Amanda Knox's Reaction to Film: 'Does My Name Belong to Me?"

She blasts 'Stillwater,' starring Matt Damon
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 30, 2021 2:25 PM CDT
Knox: Stillwater Shows a 'Tabloid, Conspiracy Guiltier Version of Me'
Amanda Knox speaks at a Criminal Justice Festival at the University of Modena, Italy, in 2019.   (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni, File)

The so-so reviews are in for the new film Stillwater, and now Amanda Knox has panned the whole project. The film is fiction and doesn't set out to portray what happened to Knox, an American who was convicted, then acquitted, of the murder of her roommate in Italy. In between, she spent four years in prison. But Tom McCarthy, the director, said Knox's story was an inspiration, CNBC reports. It's hard to miss that when Matt Damon goes to France to rescue his daughter, who's wrongfully imprisoned in France for murdering her ex-girlfriend. Knox had nothing to do with the project; it's not her story. In an essay posted on Medium, Knox criticizes McCarthy and the media for suggesting it is. The plot changes only make the film more harmful to her, she says, leaving the audience with "just the tabloid conspiracy guiltier version of me."

"There’s no similarity in our two stories beyond an American student in jail," McCarthy told Cleveland.com. He wondered what it would be like to be in Knox's shoes, per Vanity Fair, but she points out he neglected to "ask me how it felt to be in my shoes." In her essay, she raises questions about someone essentially telling her story without her permission and profiting from it, per People. "Does my name belong to me? My face?" she wrote, adding, "Why does my name refer to events I had no hand in?" The film's resolution is nothing like real life. "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," Knox writes. (More Amanda Knox stories.)

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