Amanda Knox Thinks Stillwater Really Could Have Chosen a Different Plot

Matt Damon is starring in yet another Impossible White Man movie and although the trailer focuses on his character, who just wants to bring his daughter home, Stillwater has a more complicated plot. The film is “directly inspired by the Amanda Knox saga,” director Tom McCarthy told Vanity Fair. In describing his fascination with the case, McCarthy added, “There were so many characters around the case that I really followed pretty closely.” McCarthy’s view of real-life people as characters playing out a dramatic story is an interesting one, considering that a woman was murdered and another was falsely accused by police and vilified by the media for years.

None of this is lost on Amanda Knox, the woman who found herself at the center of this tragedy after she was wrongly convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher in 2007 in Perugia, Italy. Knox was acquitted in 2015 by the Italian Supreme Court but is still constantly associated with Kercher’s murder, and in a Twitter thread on Thursday, she roasted all of the filmmakers and production houses that have profited off of what is likely the worst stretch of time in her life, mostly without her consent, barring a 2016 Netflix documentary in which she participated.

But at the heart of Knox’s thread lies the important and seemingly unanswerable question of who gets to tell Amanda Knox’s story, if not the woman herself? “Who owns my name,” she posits. As she explains, Knox lost all control of her own personal narrative when she was imprisoned and throughout her ordeal, news coverage chose to center her not just as a villain but as a True Crime starlet, effectively erasing Meredith Kercher’s existence and ignoring the actual murderer, Rudy Guede.

Unfortunately, Knox seems aware that no matter how much she rightfully pushes back against the “Amanda Knox saga”—a hyper-dramatized version of her lived experiences—she is still chained to that particular caricature of herself.