Amanda Knox criticized the new film Stillwater, a movie inspired by the American student’s ordeal in Italy, in a long series of tweets Thursday.
“Does my name belong to me? My face? What about my life? My story? Why does my name refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions because others continue to profit off my name, face, & story without my consent. Most recently, the film #STILLWATER,” Knox wrote. “This new film by director Tom McCarthy, starring Matt Damon, is ‘loosely based’ or ‘directly inspired by’ the “Amanda Knox saga,’ as Vanity Fair put it in a for-profit article promoting a for-profit film, neither of which I am affiliated with. I want to pause right here on that phrase: ‘the Amanda Knox saga.’ What does that refer to? Does it refer to anything I did? No. It refers to the events that resulted from the murder of Meredith Kercher by a burglar named Rudy Guede.”
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As Rolling Stone reported in the 2011 article “The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox,” she and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to over 20 years in prison for the 2007 murder of Kercher in the Perugia, Italy, apartment Knox and Kercher shared.
Knox was the victim of “shoddy” police work and tabloid journalism that speculated endlessly on her involvement in Kercher’s murder. Even after Guede was arrested and convicted for Kercher’s murder, Knox still suffered the injustices of the Italian legal system; she and Sollecito were finally exonerated of any wrongdoing in 2015.
Despite her non-role in the murder of Kercher, 14 years later, Knox remains the focal point of the incident.
Knox added, “I would love nothing more than for people to refer to the events in Perugia as ‘The murder of Meredith Kercher by Rudy Guede,’ which would place me as the peripheral figure I should have been, the innocent roommate.”
After criticizing previous retellings of the Kercher murder, in the case of Stillwater, Knox took to task its director and co-writer McCarthy for making a film “inspired by the Amanda Knox saga,” but not approaching her to hear her side; however, she tweeted an invitation to both McCarthy and Damon to discuss the issue further on her podcast Labyrinths.
“I bet we could have a fascinating conversation about identity, and public perception, and who should get to exploit a name, face, and story that has entered the public imagination,” Knox tweeted. (She later posted her tweet thread in full on Medium.)
“I never asked to become a public person,” she wrote. “The Italian authorities and global media made that choice for me. And when I was acquitted and freed, the media and the public wouldn’t allow me to become a private citizen ever again. But I know that my wrongful conviction, and subsequent trials, became the story that people obsessed over. I know they’re going to call it the ‘Amanda Knox saga’ into the future. That being the case, I have a few small requests: Don’t blame me for the fact that others put the focus on me instead of Meredith. And when you refer to these events, understand that how you talk about it affects the people involved: Meredith’s family, my family, @Raffasolaries, and me.”
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