The real-life story behind Hulu’s new mini-series ‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’

In November 2007, American student Amanda Knox made headlines around the world when she was arrested and put on trial for allegedly killing her roommate in Italy. Now, nearly two decades later, she making headlines again, but this time, it’s for Hulu’s limited series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.

The eight-episode series, starring Grace Van Patten as Knox, which dropped on August 20 has created significant buzz around the world. After all, the story that inspires the series was the perfect tabloid story — beautiful young American; a brutal murder in a picturesque Italian town and tales of sex games and occult rituals.

But who exactly is Amanda Knox? What was the case against her?

The life of Amanda Knox

Knox was born in America’s Seattle in 1987 to parents — mother Edda Mellas, a math teacher from Germany, and father Curt Knox, a finance executive at Macy’s. At the age of 20, then studying in the University of Washington, she applied to spend an academic year abroad, opting for the picturesque Italian college town of Perugia.

She soon makes her way to Perugia and rents a room in a cottage along with three other roommates, including Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student from the University of Leeds.

Shortly after she reached Italy, Knox met Italian Raffaele Sollecito at a classical music concert, and they started dating. The 23-year-old Italian computer engineering student’s apartment was a short walk from the girls’ flat.

On November 1, however, a chain of events occurred that changed Knox’s life irreversibly. Her roommate, Kercher, was found dead in her bedroom in the apartment that they shared. According to the Italian police, her body was partially clothed, with her throat cut. She was stabbed multiple times and was sexually assaulted.

When the Italian authorities questioned Knox, she revealed to them that she had the spent the night at her boyfriend’s house and when she returned, she found the home door ajar and drops of blood on the bathroom mat.

Following this, the Italian police took her in for interrogation. In a January 2025 report for The Atlantic, she described the questioning as “the most terrifying experience of my life”.

“I was 20 years old, and was questioned for more than 53 hours over a five-day period in a language I was only just learning to speak. The night of Meredith’s murder, I had stayed with Raffaele Sollecito, a young man I’d just started dating. But no matter how many times I said that, the police refused to believe me,” she wrote.

She reveals in that same essay that as a result of sleep deprivation and the lies she was fed by the police, she signed papers that claimed that she was in the house when Kercher was stabbed. She even confessed that it was Patrick Lumumba, who owned the bar where Knox worked part-time, killed Kercher.

“I recanted only a few hours later, but it didn’t matter,” Knox wrote. “I was coerced into signing the statements and then charged with criminal slander for doing so. (The police, who did not record the interrogation as they were supposed to, deny that I was hit or pressured into making these statements.)”

Arrest and trial of Amanda Knox

On November 6, 2007, Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba were arrested. However, Lumumba was released two weeks later after customers at his bar proved he had been serving drinks that night.

But Knox and Sollecito were charged with murder and went on trial. In the initial trial spanning from January to December 2009, prosecutors claimed Knox and her boyfriend murdered Kercher because she wouldn’t participate in a group sex game. Lead prosecutor Giuliano Mignini said, “Amanda had the chance to retaliate against a girl who was serious and quiet. She had harboured hatred for Meredith, and that was the time when it could explode. The time had come to take revenge on that smug girl.”

At the end of the trial, both of them were found guilty with Knox receiving a 26-year prison sentence. Both served four years in an Italian prison before being found innocent in 2011 by an eight-member jury. Following this, Knox returned to the US.

But her legal woes were far from over. In March 2013, a retrial was ordered after prosecutors appealed that crucial DNA evidence had been left out, and the case was sent back to an appeals court in Florence. And a year later, she and Sollecito were convicted again of Kercher’s murder. Knox remained in the US and was sentenced in absentia to 28-and-a-half years in prison, while Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years.

In 2015, Knox’s and Sollecito’s murder convictions were once again overturned by Italy’s highest court in a retrial. In a statement, Knox said: “I am tremendously relieved and grateful for the decision of the Supreme Court of Italy. The knowledge of my innocence has given me strength in the darkest times of this ordeal.”

While Knox was embroiled in one legal battle after another, it was not her only suffering. As she faced court, she also faced a media trial, which depicted her in very poor light.

She was often referred to as ‘Foxy Knoxy’ with the media painting her as some femme fatale. Journalists scoured her online profiles to dig up anything on her; they even dug up a picture of her posing with a vintage machine gun at a museum that she had uploaded to her Myspace page.

They portrayed her as promiscuous woman motivated by extreme thrills and sexual conquests. The media ran photos of the couple kissing outside the house while they waited for the police to arrive. They even ran headlines such as ‘Orgy of death; Amanda was a drugged up tart’.

Even CCTV screenshots of her and Sollecito buying lingerie were published across newspapers and news channels in Italy.

After her final exoneration, Knox recalled the sensationalism around her case, saying, “It was impossible for me to have a fair trial,” adding that in the eyes of many she had become “the dirty, psychopathic, man-eating Foxy Knoxy”.

Knox’s path to redemption

Today, Knox lives in the US with her husband, Christopher Robinson, and their children — daughter Eureka Muse Knox-Robinson and son Echo. She has written two memoirs on her experiences, 2013’s Waiting to Be Heard and 2025’s Free: My Search for Meaning.

There’s also been a Netflix documentary titled Amanda Knox and a docuseries she hosts, talking to women about being publicly shamed.

And now comes the Hulu series, _The Twisted Tale of Amanda Kno_x where she is the producer.

According to her website, she advocates for wrongfully incarcerated people and is involved with multiple organisations fighting for criminal justice reform.

With inputs from agencies

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