The missing piece of Hulu’s strange new Amanda Knox docudrama

If ever true crime had a “household name,” that name might be Amanda Knox. Forever immortalized as an inadvertent yet infamous media darling, Knox has weathered the storm of being tried, convicted, imprisoned, freed, retried, and ultimately found innocent of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher. Knox, a Seattle native, was just 20 when she briefly lived with Kercher and two other roommates in the idyllic cliffside house in Perugia, Italy, where Kercher was murdered. Despite a glaring lack of evidence against her from the start (and overwhelming evidence against the man who actually did it), Knox became a publicly reviled figure who still generates suspicion across two continents. Since her exoneration, she’s chosen to meet that suspicion head-on, participating in a documentary, writing memoirs, and speaking out about how the media demonized her and how the justice system nearly failed her. All of this has led to her newest project, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, an eight-episode Hulu docudrama created by K.J. Steinberg (This Is Us) and co-produced by Knox, retelling her story from her perspective. While true crime biopics are everywhere these days, there’s something particularly strange about this one, which sees Grace van Patten as a wide-eyed, winsome, fourth-wall-breaking Amanda. The show’s director, Michael Uppendahl, deliberately plays with tonal shifts, seesawing between the quirky, twee aesthetic of Amelie, the film Knox and her boyfriend were watching the night of the murder, and the claustrophobia of interrogation rooms and grief of tearful family meltdowns. The result is something that feels almost unholy — like The Staircase meets Fleabag, two things that should probably never meet! As with Hulu’s other recent true crime-ish docudrama about Natalia Grace, Twisted Tale takes a granular approach to its storytelling, canvassing a huge amount of detail even as the narrative spans years. It also takes on a very close point of view through Knox’s perspective — which may explain why the narrative glosses over one of the most well-known aspects of this case: If this tale is twisted, who exactly twisted it? Whatever you think you know about this case, you don’t know the half Because we rarely shift out of Knox’s viewpoint in Twisted Tale, many of the more famous aspects of the case become offstage concerns. The media’s obsession with “Foxy Knoxy” — the main lens through which most Americans would have absorbed the Amanda Knox story — gets reduced to a passing remark between unnamed journalists. The public’s obsession with the case is also kept firmly at arm’s length; fictional Amanda doesn’t even open the hordes of fan mail she receives in prison. The elevation of so many personal details and relationships inevitably leads to the fast-tracking of many other details about the case, including years of pretty bonkers information about the investigation, prosecution, and ongoing media frenzy. The result is that casual viewers, and even viewers who think they already know where this is headed, might be left frantically Googling case facts to convince themselves they just heard that correctly. Spoiler: You did. Yes, in Italy, the prosecutor also runs the police investigation. Yes, the prosecutor in this case, Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), had an obsession with sexual morals and occult conspiracies. Yes, he decided that Knox, her eight-day boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito (Giuseppe De Domenico), and a local named Rudy Guede, the man who actually murdered Kercher, had all killed her together. His theory? The group participated in a sex game (“gioco erotico”) and satanic ritual acts together that led to Kercher’s murder. (Knox barely knew Guede, and Sollecito had never even met him.) Yes, the prosecutor, Mignini, decided a woman must have killed Meredith Kercher because her body had been covered with a blanket. Yes, he, the investigators, the public, and the press all decided from the outset that Knox was guilty because she kissed her boyfriend while standing outside the crime scene. Yes, Mignini also pursued an occult conspiracy theory in the case of the “Monster of Florence.” After accusing 20 people of being involved in occult acts related to those murders, Mignini was reprimanded by the courts and convicted of abusing his office by improperly wiretapping some of the suspects. That conviction, however, was overturned on a technicality, so Mignini continued to investigate and prosecute cases — including the murder of Meredith Kercher. Yes, Knox claims she really was coaxed into doing yoga poses at the police station. Yes, the police really interrogated her for five days while barely allowing her to sleep, hitting her when she gave answers they disliked. This went on until she coughed up a false confession that was then successfully used to convict her of slandering the innocent man the police had pressured her to implicate. Yes, authorities really lied to her and told her she had contracted HIV in order to get her to give them information about her sexual history. Yes, several of Knox’s friends really testified about her awkward behavior at her 2009 trial. “Sometimes she had unusual attitudes, like she would start doing yoga while we were speaking, or she would play guitar while we were watching TV,” her roommate Filomena Romanelli testified. While Mignini’s occult theory was barred from trial, the Satanic Panic of it all continued to influence the media, the public, and the prosecution. Italian lawyers were allowed to refer to Knox in court as “Luciferina,” “enchanting witch,” and “she-devil.” The list of tabloid nicknames for her was much longer and just as absurd. Fortunately for Knox and Sollecito, the actual evidence that they did it was almost nonexistent, and the prosecution’s DNA evidence fell completely apart due to evidence contamination and a botched handling of the crime scene. Guede, meanwhile, left his DNA everywhere. Because there was so much legal wrangling that happened offscreen and out of sight, you might understandably be confused about whether Knox and Sollecito actually got exonerated or not. Yes, and no. After Knox’s first trial in 2009, she was sentenced to 26 years in prison, Sollecito to 25. In 2011, they won a successful appeal — the decision that freed them both — but that appeal was overturned in 2013 and a new hearing found them guilty again. In that verdict, the court actually increased Knox’s sentence to 28 years. Neither were required to return to Italy to serve this time, however, and in 2015, the case was appealed to the Italian supreme court, which overturned this conviction and acquitted them both once and for all, citing “glaring errors” and “investigative amnesia” among other reasons. This overturned conviction often gets framed as an exoneration. However, she still stands guilty of slandering her former boss, Patrick Lumumba, as a result of her false confession. Guede was initially sentenced to 30 years, but ultimately served just 13 years before his release. He still claims he was innocent and that Amanda Knox was the culprit — and for years, many Italians and British citizens believed him. Even today, despite the general shift in public sentiment in the US, many people still argue fiercely that Knox was guilty, based on little more than vibes. The problem of centering Amanda Knox One side effect of this dramatization is that like many true crime dramas, it reduces real people into characters in ways that feel uneven and unsatisfying. The intermittent attempts to return to talking about Meredith feel shallow; after all, Amanda only knew her for a few weeks. This series argues unequivocally that Meredith and Amanda were both victims — but while centering the victim has become a true crime watchword, centering Meredith in Amanda’s story is easier said than done. Then there’s the “character” of Amanda herself. On the one hand, the decision not to water down her tendency to be flippant, glib, or socially awkward at the worst times is a smart one, since this is exactly what the media attacked her for to begin with. On the other hand, she’s a frustrating ingénue. Her knowing looks at the camera start out annoying and have diminishing returns. Her family members ultimately seem more fazed by her imprisonment than she does. By the time she finds herself on a mystical visit to the Innocence Project, where an encounter with fellow exoneree Antoine Day leads to her awakening as a justice advocate, you can be forgiven if, while wallowing in sympathy, you are just a little tired of this girl. The decision to present Amanda directly to the viewer without the filter of a damning media lens is arguably a smart choice — but it creates a gap in Amanda’s version of the story. After all, the way the press chose to cover the case at home and abroad may have played a bigger role than anything else in putting Amanda in prison. The biggest absence in Knox’s narrative are, perhaps, the people who put her there To understand the real impact the media had on the trial of Amanda Knox, it’s crucial to understand that Italian juries aren’t sequestered during the trial proceedings. That means that both before and during the trial, they have access to the media’s coverage of the case. Experts close to the case have argued that this media exposure was the single biggest reason for Knox and Sollecito being convicted. We do see one such journalist in action, but only after Knox has finally been cleared of guilt — when she sits down for a 2013 CNN interview with Chris Cuomo, who proceeds to challenge her innocence and hound her about why Italian investigators were so convinced she’d been involved in sex games. Because this comes after Knox is free, it doesn’t speak to the real role of the media; it fails as a clue to how we got here. Contrast this with the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox, in which prolific Daily Mail journalist Nick Pisa proudly gave a master class in villainy. Pisa was the one who coined the nickname “Foxy Knoxy”; in the doc, he compared his front-page bylines about her to having sex. He was blithe about never fact-checking the things he wrote about her before sending articles off to his editors, and gave quotes on the record that would leave any reputable journalist open-mouthed. “I think now, looking back, some of the information that came out was just crazy really, it’s just completely made up,” Pisa stated at one point. In one interview years after her first trial, Pisa brought up a purely innocent incident on Knox’s part — she wore a Beatles T-shirt to trial — as a reason why prosecutors and “the media” painted her as suspicious. He failed to mention that he had been the one writing about the T-shirt to begin with. By keeping all of that irresponsible scheming at bay, we miss a vital piece of the convoluted puzzle that led to Knox and Sollecito becoming such easy targets. It wasn’t just that Mignini was “prey to delirium” or that the police had an anti-American bias. It was that Amanda herself was vulnerable to a media that craved a villainess. She was “creepy,” “weird,” “inappropriate.” Above all, she was the one thing an innocent girl is never allowed to be: easy. “It wasn’t the crime itself,” Frank Bruni wrote for the New York Times in 2013. “It was the supposed conspiracy of her libido, cast as proof that she was out of control, up to no good, lost, wicked, dangerous. A girl this intent on randy fun was a girl who couldn’t be trusted and got what was coming to her, even if it was prison.” It’s understandable that the media might have been squarely in the periphery of Amanda’s perspective as she experienced the events that unfolded in Perugia, and that this might shape her version of the story. But if she wasn’t focused on them, they were certainly focused on her. Without their influence, this Twisted Tale might have untangled itself much sooner.