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Amanda Knox, who was wrongfully convicted of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in 2007, penned an impassionate essay hitting at Matt Damon’s Stillwater for profiting off of her story.
“Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in?” she questioned in a Medium article, also posted via a Twitter thread. “I return to these questions because others continue to profit off my name, face, and story without my consent. Most recently, the film Stillwater.”
Knox went on to explain that she read a recent Vanity Fair interview with Stillwater director and co-writer Tom McCarthy, who claimed that Knox’s story inspired his film, saying, “There were just so many layers to that story that kept anyone who was following pretty riveted.”
“This new film by director Tom McCarthy, starring Matt Damon, is ‘loosely based’ or ‘directly inspired by’ the ‘Amanda Knox saga,’
“I want to pause right here on that phrase: ‘the Amanda Knox saga.’ What does that refer to? Does it refer to anything I did? No. It refers to the events that resulted from the murder of Meredith Kercher by a burglar named Rudy Guede. It refers to the shoddy police work, prosecutorial tunnel vision, and refusal to admit their mistakes that led the Italian authorities to wrongfully convict me, twice.”
Knox noted that while Kercher’s murder is often connected to her name, “Everyone else in that ‘saga’ had more influence over events than I did.”
“The erroneous focus on me by the authorities led to an erroneous focus on me by the press, which shaped how I was viewed,” she wrote. “In prison, I had no control over my public image, no voice in my story.”
She went on to condemn Deadline’s Pete Hammond for his recent review on the film, in which he did not mention Knox’s acquittal.
“I asked him to correct it,” she wrote. “No response.”
“And if you must refer to the ‘Amanda Knox saga,’ maybe don’t call it, as The New York Times did in profiling Matt Damon, ‘the sordid Amanda Knox
Knox pointed to other content that drew inspiration from her wrongful conviction, writing, “Now, Stillwater is by no means the first thing to rip off my story without my consent at the expense of my reputation.”
She hit at Fox series Proven Innocent, as well as Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers for analyzing her story without interviewing her or asking permission — later praising Gladwell for joining her on her podcast Labyrinths.
“In the wake of #metoo, more people are coming to understand how power dynamics shape a story. Who had the power in the relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? The president or the intern? It matters what you call a thing,” she added. “Calling that event the ‘Lewinsky Scandal’ fails to acknowledge the vast power differential, and I’m glad that more people are now referring to it as ‘the Clinton Affair’ which names it after the person with the most agency in that series of events.”
Knox went on to ask that people don’t “blame me for the fact that others put the focus on me instead of Meredith,” but conceded that both McCarthy and Damon “have no moral obligation to consult me when profiting by telling a story that distorts