Monica Lewinsky is keenly aware of what it feels like when your name is no longer your own and becomes attached to a character conjured by others. An affair that she had with President Clinton nearly 30 years ago as a White House intern made her an international headline.
So, when Lewinsky read that Amanda Knox, another woman whose image precedes her, wanted to adapt her memoir for the screen, she felt she was in a unique position to help.
Knox was on a study abroad program in Italy in 2007 when one of her housemates, Meredith Kercher, was killed. She and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito quickly became the prime suspects. The story was a tabloid sensation and Knox was branded Foxy Knoxy. After a lengthy trial, she and Sollecito were convicted of Kercher’s murder and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison; they were later acquitted and exonerated.
Knox has already told her story in two memoirs and it's been dramatized by others. There was a Lifetime movie about the case and she believes the 2021 movie "Stillwater" starring Matt Damon was unfairly familiar. “I have a story to tell because I have a mission, and my mission is to help people appreciate what really is going on when justice goes awry," Knox said about why she entrusted Lewinsky to help tell her story through “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox."
“This woman, who has gone through her own version of hell where the world had diminished her to a punchline inspired me to feel like maybe there was a path forward in my life," Knox said.
The limited series is now streaming on Hulu. Grace Van Patten ("Tell Me Lies") stars and both Knox and Lewinsky are among its executive producers.
Shared but different trauma
Lewinsky was not always in a place to help others reclaim their narrative because her own was too much to bear.
She remembers vaguely hearing about Knox's case but didn't have the energy to give it attention. “I was allergic to cases like this,” Lewinsky said.
“I had just come out of graduate school at the end of 2006. And 2007 was a very challenging year for me.” She believed graduate school would lead to a new beginning and desired to “have a new identity and go get a job like a normal person.” She said the realization that wasn’t going to happen “was a pretty devastating moment."
In 2014, Lewinsky wrote a personal essay for Vanity Fair and became one of its contributors. She went on to produce a documentary and give a TedTalk called “The Price of Shame,” addressing cyber-bullying and public-shaming. Educating others provided Lewinsky with a purpose she had been looking for. “With most everything I do, it feels really important to me that it moves a conversation forward somehow," said Lewinsky. She now hosts a podcast called “Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky.”
By the time they officially began working on “Twisted Tale,” Lewinsky was in protective mode. The 52-year-old Lewinsky, 14 years older than Knox, wanted to shield her from painful moments. She recalled being particularly worried that Knox would be traumatized by reading the first script.
“It’s someone else’s interpretation. There’s dramatic license,” explained Lewinsky, who said she can still “have sensitivities” to reading something written about her. Instead, Knox was OK and Lewinsky learned they’re “triggered by different things.”
She laughs about it now: “Amanda’s a lot more agreeable than me.”
The interrogation was key
Knox said a part of her story that she wanted to make sure the TV series got right was the interrogation scene. She still describes it as “the worst experience of my life and a really defining moment in how this whole case went off the rails.
“I was interrogated for 53 hours over five days. We don’t see that on screen," she said. Now an advocate for criminal justice reform, Knox hopes viewers are moved by the condensed version and recognize “the emotional truth and the psychological truth of that scenario.”
Knox said she was coerced into signing a confession that she did not understand because of the language barrier. She was not fluent in Italian and did not have a lawyer with her at the time. In that document, Knox wrongly accused a local bar owner of the murder, and she still has a slander conviction because of it. Knox's lawyers recently filed paperwork to appeal that decision.
She believes interrogations should have more transparency “because what happens behind closed doors results in coerced confessions from innocent people to this day. I really wanted to shed a light on that.”
No villains in Knox's version
Knox has returned to Italy three times since her release from prison. One of those times was to meet with the prosecutor of her case after years of correspondence. Showrunner-creator KJ Stenberg said she had to condense more than 400 pages of their writing back-and-forth for their reunion scene. That meeting ultimately became the framework for the series.
“The scope of this story isn’t, ‘Here’s the bad thing that happened to Amanda, the end.’ The scope of the story is Amanda’s going back to Italy and to appreciate why she made that choice, we need to go back and revisit everything that leads up to it," said Knox.
Viewers will also see others' perspectives, including Sollecito's, a prison chaplain and confidante, and Knox's mother. It also shows how the investigators and prosecutor reached the conclusion at the time that Knox and Sollecito were guilty.
“We did not want mustache-twirling villains," said Knox. "We wanted the audience to come away from the story thinking, ‘I can relate to every single person in this perfect storm.’ That, to me, was so, so important because I did not want to do the harm that had been done to me in the past.”
“It's showing all of these people who are going through the same situation and all truly believing they were doing the right thing," added Van Patten.
Knox isn't presented as perfect either in the series. “I wasn't interested in doing a hagiography of Amanda Knox, nor was Amanda,” said Steinberg.
Knox's harsh return to life after prison
Knox had a hard time adjusting to so-called “real life” after she was acquitted and returned home to the United States. This is shown in “Twisted Tale.”
“I couldn’t interact like a normal person with other people," said Knox. “I went back to school and there were students who were taking pictures of me in class and posting them to social media with really unkind commentary.” She said the stigma has become "a huge, like, life-defining problem for me to solve.”
“People don’t think about the adjustments she had to go through to reinsert herself into normal life, which is still not normal,” said Van Patten.
Knox said she's learned that there are positives and negatives to her unique situation.
“There are exoneree friends of mine who have been able to move on with a life and be around people who don’t know about the worst experience of their life. That’s kind of a blessing and a curse. You don’t have to explain yourself all the time but it’s a curse because then this thing that was so defining of who you are as a person is something that you maybe feel like you don’t know if you should share."
"In my case, I never had that choice."
Knox is now a married mother of two and grateful that her life did not turn out the way that she feared it would while in prison, particularly that she would never have children.
"I was 22 years old when I was given a 26-year prison sentence. I could do the math,” she said. “So every single day when I am with my children, I am reminded that this might not have happened. I don’t care if I’m exhausted and I’m overwhelmed, this is what life is all about.”
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