When Monica Lewinsky reintroduced herself to the public nearly two decades after the public reveal of her affair with former President Bill Clinton, she did so on her own terms. In essays and a TED Talk, she positioned herself not as the tabloid caricature of the ‘90s, but as an early casualty of online shaming. She called herself “patient zero,” staking a claim to her narrative.
Amanda Knox has been attempting something similar for years. Wrongly convicted of the 2007 murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher, she became known as ‘Foxy Knoxy’ in headlines worldwide and her trial consumed by mass media coverage. Though acquitted, Knox has never been able to step fully outside the shadow of scandal. A memoir, a Netflix documentary, a podcast — each has been part of her long campaign to take back a story once wrenched from her hands.
Now comes “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” an eight-part dramatization currently releasing weekly that she (alongside 10 others) executively produced. As of publication, four episodes have been released, and at first glance, it fits neatly into the cultural wave of reclamation projects: women who were once reduced to punchlines — Lewinsky, Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears — revisiting their own stories with the benefit of hindsight. But this one complicates the pattern. If Lewinsky’s work has been about deepening our understanding of a single figure, Knox’s project exposes the uneasy trade-offs of reclamation. In centering her ordeal, the series leaves Kercher, the woman whose death made any of this possible, in the shadows.
The connection between Lewinsky and Knox is not only symbolic but literal. Lewinsky serves as one of the executive producers on the miniseries, bringing to the project her own hard-won understanding of what it means to be consumed and distorted by a global scandal. Her presence behind the camera teases the show’s ambitions — not just to retell Knox’s story, but to reframe the machinery of public shaming.
The show is visually distinctive, though not always to its advantage. At moments, it employs a form of magical realism — images surreally morphing into one another, whimsy bleeding into otherwise grim proceedings — that seems modeled on Amélie, a movie that is visually referenced through Knox’s laptop within the series. Knox’s narration is honest yet strange, chattering over events with a knowing edge. These flourishes gesture toward playfulness, but the effect is jarring. The tonal slippage between stylized fantasy and legal tragedy raises the question of what exactly the series wants to be: a reclamation, a commentary, a true-crime drama or some uneasy amalgamation of all three.
Still, it is unmistakably Knox’s version of events. Grace Van Patten plays her with earnest energy, emphasizing her youth and naivete. The first few episodes linger on Knox’s bewilderment during police interrogations, the crushing isolation of prison, the scrutiny and strict surveillance of the press. Italy’s Supreme Court did eventually rule that her convictions were the product of “stunning flaws,” and the European Court of Human Rights ordered compensation for the ways her rights were violated. Her desire to make that ordeal visible is understandable, even necessary.
Yet it comes with costs. Though referenced repeatedly, Kercher hardly appears in the first few episodes. Perhaps this will change as the series develops, but at the moment, the imbalance is stark as Knox, who has often lamented that Kercher was reduced to a “footnote” in media coverage, inadvertently perpetuates the same erasure.
That imbalance is sharpened by Kercher’s family’s lack of involvement. Her sister Stephanie told The Guardian that it was “difficult to understand” the purpose of another retelling. Their absence is quietly felt, shaping how Kercher’s memory is mediated on screen.
Lewinsky’s involvement additionally heightens the paradox. She has admitted she would have preferred not to see her story dramatized again, but believed that if it was inevitable, it was better to be involved. Knox echoes that logic. Both women are responding to decades of voyeurism by trying to redirect the gaze. But where Lewinsky’s productions complicated a flattened narrative, Knox’s seems to risk flattening someone else.
That doesn’t make the series entirely valueless. The magical-realist devices — stuffed animals, a study abroad flyer waving — capture a sense of disorientation and whimsy that makes her narrative more nuanced. It emphasizes Knox’s humanity and the psychic toll of becoming a global symbol for something you did not do. It also gestures, however awkwardly, toward the absurdity of media spectacle itself.
But reclamation is rarely tidy. To tell one story in such sharp relief often means allowing another to blur. That tension animates every frame of “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.” One woman was murdered; another was wrongly convicted. Only one remains to speak. In centering Knox, Kercher’s presence is quieter, her absence lingering just out of sight.
