Amanda Knox Shares How She Talks to Her Daughter, 4, About Wrongful Murder Conviction

According to a new interview with Today, Knox said she wasn’t expecting the question until Eureka was at least six years old, but the 4-year-old jumped the gun, first asking her about it a year ago when she was only three.

Eureka may not be watching The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, but Knox jokes that she’s come to kind of enjoy the way her mommy tells her about her four years behind bars after a wrongful conviction for murder in 2007.

As for how she could have even thought to ask about it at such a young age, Knox says that “a part of it is because I don’t hide it — I don’t hide that I go every year to the Innocence Network Conference, right? And I’m friends with other wrongly convicted people.”

She went on to explain, “I do a lot of criminal justice reform advocacy, and then, of course, we’re making the show, and my daughter is seeing an actress playing me, an actress playing her as a baby, and is curious and wants to know.”

Knox is an executive producer on Hulu’s dramatic retelling of her story, with Van Patten taking on her role. Her husband, Christopher Robinson, and Monica Lewinsky are also listed as executive producers.

She believes it was Eureka’s growing understanding of her world, and curiosity about it, that led her to say about a year ago, “Hey Mommy, tell me the story of when Mommy went to Italy.”

As a parent, she told Today that she believes in transparency and honesty — but obviously, hers is a complex story with some pretty dark elements. So she said she thought carefully about how to approach it before coming up with an age-appropriate response that was still the truth.

“It’s very simple,” she said she told her daughter. “It’s just, when Mommy was young, Mommy went to Italy, and she made friends and she had fun, but then someone hurt her friend, and the police thought Mommy hurt her friend, and so they put Mommy in jail.”

Her story continued, “And Mommy was in jail for a long time, and she was very sad. But then one day, Mommy proved that she was innocent and she got to go home, and then she met your daddy and had you and happily ever after.”

She said that the conclusion of the story is a favorite for Eureka, as “she loves it when it ends on her.”

Getting the opportunity to relive the experience as a mother to two, including Eureka’s younger brother Echo, has been beneficial for Knox’s healing journey, as well. Even after all these years — she was released in 2011 — Knox says she’s “amazed” at “how much being a mom has helped me process this terrible experience.”

Calling her daughter a “storyteller” like she is, Knox shared that her daughter sometimes likes to pretend she’s the main character of that chapter in her mom’s life.

“She’ll find like, bars at a playground, and be like, ‘Look, I’m Mommy in jail.’ And it’s just, like, the shift there — of, ‘Oh, this is a game,'” Knox shared. “Like, it’s not just a horrible, traumatic experience. It can also be a game that me and my daughter can play with each other. It’s just that lightness of being of a child that really helps me carry the weight of it.”

That re-contextualizing of her experience through sharing it with her daughter has also colored how Knox wanted to approach Hulu’s retelling of her saga. “It’s not just a drudgery sort of show,” she explained, adding that “whimsy” was an actual word used to describe the tone they were targeting.

“This is a show that embraces the absurdity of the experience and the lightness of my being as I’m trying to navigate this terrible experience,” she explained. “And I think that’s really what makes it so unique, is it’s a willingness to embrace a wider lens and a broader perspective.”

“We start it with two young girls go to study abroad in Perugia, Italy, and it’s a beautiful experience,” Knox says, which mirrors her real experience when she and her fellow exchange student, friend and roommate Meredith Kercher began their international experience in Italy.

Then, on November 1, 2007, Kercher was found dead in their apartment and two years later, Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were found guilty of her murder. They’d already been charged by the time bloody fingerprints found at the scene were connected to Ivorian immigrant Rudy Guede.

Nevertheless, while Guede was tried and sentenced for her murder in October 2008, prosecutors argued that all three were involved and carried it out together. The highly-publicized trial of Knox and Sollecito resulted in their convictions for faking a break-in, defamation, sexual violence, and murder. Knox was sentenced to 26 years, while Sollecito got 25.

It wasn’t until May 2011 — and much scrutiny and criticism from the American legal system — that forensic results determined Guede had acted alone. On October 3, 2011, both Knox and Sollecito were found not guilty of Kercher’s murder in a second-grade (appeal) trial and released.

But those acquittals were set aside by Italy’s highest court, the Supreme Court of Cassation, in 2013, and a retrial ordered, after which they were again found guilty before the highest court finally examined the case on appeal and ruled that the initial charges were without foundation and the two prior cases had substantial errors, leading to definitive acquittals of murder on March 27, 2015.

Throughout the traumatic ordeal, and even reliving it now, Knox said she’s tried to keep her friend at the forefront of her series, even as it chronicles what Knox endured through those years. “How do I carry her alongside me as I try to make sense of this traumatic thing?” she explained of grappling with Kercher’s legacy amid her story.

“I think that was a really important part of our trying to do justice to something that had been a story that had been so misrepresented and so exploited,” Knox said of her motivation to take control of the story. “Just the fact that there are people out there who still don’t remember her name, much less the name of the person who actually killed her — Rudy Guede — is just shocking.”

Guede was sentenced to 30 years in prison, though that sentenced was later reduced to 16, and he was ultimately released in 2021 after serving 13 years. He maintains his innocence.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode series launching on Hulu August 20.