Amanda Knox says she decided to produce a Hulu series about her own life, including her wrongful murder conviction in Italy, in part due to the birth of her daughter.
Knox tells TODAY.com welcoming her daughter, Eureka, in 2021 pushed her to confront what happened to her during her study abroad experience in Perugia, in which she was later accused and acquitted of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” premiering on Aug. 20.
“I now was faced with the prospect not of just trying to make the most of my own life, but also being the shepherd of this young girl who was going to emerge into the world, and I did not want the dark cloud hanging over me to inadvertently hang over her,” Knox says.
“I felt like this sudden sense of urgency to figure it out โ to find closure, to feel like I was not just running from this horrible thing that had happened to me, but was really confronting it,” she adds.
The 38-year-old shares two children with her husband, Christopher Robinson: Eureka, 4, and Echo, 2.
Knox’s journey from being a study abroad student, to serving four years in prison for a crime she was later acquitted of, are portrayed in “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” an eight-episode Hulu series with Grace Van Patten as Knox.
Knox serves as an executive producer on the series, and she says she was approached about the idea of creating a limited series by Monica Lewinsky, who also is an executive producer on the show.
“Of all the people in the world who could hold my hand through this experience, it was this other woman who had a bad event in her life get blown out o
f proportion, and she was diminished before she had even developed fully as a human being,” Knox says.
Knox says she watched Lewinsky’s TED talks, which had given her “hope that there might be a path forward for me in the future.”
She adds: “Like, of course, I was going to say yes to Monica Lewinsky.”
Knox partnered with Lewinsky and showrunner K.J. Steinberg to create the series, which begins with Knox’s arrival in Italy from Washington State in 2007. A few months later, her roommate Kercher was found dead with multiple stab wounds in their home on Nov. 1, 2007.
Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were charged with murder. Both Knox and Sollecito have maintained their innocence in the crime, and have said they spent the night together in Sollecito’s apartment the night of the murder.
Rudy Guede was also eventually charged with murder after bloodstained fingerprints and DNA at the scene were identified as his, according to NBC News.
Guede opted for a fast-track trial, where he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison, which was later reduced to 16 years. He was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years in prison, according to the Associated Press.
Knox and Sollecito were convicted in their first trial in 2009, and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively. The pair were acquitted on appeal in 2011, and Knox was released from prison and returned to the U.S.
In 2014, Knox and Sollecito were once again convicted of Kercher’s murder, though the Italian Supreme Court overturned the convictions in 2015.
Knox says she deeply felt how much everyone working on the show “cared about getting this right and honoring all of the people who had been impacted by this perfect storm.”
She adds that she feels the show is a story about how one woman is “attempting to reclaim a sense of of agency in her own life, and she’s doing it in a very surprising way,” and that the previous tellings of her story are what led her to revisit it now.
“Years ago, I was still trying to figure out what was the story โ what was this horrible thing that happened to me? It felt like it wasn’t even my story, I was just sort of taken on this journey,” Knox says. “I was, like, defined (as) the girl accused of murder, and there was nothing I could do about it. I just felt like a helpless, victim of this thing.”
“And today, I do not feel that way. Today, I have confronted my past. I have confronted my adversaries, and I have emerged a person who feels truly free in a way that I could not have ever appreciated, even before this terrible thing had happened,” she continues.
The first two episodes of “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” premiere on Hulu on Aug. 20, with new episodes dropping on Wednesdays until the finale on Oct. 1.
