KNOX: I’M USED BY NEW FILM
Amanda slams ‘Stillwater’ as cashing in on her false slay rap
It’s a cheap Knox off. Former exchange student and absolved murder suspect Amanda Knox says the new Matt Damon film “Stillwater” is profiting off her misfortune.
“Does my name belong to me? My face? What about my life? My story? Why does my name refer to events I had no hand in?” the 34-year-old Seattle, Wash., native demanded on Twitter Thursday. “I return to these questions because others continue to profit off my name, face, & story without my consent.”
In 2007, Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted in the killing of fellow exchange student Meredith Kercher in Italy before being cleared by an Italian court in 2015. Knox spent four years in an Italian prison before being fully exonerated.
“Stillwater,” starring Damon, Camille Cottin and Abigail
Breslin, is a new movie revolving around an American student studying abroad who gets caught up in a murder-mystery.
“This new film by director Tom McCarthy, starring Matt Damon, is ‘loosely based’ or ‘directly inspired by’ the ‘Amanda Knox saga,’ as Vanity Fair put it in a for-profit article promoting a for-profit film, neither of which I am affiliated with,” Knox further charged.
Knox’s 30-tweet defense — also published on Medium — continues by taking issue with the term “Amanda Knox saga.”
According to Knox, that phrase makes it sound as though the chaos surrounding her murder investigation, conviction, acquittal and endless media coverage was her fault. She compared her trials and tribulations to those of former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, then 22, who was for years vilified following her sexual liaison with former President Bill Clinton, 49, in the mid ’90s.
“Calling that event the ‘Lewinsky Scandal’ fails to acknowledge the vast power differential, & 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 states.
As upset as Knox was with media coverage at the time of Kercher’s death, she still takes issue with how the events surrounding that murder are being remembered now.
According to Knox, the release of “Stillwater” isn’t the first time she’s felt exploited by the media and entertainment world. She also made reference to a “terrible Lifetime movie,” a show on Fox and a book by Malcolm Gladwell, whom she said made amends by doing her podcast.
She hopes those involved in “Stillwater” will do the same.
“Foxy Knoxy,” as she was billed during her trial, quotes a Vanity Fair article in which the film’s director says he decided to “leave the Amanda Knox case behind,’ ” but to take “this piece of the story — an American woman studying abroad involved in some kind of sensational crime and she ends up in jail — and fictionalize everything around it.”
Knox argues her story was that of “an American woman NOT involved in a sensational crime, and yet wrongfully convicted.”
“I get it,” Knox wrote. “There’s money to be made, and you have no obligation to approach me.”