“The devil is known to assume pleasing shapes.” So warns the mother of future Italian magistrate Giuliano Mignini during a flashback in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which premiered on Hulu on August 20. “Always remember that,” she barks, wrenching the boy from a window where he can ogle the inmates of a neighboring women’s prison.
That lesson in suspicion—revealed in one of the many warmly lit, vaguely folkloric moments of retrospect in the series—seems to undergird the relentless crusade of Mignini (played as an adult by Francesco Acquaroli), the prosecutor who helped convict the 20-year-old American exchange student Amanda Knox of the murder of her study-abroad roommate Meredith Kercher. But just as factors like context and biography count in this story, so too does appearance.
In November of 2007, authorities discovered Kercher’s dead body behind her locked bedroom door in the Perugian apartment she shared with Knox and two other roommates. (Knox called the police after returning from a night at her boyfriend’s apartment to find signs of a break-in.) Soon, investigators and the press had launched a campaign to pin the crime on Knox—with her physical beauty becoming a particular public preoccupation.
In the media firestorm, Knox’s appearance betrayed her: instead of youth and innocence, her girl-next-door good looks were bound up with the world’s worst fears about feminine sexuality. As Mignini’s shoddy investigation falsely framed her as the orchestrator of a drug-crazed sex rite turned fatal (there was evidence that Kercher had been sexually assaulted before her death), Knox was portrayed as promiscuous, a sexual deviant—the press producing feverish visions of “Foxy Knoxy,” an evil young woman with a deceptively sweet face.
In the Hulu series, flashbacks reveal Knox (Grace Van Patten) to be zany and carefree: a child in a clown costume performing for her stuffed animals; a young woman traipsing down Perugian side streets after a night watching Amélie at her boyfriend’s apartment. Yet to the Italian authorities she’s a classic femme fatale, doing the splits in the police-station waiting room (at the urging of a flirtatious detective) and nestling in her Italian boyfriend’s lap while they await interrogation. (Images of the pair would soon be splashed across the pages of international tabloids and used to position him as Knox’s accomplice.)
Everything from Knox’s smile to the rabbit-shaped vibrator in her toiletry case was used against her. The Italian papers called her the “angel-faced killer with ice-cold eyes”; the British tabloids described her entering the courtroom “like a Hollywood diva sashaying along the red carpet.” They accused her of “lingerie shopping” in the days after the murder, when she’d run out of clean underwear. After her imprisonment, they leaked photos of her prison diaries, including a list of past sexual partners she was told to record after receiving a false HIV diagnosis from a prison doctor.
As dramatized in The Twisted Tale, the dynamic between appearance and perceived guilt was further complicated in Knox’s story when hair belonging to a Black man was discovered at the crime scene. In the show, Knox, addled from hours of rough interrogation in Italian, falsely accuses Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a local Congolese bar where she worked as a server, of Kercher’s murder. Although she immediately retracts the statement in writing, the damage is done: Lumumba is taken from his home and jailed for two weeks, costing him his business and his family’s happiness in Italy. (The real culprit, an Ivorian man named Rudy Guede, is later captured in Germany.)
In the show as in real life, the sensationalized coverage continues as Knox serves prison time. But things take a turn in the courtroom. The prosecution falls apart during the appeals process, when experts uncover the reckless handling of evidence and the fabrications by Mignini and his team. In 2011, after four years in prison, Knox was released and her sentence overturned. In a re-trial in 2014, she was convicted again; then the Italian Supreme Court definitively exonerated her in 2015.
Her life since has included milestones that once seemed impossible and a gradual reclamation of her narrative: marriage, motherhood, advocacy for the wrongly accused, a couple of memoirs, and a podcast with her husband, Christopher Robinson.
Still, The Twisted Tale represents a bold re-entry into the spotlight for Knox and a project in which she’s had unprecedented creative control. As an executive producer, she’s backed by a high-powered team of writers and researchers, not to mention an understanding co-producer in Monica Lewinsky. The connection between the two women’s stories is undeniable: both were publicly vilified in their youth for their looks and sex lives, rousing fears about temptation and subversive desire. For them to now come together to reframe Knox’s story seems, in a way, like its own form of justice.