“At least Amanda knew her innocence. I never really believed in mine.” When a week absorbing the trauma of Hulu’s Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox hits exceedingly close to home…
by: Jianna Heuer
What were you doing in the fall of 2007? I just turned twenty-four years old and was living in a studio apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I had been in New York City for a year and a half. I moved from a small town in Connecticut for a big job at Simon and Schuster as a managing editorial assistant. My life was full with my on-again, off-again boyfriend, weekly boozy brunches on Sundays, and trips to visit friends, all scattered to new cities after college. I had no interest in the news or tabloids, busy reading everything I could from the free shelves at work, so while I remember the name Amanda Knox and the basic story — that she was accused of killing her roommate while studying abroad in Italy — I didn’t register anything more than that at the time. I haven’t thought about it since.
Now it is October of 2025, and I’ve spent this year, for the first time in my life, binge-watching terrifying TV. I’ve always hated scary media. I know it sounds innocuous but after E.T. terrified me at the age of eight, I stuck to cozy shows like The Gilmore Girls and Dawson’s Creek. I don’t consume anything that could increase my anxiety or get my heart rate up. This year, something changed. I’m not sure why I suddenly wasn’t just okay with chilling stories, I craved them. I binge watched anything I could find that got my pulse rate up from dystopian fantasy like Paradise to the straight-up horror of Yellowjackets. A woman in my writing group pointed out that perhaps I am interested in these shows now because they offer controlled chaos, a sense of disorder but with a frame, a beginning, middle, and end with the ability to shut off if it gets to be too much. Rather than the intractable hellscape we live in. She was right.
My most recent nerve-wracking binge was the Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox on Hulu, which kept me in its grip for ten days straight. I, of course, am still a scaredy cat, so I’ve been watching my frightening shows at the gym at 6am to avoid nightmares. I figure the fourteen hours between watching it and going to bed there is enough other input that I won’t dream of sadistic sex acts and bloody bras. By the second episode, I was looking around the gym, identifying people who looked like the accused murderer in the show, my heart racing as I tried to calm myself down by telling myself what I was watching was not real, at least not now. The problem with a story like this is that it is true, and it could happen to anyone, a random slaying by a random man. Being placed at the scene of a crime you did not commit, even though you were miles away. It’s all quite realistic.
After every episode, I found myself googling news articles about this case from the years it was going on. I couldn’t believe that the Italian justice system seemed even more fucked than the U.S. one. Amanda Knox had two trials, two convictions, appeals, and all while someone else was found guilty of the murder. As someone who loves Italy and had planned to visit annually, I found myself worried about my own safety in this land I have only experienced as blissful, and not from random murder, but from random accusations that could ruin my life for a decade or more, like poor Knox.
But back to 2007. Amanda was twenty, and I was twenty-four. Why did I not pay more attention to her story? In 2004, I had been studying abroad in London, where my life had changed drastically in the opposite way to how it had changed hers. She showed up in Perugia as a well-adjusted, open, loved, and loving girl. I started my time in London traumatized, closed off, and feared that everyone would hate me because that is what I had experienced from peers up until that time — ridicule, bullying, and harassment. I had learned it was safer to be shut down and not let anyone in, while Amanda had learned the opposite, which would prove to be part of her downfall. She laments trusting the police and the prosecutor, trying to speak in her broken Italian to tell her story of what happened. She says she never should have trusted them. She had too much trust; I had not enough.
While I studied abroad, I learned to trust people my own age through the kindness of the group I was in, and also because I desperately wanted to change how I felt about people. My roommate, my new friends, and my teacher all proved to be loyal, intelligent, and driven like me. Perhaps in my past life, I had just not encountered people like this. But that isn’t quite right because, yes, in high school, there were the bullies, but there were also Abby, Tara, Zoe, Jess, and a few others who were my friends and shared all these qualities with my cohort in London.
But it’s hard to remember the good when there was so much bad. In the finale, Amanda says something like, “I had to sift through ten years of trauma to see Meredith and these good memories again.” Same here, except for me, it’s been almost thirty years since I was tormented, and I still can barely grasp anything good from middle school or high school, though I get glimmers here and there. The other day, Zoe commented on an Instagram post about my 42nd birthday, “still a beauty.” I haven’t spoken to or seen Zoe since high school, but I vividly remember her printing song lyrics and putting them in a card to remind me that I shouldn’t want to die, which was my default at the time. I can’t recall the song, but they were about a girl who is lost and how there is still hope and beauty in her and in the world. I remember it made me happy, if only for a moment.
Obviously, what Knox went through is worse than being bullied by a bunch of bored suburban kids, but there are similarities in the issues that cause these scenarios. The innocence of girlhood seems too often to be strangled by labels: slut, whore, bitch, and, in her case, murderer. Men and women alike, people who knew her well and those who didn’t, were happy to jump into the prosecution’s story without questioning why it was so easy to believe an innocent young woman was not a monster.
In the finale, Knox has many lines that address questions about what happened to her, as well as about my own circumstances. She asks the prosecutor why he couldn’t see her in his daughters, only Meredith. I always wondered the same of my tormentors, how could they look in the mirror, these girls, and not see themselves or their sisters, and then see me?
The week I spent watching this show, I cried a lot while sweat poured down my face, remembering how I had done the same when I was eighteen and started going to the gym in college. Then I cried because I hated myself. Now I was crying for that younger me who her peers so tormented.
The fact that most of the show was in Italian lent to its emotional impact. It was as if having the language element removed helped me gain the distance I needed to look past the horror and into the nuances of how this isn’t just one woman’s big salacious story. Taking down women using their sexuality has a long history. We all suffer under the duress of a patriarchy that demonizes women and turns us against each other. At the end of the show, Amanda’s voice-over laments that “Meredith was the victim, yes, but I was also a victim.” Women in general are the victims of a system that is set up to ensure their shame, and for some, a total undoing.
As “Maybe Not” by Cat Power plays in the background, Knox is no longer in prison, playing the same song on the keyboard that the loving priest brought her. However, she is still trapped by the lies being told about her. I was trapped too by the perception of others, but ultimately it wasn’t them that kept me imprisoned, it was me believing the filth they had spewed. At least Amanda knew her innocence. I never really believed in mine.
The BBC ran an article shortly after this show came out saying they didn’t do Meredith justice, and perhaps they did not. But I never even knew her name all these years, while Amanda Knox is notorious. I didn’t realize until I started watching this show that Knox was innocent. In my mind, when she was found guilty way back in 2008, she remained that way. I think that is what she wanted when creating this series — to be exonerated in the court of public opinion, not just by the Italian government. Now I will remember both their names, so perhaps they did help bring Meredith’s story further into the light.
Because that is the thing about labeling someone. Whether it’s in the parking lot of your high school or every media outlet in the world, once someone says murderer, slut, geek, whore, there is no taking it back, not from anyone else who heard it, and not from the victim of those words. Depending on your age and fragility, a simple term repeated often can change how someone reacts to life, and perhaps how their progeny will as well. Amanda worried it would be hard for her daughter, Eureka, to live a good life with her as a mother, that the trauma, the labels would follow and infect her innocence.
I don’t believe one moment, one decision, or one circumstance has the power to ruin one’s life or change it forever. When these things happen, particularly traumatic moments, they can alter how we interpret ourselves and the world, making it much harder to move through them. For me, help came in the form of therapy and a daily tarot practice. By acknowledging my own power and agency, I surpassed these moments of misery, allowing me to move into different feelings and circumstances. I have made progress in many areas of my life, though one area has proven incredibly hard to improve.
I still feel unlovable most of the time, even after nineteen years with my now-husband (the on-again, off-again boyfriend from 2007), who I know loves me very much, but I can’t feel it much of the time. It’s like a steel jail cell door that drops when I feel insecure or when things aren’t perfect. I can’t open it until I feel safe again, which could take minutes, hours, days, or weeks. That is the living legacy of my trauma. I hope it will change one day, but for now, I cherish the moments when the door is open, and the love comes through.
Jianna Heuer is a Psychotherapist in New York City. She writes Nonfiction and Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Hooghly Review, The Inquisitive Eater, and other literary journals. Her flash non-fiction has appeared in two books, Fast Funny Women and Fast Fierce Women. Check out more of her work here: www.jiannaheuerwrites.com.
