Why now?
Amanda Knox is well aware that’s a question people might have when they watch an episode of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. It’s been 18 years since Knox returned home to her Perugia, Italy apartment to find her roommate Meredith Kercher brutally stabbed to death. Eighteen years since the subsequent police investigation and trial transformed Knox from your average foreign-exchange student into an internationally known figure accused of murder and vilified in the press.
Knox, now 38, has discussed the traumatic 2007 situation in her 2013 book Waiting to Be Heard, the 2023 memoir Free: My Search for Meaning, and dozens of primetime interviews and documentaries, including the 2016 documentary Amanda Knox. Throughout the course of her Italian trials, where she was convicted of murder twice before finally being acquitted, her private diaries were dissected by journalists, old social-media posts were splashed across tabloids, and Knox herself was described on television and in court as a sex-crazed murderer nicknamed “Foxy Knoxy.” It was a uniquely traumatizing experience, one that followed her even after she flew home to America, got married, and became a mother. “At that time, I felt like no one would ever listen to me and no one would ever believe me,” Knox explains to Rolling Stone over Zoom from her Seattle home. “I would always be viewed in the worst possible light, and I was really living a life in hiding.”
The Hulu miniseries, which premiered Aug. 20 and is co-produced by Knox and Monica Lewinsky, takes a dramatized look at the true crime nightmare that saw Knox falsely imprisoned for years for a murder she says she absolutely did not commit. As viewers, we follow Knox (Grace Van Patten) though her trip to Italy, her friendship with Meredith (Rhianna Bareto), her romance with boyfriend Raffale Sollecito (Giuseppe De Domenico) and the ruthless investigation and eventual trial led by Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Aquaroli). The show doesn’t shy away from the confusion and trauma Knox endured, but also dives deep into the psyche of the people around her, including Knox’s family members, Sollecito, and even Mignini. For Knox, that human element was integral into why she decided now was the right time to see her story brought to life on screen.
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“Part of my motivation in making this show is to make a world that will be hopefully kinder to my daughter than it was to me,” Knox says. “When Monica reached out to me to work on this project, it was really important from the get go that this wasn’t going to be what people typically think of when they think of a true crime story. We really wanted to convey that there are real human beings at the center of the story who are grappling with grief and loss and crisis. I’ve been scrutinized and judged and had my story told by others my entire adult life. The thing that’s new is that I’m doing it intentionally.”
Knox broke down several key scenes from the final episode of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which she wrote with KJ Steinberg.
Developing a Relationship with “My Prosecutor”
As a true crime show, some might expect the final episode of The Twisted Tale to end with Knox’s acquittal by an Italian court, exonerating her and her boyfriend Sollecito from Kercher’s murder entirely. But the episode takes place entirely after Knox’s exoneration, following her through her marriage with husband Christopher Robinson and the 2021 birth of her first daughter Eureka. The episode shows viewers how Knox struck up a pen pal-esque relationship with her former prosecutor, Mignini — eventually corresponding regularly until she convinced him to meet her in Italy to talk.
KJ Steinberg, executive producer, showrunner, and creator of the show, says that Knox’s relationship with Mignini was the “most surprising” aspect of Knox’s story for her — calling it “utterly fascinating” and akin to an epic tale. “Here are two of the most unlikely people to ever become inextricably linked by something,” Steinberg tells Rolling Stone. “For two decades these two human beings and this case have come to define each other’s lives. It’s the most unlikely of stories.”
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The series finale takes great care to linger on Knox’s 2022 conversation with Mignini. Between sentences of Italian, the two falter, Knox in tears, Mignini unwilling to bend, and try to work their way through the case and their motivations. Knox says that portrayal was almost exactly how it happened. She corresponded with Mignini regularly, always avoiding talking about the trial, instead sticking to subjects like films and books. After months of letters, the two finally made plans to meet. Mignini has his own solo episode in the series, which portrays the prosecutor as a devout man desperate to root out evil in his city, but so dogged in his mission that he wrongfully saw Knox as a villain. It would have been easy for Knox to write off Mignini as a one-dimensional character, someone with no background and no reasoning for hurting her. But she says depicting Mignini as human was especially important to her.
The real-life Amanda Knox being led away from Perugia’s Court of Appeal on Nov. 24, 2010.
Oli Scarff/Getty Images
“With these true crime stories, we tend to freeze everyone in amber, and we define them by a moment in their life. And we don’t recognize that all people are a process,” Knox says. “All people are an evolution, and I’m allowing my prosecutor to be an evolution, and that continues to this day. I got a text message from him this morning. He’s watching the show and giving me his feedback.”
A Family Rocked By Trauma
Knox’s family members, her mother Edda Mellas (Sharon Horgan), father Curt Knox (John Hoogenakker) stepfather Chris Mellas (Joe Lanza), and sister Deanna (Anna Van Patten), are all featured in The Twisted Tale as a steadfast support system for Knox. Her stepfather moved to Italy during the trial and Knox’s imprisonment to be close to her and her legal team. The family went into financial ruin between their constant trips to Italy and the money they spent on Knox’s legal defense. And the series shows them visiting Knox often in prison, even when her spirits were broken by the trial.
But following her acquittal, Knox’s family was entirely against her visiting Italy to meet with Mignini. In one scene, tensions get heated during a family dinner, when Knox reveals she is planning to return to the country. When her family disagrees, Knox tearfully explains that she believes this is the only way to get closure. The case has been following her for years, and she is afraid that it will ruin her daughter’s life as well.
“It is absolutely true that the first words that I spoke to my daughter were, ‘I’m sorry,”” Knox tells Rolling Stone. “The minute that I got confirmation that I was pregnant I was filled with so much joy, and at the same time, I suddenly felt an immense amount of urgency to get closure, which sort of led me on this path to reconcile with my prosecutor. I had reached out to him before I got pregnant, but I did not book a flight to Italy until after my daughter was born. That was very intentional.”
Return To Italy
While Knox’s friends and family acknowledge that it took a lot of courage to return to Italy, the series still shows the trip as a source of tension for everyone involved.
In the show, Knox and her family to meet Mignini but are stopped by a car crash ahead of them in the road. As they pass it, an Italian police officer approaches their car. Knox’s husband Robinson is in the driver seat, her mother is in the passenger seat, and Knox hides underneath a blanket next to her daughter’s car seat, afraid to be seen. At one point during Knox’s meeting with Mignini, Knox’s mother hears sirens from far away and begins to panic — thinking police are on their way to arrest Knox again.
The timeline in the series, of course, is slightly different from what happened in real life. Knox’s first trip to Italy was actually a conference for people wrongly convicted of crimes, a public visit where she was swarmed by paparazzi and “stalked constantly.” But Knox says those descriptions of nervous energy were taken almost verbatim from the discussions she and her family had prior to her second trip to meet up with Mignini. “My mom actually heard sirens when I was in the meeting with Giuliano, and she was deathly afraid that people were on their way to come arrest me,” Knox says. “And while that scene where we’re driving by a car crash and a police officer comes by didn’t happen in real life, driving into Italy was filled with dread. I was undercover and terrified of being recognized. I didn’t do anything wrong last time, and they threw me in prison. So what’s to stop them this time?”
Reuniting With Raffale
Much of the Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is in Italian, from Amanda’s first summer in Perugia to her contentious and highly publicized murder trial. Steinberg notes that the focus on language, and the lack of English in many of the episodes, was a purposeful decision to give viewers a small taste of what Amanda felt like. “So much of what befell Amanda was at the hands of misinterpretation of language, and to me, there was no way but to embrace the confusion, and also to give an immersive experience into the culture,” Steinberg says. “She was far from home. We wanted the audience to feel her and feel for her and without going to Italy.”
After her return to America, the Italian language still follows Amanda. When she is first home, she often switches to Italian accidentally in family settings, like when asking someone to pass the butter. After she returns to Italy to meet with Mignini, she also introduces her husband and mother to Sollecito, her former boyfriend, before the two go on a small walk. In this scene, the Italian leaves Knox’s lips far easier than those fateful days in the police station, and in the midst of a tense life, the show turns wistfully romantic one last time. Knox loves that hint of romance, because it’s a loss she says many people don’t recognize when they consider her story.
“In the grand scheme of things, of all the reasons to grieve over the course of this story, I think this is obviously not the greatest thing,” Knox says. “But it was meaningful to both of us. So much of our potential was taken away, and that included the potential of the two of us as people who cared about each other.”
The Confessional
The show doesn’t end with an answer. Instead, it leaves viewers with a scene open to interpretation. Priest Don Saulo Scarabattoli (Alfredo Pea) worked at the prison and developed a deep and personal relationship with Amanda during her stay, even helping her to connect with Mignini after she returned to America. In the series’ final scene, viewers see Scarabattoli enter a confession booth, a waiting parishioner ready to confess in the shaded space next to him. But when Scarabattoli turns, he is surprised — clearly recognizing the person sitting next to him. We hear a gasp and the series end, all without ever revealing who in Knox’s story had finally come to ask for forgiveness.
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Knox says that this scene ended up in the script after several discussions with Steinberg about making sure the story resolutely focused on the idea that humanity is all about change and growth. It’s something the media didn’t let Knox do, so now it’s a peace the writer and creator feels like she has to take for herself.
“That act of confession implies that somebody is coming to terms with something. And that’s a beautiful and hopeful image to be the end of the story,” Knox says. “We are all in process, we are all in evolution. We are all coming to terms with our pasts and making sense of them and trying to make peace with them. And that’s what that gesture is meant to convey.”
