At a moment when popular culture is reckoning with the way women have been treated in the public eye, two women who know that experience intimately are stepping into a new role: telling the story themselves.
Amanda Knox and Monica Lewinsky are executive producers on The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, an eight-part dramatic limited series premiering Wednesday on Hulu. Grace Van Patten stars as Knox, the 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle who in 2007 was accused, convicted, and ultimately cleared in the murder of her British roommate in Italy.
For Knox, the new series is not just about revisiting the story that dominated her life, but about taking control of it. And for Lewinsky, it’s another chance to lend her voice to reframing stories about women who were once vilified.
The two women first met in 2017, when they shared a stage at a lecture hall. Knox told The Hollywood Reporter that afterwards Lewinsky invited her up to her hotel room for tea. “She had a lot of advice about reclaiming your voice and your narrative,” Knox said. “That ended up being a turning point for me.”
Both women know what it means to be consumed by a media frenzy. Knox was branded “Foxy Knoxy” in lurid headlines that leaned into half-baked theories about sex games and violence. She spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before her conviction was overturned, yet her name remains shorthand for a crime she did not commit.
Lewinsky was also in her early twenties when she was turned into a global punchline. In the 1990s, her relationship with then-President Bill Clinton was seized on by political opponents and comedians alike, making her the subject of ridicule, judgment, and shame. Years later, she rebuilt her life as a writer, producer, and advocate, using her own story to speak out about public shaming and cyberbullying.
Talking with CNN this week, Lewinsky said what drew her to Knox was recognition. “I could see that there was a pain in her and it’s a very unique pain that I recognized,” she said. “So I think there was an instant connection, an instant understanding of two young women who had become public people who hadn’t wanted to, and had lost a lot of their identity.”
Hulu is marketing the series as a story the world thinks it knows but doesn’t. The streaming service describes it as tracing Knox’s “relentless fight to prove her innocence and reclaim her freedom,” while examining why the authorities — and much of the world — were so eager to see guilt in her.
For Knox, now a mother of two, the scars of those years remain. “Living through this kind of experience leaves this lifelong mark on you that nobody can really understand,” she told THR. The desire to connect with people, she said, is shadowed by fear that anything she says will be twisted against her.
Meeting Lewinsky, Knox said, helped her imagine something else — that standing up for herself could mean being seen as human again. For both women, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is a chance to reshape that narrative, this time on their own terms.
