Tom McCarthy, the director of Stillwater, is proud to have been "directly inspired" by "the Amanda Knox saga". The movie is being promoted with the image and the name of Amanda Knox. His movie fictionalizes an Amanda Knox stand-in character prompting the murder of a Meredith Kircher stand-in, the two posed as roommates and lovers. But there's a big problem with this scenario: Amanda Knox was falsely accused and ultimately acquitted of involvement in Meredith Kircher's murder, and the claim they were lovers was media fabrication.
Knox knows there's no legal way to stop the use of her name in marketing a movie that doesn't. But she has had enough of the media making her the star of someone else's murder and then blaming her for that choice.
Tom McCarthy's fictionalized version of me is just the tabloid conspiracy guilter version of me.
By fictionalizing away my innocence, my total lack of involvement, by erasing the role of the authorities in my wrongful conviction, McCarthy reinforces an image of me as a guilty and untrustworthy person. And with Matt Damon's star power, both are sure to profit handsomely off of this fictionalization of "the Amanda Knox saga" that is sure to leave plenty of viewers wondering, "Maybe the real-life Amanda was involved somehow." …
I never asked to become a public person. The Italian authorities and global media made that choice for me. And when I was acquitted and freed, the media and the public wouldn't allow me to become a private citizen again. I went back to school and fellow students photographed me surreptitiously, people who lived in my apartment building invented stories for the tabloids, I worked a minimum wage job at a used bookstore, only to be confronted by stalkers at the counter. I was hounded by paparazzi, my story and trauma was (and is) endlessly recycled for entertainment, and in the process, I've been accused of shifting attention away from the memory of Meredith Kercher, of being a media whore.
There is a raw, gross psychology to how Knox was treated by media, that of the stalker who blames his own obsessive behavior, misinterpretations and assumptions on the victim. And then there's fiction that just goes right ahead and imagines if she did it.
Less grotesque but likewise telling is how journalists get so snarled up in the mythic Amanda Knox they forget she's an actual person who could cause trouble for them. Malcolm Gladwell, she writes, phoned her the day before publication of a book with a chapter on her to ask for permission to use certain material!
