How ‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’ Examined the Anatomy of Bias to Reclaim Knox’s Narrative in Final Two Episodes

[This story contains spoilers from the sixth episode of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, “Colpevole.”]

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox has been reexamining the real-life murder conviction of Amanda Knox for the brutal 2007 killing of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, while abroad in Italy. The most recent episodes of the eight-part Hulu series have caught up to Knox and boyfriend-at-the-time Raffaele Sollecito’s 2009 convictions, which are only the start of each of their legal journeys.

After Knox’s sentencing of 26 years in prison by the court in Perugia, the sixth episode, “Colpevole” (which translates to “guilty”), opens up with the collective reaction to the end of a yearlong trial that was plagued by blistering media scrutiny and global public shame for Knox.

“The world was fascinated and hooked on ‘Foxy Knoxy,’ and that wasn’t the truth of who Amanda is,” executive producer Warren Littlefield told The Hollywood Reporter‘s editor-in-chief Maer Roshan when explaining why now was the right time for a Knox series. “With those sentencing and ultimately this trial where she was convicted, there were theories put forward, but none of those over time held up,” said the powerhouse producer also behind Fargo, The Handmaid’s Tale and Dopesick. “It was not evidence. And so, where is the truth? And then the other aspect that is a powerful part of this [series] that separates it from other true crime is the anatomy of bias. Big media had an agenda that was very advantageous to them.”

As they detailed in their recent THR cover story with Roshan, the real Knox, who is played by Tell Me Lies star Grace Van Patten in the series, teamed up with another survivor of the 24-hour news cycle, Monica Lewinsky, and the friends ended up co-producing The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.

“Living through this kind of experience leaves this lifelong mark on you that nobody can really understand,” Knox said in the cover interview. “There’s a great desire to connect with people, but after being burned and taken advantage of for so long, you live with this constant terror that people will view everything you do or say in the worst possible light. When I met Monica, I was just glimpsing what it could mean to stand up for myself — and hope strangers would actually see me as a human being.”

This week’s episode, “Colpevole,” dives deeper into Knox’s famous story by exploring her perspective after that 2009 conviction. While she was incarcerated and her family worked on her appeal, her sunny disposition darkened before their eyes, until she became fully engaged in her appeal and began to fight for herself on the basis of a coerced confession, which was one of the most traumatic scenes early on in the series. (Real life spoiler: Knox would go on to spend four years at Capanne prison, outside of Perugia, for a crime she always maintained she was innocent of, until both she and Sollecito were freed in 2011. They were convicted again in a retrial in 2014, before finally acquitted by Italy’s Supreme Court in 2015.)

Series showrunner K.J. Steinberg said that when Knox’s story first came to her, she didn’t have an opinion about her innocence or guilt. But after a three-year process of research with her writers, she had a “firm, firm belief in her innocence.” In fact, Knox ended up learning things about the case from Steinberg’s findings.

“I’ve been very agitated by the current climate of cultural and political discourse — how we’re trafficking in so much misinformation and how polarized we are,” Steinberg told THR. “Amanda Knox was a spectacular fascination, a 20-year-old child [at the time of her arrest]. I knew that she had the moniker ‘Foxy,’ but I did not have any attachment to her innocence or her guilt, or an opinion about her as a person. I realized that I could come at this story really fresh and my firm, firm belief in her innocence is a conclusion I arrived at through so much research.”

When Steinberg first met Knox, Knox told her she had recently traveled to Italy to meet with her former prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, which plays out in the flash-forward that opened the series. “I was absolutely beguiled by her courage and this phenomenal act, bridging this divide between herself, who had been maligned as a monster by press, and her former hunter, who too had been maligned as a monster by press,” Steinberg said. “This series explores the blast radius of trauma, not just for Amanda, but for Amanda’s family; for Raffaele Sollecito, the oft-forgotten man and his family; for Meredith Kercher and her family; and yes, for Giuliano Menini, and his sense of self and identity as both a prosecutor and as a man.”

There’s a break in Knox’s appeals case in “Colpevole” when, 161 days into the appeals trial and more than 1,000 days into her imprisonment, the evidence used to indict her in her initial trial is questioned over and over, showing contamination of the scene by the investigating police and how protocol was violated. The episode ends with Knox, who says she has now regained the dangerous feeling of hope, awaiting the verdict, which is reached just as the episode comes to an end, but not shared with viewers or Patten’s Knox yet.

But with two episodes left, Steinberg wants to make it clear that the series was always intended to go beyond the verdict(s): It’s not a whodunit, but a how-and-whydunit, said the showrunner: “How did this happen to Amanda? [To answer that] means exploring the ecosystem in which the grand injustice was allowed to happen, and that includes her decisions, her behaviors at the time, but also the decisions and behaviors of everybody else that came to play, plus the institutions and systems that were the arena for that grand injustice to happen.”

The writers room made a list of biases they felt played a role, and “misogyny” was chief among them, said Steinberg. “We call it a coming-of-age horror story for a reason. [Amanda] coming of age, exploring her identity and setting out to have a life- and mind- broadening adventure in Italy to find herself being called a vixen and ‘Luciferina’ and ‘Foxy Knoxy’; having her journals stolen from her and publicized; and the misdefinition of her and the fascination with her and the over-sexualization of her really, to me, speaks to the misogyny running through the whole thing.”

The final two episodes of the series explore what happens after Knox’s appeals verdict. “I think the typical true-crime [series] would’ve ended before episodes seven and eight,” Steinberg admitted. “But we were all aligned on the importance that if we’re really going to tell a story that reflects Monica Lewinsky and Amanda Knox, and the dangers of big media and misinformation, we must must follow Amanda Knox back into the embattled, reintegration into her life and reflect her struggle to reclaim an identity that had been stolen from her, and also show her discovering a new identity that synthesized all of the trauma she had been through with the person she wanted to be today.”

Steinberg credits Lewinsky for pushing to continue telling that story. “Monica has done so much self-actualization and integrating what happened to her in the past with who she is now. I found a lot of alignment between her and Amanda on that front,” she adds.

Littlefield revealed that the creative team was even challenged by Hulu and producers 20th Television about why the story should continue after episode six, but said they were convinced once they saw what Steinberg still has in store for viewers. “As the thematic all came back home, that’s when they said, ‘You’ve convinced us that there are two more episodes we must tell in order to tell this story.’ We celebrate the fact that they could embrace that.”

Maer Roshan contributed to this story.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox releases new episodes Wednesdays on Hulu, with the finale on Oct. 1.