In the Running: Emmy Contenders in Conversation With The Ankler is a special series hosted by Prestige Junkie’s Katey Rich, Ankler Media awards editor. She chats with top talent from Disney networks and streaming platforms — including ABC, Disney+, FX and Hulu. In the Running is presented by Disney.
“Why do we all remember ‘Foxy Knoxy,’ and none of us knows who Rudy Guede is?”
For Monica Lewinsky, an executive producer on The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, that became the driving question in turning Amanda Knox’s infamous murder conviction and subsequent exoneration in an Italian court into a limited series for Hulu.
“It’s a story about what happens to a young woman on a global stage, which I could relate to,” Lewinsky says. The author and anti-bullying advocate was previously a co-producer on the Impeachment season of the FX anthology series American Crime Story, which focused on her relationship with President Bill Clinton.
“It’s reflective of how we treat young women, how we see young women, the misogyny that’s there,” Lewinsky adds of Knox’s story. “We’ve certainly seen that just expand in many ways in our culture and news in the last several months.”
Lewinsky met Knox in 2017, when Knox was making her first public remarks after being the subject of global headlines and tabloid scrutiny following the 2007 murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy. Knox, then 20, and Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend at the time, were arrested for Kercher’s murder and convicted two years later, in 2009. (Guede, an acquaintance of the people who lived on the ground floor of the house where Knox and Kercher lived, was tried separately from Knox and Sollecito and was convicted of murder and sexual assault of Kercher in 2008; he was released from prison in 2021.) After a total of four years in Italian jail, Knox saw her 26-year sentence overturned in 2011 — and while she was subsequently retried for the crime in 2014, she was ultimately exonerated in 2015.
“It’s very much a story that you think you know,” Lewinsky says. “But people are so surprised by what they thought they knew — and what they learn.”
Created for television by K.J. Steinberg and starring Grace Van Patten (Tell Me Lies) as Knox, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox gives its title character a full arc, from her life as a young college student traveling abroad for the first time to the aftermath of her experiences in the public eye and prison.
“The differentiation was very important to all of us, to show the two people that Amanda is in both situations — the young, naive, doe-eyed innocent, and then the person she was after this very traumatic experience,” Van Patten says. “The series shows that evolution really well, and her readapting to normal life and still feeling imprisoned.”
Van Patten credits Steinberg and the writers, as well as the show’s directors (Michael Uppendahl, Cate Shortland, Natalia Leite and Quyen Tran) for such sensitivity and respect. “I always felt so guided and taken care of and trusted.”
For Steinberg, a four-time Emmy nominee as an executive producer of This Is Us, Knox’s story is as relevant now as it was in the 2000s — especially as so much of Knox’s case boiled down to preconceived notions and an unwillingness to change perceptions or beliefs.
“Our political and cultural discourse right now, where there’s so much misinformation and so many of us are standing so firmly in beliefs that maybe aren’t as educated as [we’d like to believe],” Steinberg says. “It’s important that we look at ourselves and what we believe are our failings and our entrenchments and our biases, and do we have room to grow?”
That question, Lewinsky hopes, is what people will take away from the series. “Having been somebody who experienced some of the similar things as Amanda, I think that’s how change happens,” she says. “That’s how we move forward in society.”
