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Disney+ is airing one of the most twisted cases, an eight-part series, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, taken straight from Knox’s own memoir, Waiting to Be Heard. The true-crime docuseries portrays the story through the eyes of a young American whose world turned upside down in November 2007 when her roommate, Meredith Kercher, was found brutally murdered in their apartment.
Following Kercher’s death, Italian police launched a massive investigation, arresting Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito as the prime suspect. Knox was portrayed as a cold, isolated young woman, while prosecutor Giuliano Mignini pushed a wild theory that she was part of a sex game gone wrong that ended in murder. After a series of interrogations, false testimonies, trials, and verdicts, Knox was pressured into signing a statement she later retracted.
In 2009, she and Sollecito were convicted, and both were sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively. Two years later, the first appeal court overturned the ruling, and she walked free. By 2014, another court dragged her back into it, claiming the appeal was wrong. But in 2015, Italy’s Supreme Court shut it down for good, ruling there wasn’t enough evidence. Case closed, but doubt and accusations never really disappeared.
Knox was interrogated several times. During one long session, she ended up naming her boss Patrick Lumumba as the murderer. Knox even suggested she could have been in the house at the time. She later took this back, saying she was confused and pressured during questioning. Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba were arrested. Two weeks later, Lumumba walked free after his alibi gave a statement.
While investigating, police found evidence that a man named Rudy Guede from the Ivory Coast was also present in the apartment during the time of the murder. Guede, who was a drifter, occasionally partied with the girls and their friends. His fingerprints, shoeprints, and DNA were found all over the place. He was arrested in Germany and convicted of sexual assault. Guede served 13 years in prison.
The Disney+ drama is told primarily from Knox’s point of view. The show admits that some characters and scenes are fictionalised to make it more dramatic, even drawing some references to the movie Amélie. Real characters, including prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, prison chaplain Don Saulo Scarabattoli, and policewoman Monica Napoleone, appear.
Fictional characters: Knox’s interpreter and a “forensics tsar,” including Vittoria Noce (Greta Bendinelli) and Lucrezia Ippolito (Evelyn Fama), are not real. Much of the courtroom dialogue uses Knox’s real words from transcripts. Her famous 2013 TV interview, where she was asked about “freaky sexual things,” was also recreated word for word, including some BTS police scenes and investigations that were imagined.
Knox’s bizarre behaviour, like doing splits in the interrogation room or sitting on Sollecito’s lap at the station, only fed the wild theory that she was some sex-obsessed “monster.” The series tries to recreate that, though with a few tweaks. Instead of her infamous cartwheel, the show has a cop asking her to do yoga poses, which she turns into awkward stunts. In reality, chief superintendent Giacinto Profazio once testified, “In the police station, she turned a cartwheel and did the splits.”
According to the show, yes. Amanda Knox was given a false HIV test result by a prison guard, who reportedly acted as a physician. At the time, she maintained a diary and alleged that done as a manipulative interrogation tactic to force her to provide a list of her past sexual partners. The list was eventually leaked.
Yes. The Disney+ show reveals that both Knox’s and Sollecito’s phones were secretly tapped, and even phone calls and text messages from their family and friends were being monitored. Knox, on the other hand, can also speak Italian. While she could only speak broken Italian during the investigation, in four years she became fluent.
Guede was convicted of murder and assault, but he never accepted it. The then 20-year-old insisted he tried to save Meredith as she lay bleeding from brutal stab wounds, explaining why his DNA was everywhere. He served 11 years in prison, yet in a tapped Skype call with a friend, he said, “I tried to help her, to staunch the wounds…” Even after his release, he stuck to the same story: “I’ve got blood on my hands because I tried to save her, not kill her,” pointing out that court papers state others were present and he did not deliver the fatal blows.
The prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, argued in court that the murder wasn’t just a random robbery or an assault by one person. Instead, he claimed Amanda, her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede were involved in some kind of cult practices. Even after everything, Knox was still haunted by the question ‘why her’, and tried to make sense of Mignini’s framing of her as a “dangerous person.” Months later, she wrote him a letter seeking closure, while her family thought she was “mad” and suffering from “Stockholm syndrome.”
Their friendship began with correspondence via email. Knox described writing to him to let him know who she truly was and how the accusations changed her life. She saw him for a long time as a “big, scary sort of omniscient presence.” Mignini, who retired in 2020, also started replying to her emails. He admitted that the conversations won’t change his belief but he also expressed that the woman he now knew was not the person he believed he was prosecuting. He stated, “Now we write to each other and she sends me photos of the baby and best wishes on Thanksgiving day.
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