Impeachment: American Crime Story for FX. With a production deal with 20th Television, Lewinsky put together this new series, inspired by a New York Times article in which Knox said she wanted to tell her story onscreen.
"I had a very bonkers narrative in my head about what had actually happened," Lewinsky says of Knox's tale before she delved in. "There were so many things that I thought I knew, and I was wrong. And so I think people are going to be really surprised."
To write Knox's tale from different points of view, showrunner K.J. Steinberg says she pored through thousands of pages of court documents, forensic files, police reports and videos, witness depositions and judges' decisions.
Steinberg says she admires the resilience of Knox and Lewinsky. "They're both extraordinary women," she says. "I don't know where they found the strength. They're both very inspiring people to me, and they're part of a very unfortunate small club. I grew up being aware of them for all the wrong reasons."
Despite their similarities, Lewinsky says she had a very different relationship to the man whose team interrogated her than Knox has with her prosecutor.
"I met Ken Starr once," she chuckles. "I definitely did not want to become pen pals with him."
Starr, who died in 2022, denied bullying Lewinsky during the Clinton investigation.
Knox now serves on the board of The Innocence Center, a nonprofit dedicated to freeing innocent people from prison. With her husband, Christopher Robinson, she also hosts two true crime podcasts. They have two young children and live near Seattle.
"I want people to come away knowing that whatever traumatic thing that they're experiencing, their life is not over," she says. "You have to carry these experiences with you in a way that makes sense to you and gives you momentum, as opposed to holds you back."
These days, Amanda Knox has a new passion: performing stand-up comedy. And you can sometimes find her singing with others who were wrongly convicted, in a band called The Exonerees.
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