Amanda Knox has claimed new film Stillwater sensationalises her life and rips off her story “without her consent” and “at the expense of her reputation”.
Stillwater stars Matt Damon as a father who flies to France to help his estranged daughter, Allison, played by Abigail Breslin.
She has been convicted and imprisoned for murdering her girlfriend in Marseille, in a case that has generated lurid headlines.
Knox is never named on screen, but in interviews the filmmakers have noted her sensational case was an initial jumping off point for the script.
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Matt Damon stars as Bill – a father who flies to Europe to help his daughter who is accused of murder. Pic: Focus Features
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Stillwater is partly influenced by the murder of Meredith Kercher. Pic: Focus Features
In tweets and an essay on the site Medium, Knox called out various publications and director Tom McCarthy for using her name to promote the movie.
She wrote that his “fictionalised version of me is just the tabloid conspiracy guiltier version of me”.
She added: “Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in?
“I return to these questions because others continue to profit off my name, face, and story without my consent.”
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.
— Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) July 29, 2021
Knox was the subject of worldwide headlines after the 2007 murder in Perugia, Italy, of British student Meredith Kercher.
Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were placed under suspicion. Both were initially convicted, but after a series of different decisions Italy’s highest court threw out the convictions in 2015.
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Interviews and reviews of the film mention Knox as an inspiration for the story
Rudy Guede was eventually convicted for the murder and sentenced to a 16-year prison sentence in 2008.
“By fictionalising 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,” Knox wrote.
At the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month, where Stillwater was screened, McCarthy said Knox’s case served as an “initial inspiration point but not much beyond that. I just had a daughter then and I thought how it would be like”.
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British student Meredith Kercher was killed in Perugia, Italy in 2007
In a later interview with The Associated Press to promote Stillwater, McCarthy said he “didn’t want to kind of copy or mimic” Knox’s legal ordeal.
“It’s loosely inspired by that case, so I didn’t want to try and do a recreation of that. I want Allison to kind of be her own stand-alone character, but it was definitely great to have that for a reference,” he said.
Many reviews and feature stories about Stillwater have mentioned Knox as an inspiration for the plot. The film opens Friday.
The studio releasing the film, Focus Features, didn’t immediately respond to emails from the Associated Press on Friday.
