The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox

“My every quirk would be used to brand me as a monster.”

In Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture turned a Generation of Girls Against Each Other, writer Sophie Gilbert picks through and re-examines the casual misogyny of the 2000s. The saga of Britney Spears (videos of whom writer Amanda Hess has described as akin to "found footage in a horror movie”), public fascination with Jessica Simpson’s weight, the salacious hunt for signs of pubescent Mouseketeers becoming celebrity hos, and the mainstreaming of porn through celebrity sex tapes – all of it looks different now through the post “me-too” lens.

For some Millennial girls, it really wasn’t pretty to be pretty.

No one knows this better than Amanda Knox, the blue-eyed “angel face” at the center of an internationally notorious murder case alleging that she stabbed her roommate Meredith Kercher to death the night after Halloween, possibly in some witchy occult game. The salacious charges and her photogenic mien brought out the worst aspects of media culture in three nations, and instigated the first – but definitely not the last – mass internet swarming by surly couch potatoes engaged in DIY conspiracy-solving.

The first two episodes in an eight part series, “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” premiere tomorrow, August 20, on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. The series stars Grace Van Patten as Knox, opening with a montage of Knox’s life – from broken home and personal “quirks” in Seattle through her move to the medieval alleys, piazzas, dungeon-like courtroom and finally jail of Perugia.

Knox executive-produced the show with another woman whose public persona was hijacked by a bloodless but sex-drenched global scandal, Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky’s affair with Bill Clinton – she was an intern, he the President – led to his impeachment, and her own lifelong rebrand as a 19-year old nympho flashing a thong at the leader of the Free World.

Lewinsky, 52, is more Gen X than Millennial, but her story was one of the formative political events of the 2000s – as Knox, 38, was coming of age. Both women were in their early 20s watching helplessly (Knox from inside a prison in Italy, Lewinsky hiding from paparazzi in Washington) as they were branded into cliches of insatiable young female whoredom.

The two women eventually met in 2017 and decided to team up on the project a few years later. “I could see that there was a pain in her and it’s a very unique pain that I recognized,” Lewinsky said to CNN this week. “So I think there was an instant connection, an instant understanding of two young women who had become public people who hadn’t wanted to, and had lost a lot of their identity.”

I was one of the many members of the media who wrote a version of Knox’s story. I arrived in Italy, assigned to write a book, thinking I was going to discover how and why an American girl became Charles Manson overnight. Within a few weeks, I realized something was very wrong with the case as I understood it from British and American press accounts. Many of the most damning “clues” were not even in the actual record, or were cherry picked out of context. As Knox says in the opening scene of the series: “My every quirk would be used to brand me as a monster.”

There was more driving the story than just her quirks: the uncanny timing of the murder on the day after Halloween - a day in Italy that has been associated with the mingling of dead and living since pagan times, the walled mountain town of Perugia and the prejudices of its provincial magistrate, Italian anti-American sentiment, and shoddy police work. And the most interesting person in the story was a man whose name almost no casual consumer of news remembers. Rudy Guede was a Black immigrant, known to local cops as a cat burglar, repeatedly breaking into empty houses and taking stuff. He had never murdered anyone, but was known to carry a knife. His fingerprints were on the wall of Meredith’s bedroom, his shoe print on the floor in blood. A local Perugia defense lawyer, tight with the prosecutor, copped him a plea deal. After initially saying Amanda “had nothing to do with it,” he testified that she had been inside the house as Kercher bled to death. He then disappeared into the Italian prison system. Released ten years later, he is now back in jail after being arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting another woman.

In a 2016 documentary, a year after the Italian high court threw out the case against her, Amanda Knox stated the Occam’s Razor of the case succinctly: “What’s more likely: that I get together this boyfriend who I’ve had for five days, and this guy [who] I don’t even know his name, tell them to rape my roommate and then I stab her to death? Or that a guy who regularly committed burglaries broke into my home, found Meredith, took advantage of her, killed her, and ran off?”

But that explanation was so boring. The Italians have a word for what was erupting around the Knox case, and more broadly around the world wide web: Dietrologia – from the Italian word for behind, meaning the study of what’s hidden, or, in English, conspiracy theorizing.

A burglary gone wrong? Too obvious for inquiring minds, could not hold a candle to the Italian Magistrate’s version of the case, where witchy Amanda Knox and her male cohorts were acting in service of a deviant secret cult with midnight membership lists meeting by the light of the moon.

The Amanda Knox phenomenon marked the first time a bizarre cult of credulity emerged online, with tens of thousands of people energetically subscribing to the most heinous possible scenario, while refusing to accept more reasonable alternatives. Bored couch potatoes in the U.S. and U.K. snapped out of their torpor, morphing into thousands of Miss Marples.

A now-familiar scenario played out: vicious social media swarms led by trolls using online pseudonyms. Accusations of fake news hurled at reputable outlets, while demonstrably fake news was published regularly. Doxxing. Lawmen attacked as shills. Journalists accused of “being on the payroll.”

And: the repetition of lies until they became “truth.”

The Hulu series isn’t the first time Knox has tried to set the world straight on her story. She’s published two books, has a podcast (Hard Knox with Amanda Knox), been interviewed countless times on TV and in documentaries and headlined many Innocence Project events. In her high profile post-prison activities, she has played into the caricature that online fanatics crafted of her while she was jailed in Italy: an “angel face” killer manipulating the media.

But what else is a girl to do?

“When I met Monica, I was just glimpsing what it could mean to stand up for myself – and hope strangers would actually see me as a human being,” Knox said in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “No one had walked that walk before me more than she did.”

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AUTHOR NOTE: I’ll send a free signed paperback copy of my bestselling book The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italian Trial of Amanda Knox, to anyone who upgrades to a paid subscription this week. And I’ll be discussing the murder trial on ABC at 8 p.m. this Friday, August 22, and then streaming on Hulu.