The glitz and glamor witnessed on a New York red carpet this week mirrored that of any major film debut. Designer dresses, immaculate hairstyles, and perfectly posed smiles to greet a flood of cameras and microphones were prevalent.

In the limelight was not a movie star or director but a woman thrust into the public eye through tragic circumstances: Amanda Knox.

It was eighteen years ago in the Italian town of Perugia when Amanda was apprehended and accused of murdering her British roommate and fellow student abroad, Meredith Kercher.

Meredith, just 21 years old, had barely begun her stay in the Umbrian city when she tragically lost her life, stabbed in November 2007, in a horrific scene in the flat she shared with two young Italian women—and Amanda.

At the time, Amanda was a 20-year-old linguistics student from Seattle. Under the harsh spotlight of many more cameras, she and her bespectacled Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty of murder, resulting in a four-year imprisonment before their acquittal.

Young and seemingly naive, Amanda’s every move and utterance underwent intense scrutiny. A snapshot of her and Raffaele exchanging a kiss amidst the harrowing events became an iconic image of the case.

Yet it was a very different Amanda who stepped on to the carpet in New York this week. Now a 38-year-old mother of two, she looked every bit the A-lister in shimmering Aquazzura heels and an elegant floral Giambattista Valli Paris dress. The company she was keeping was very different, too.

At her side was a woman with her own experience of being propelled into the public consciousness for less than positive reasons: Monica Lewinsky, who garnered unwitting notoriety as the White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton.

The occasion uniting the two? The premiere of an eight-part Disney+ drama series, The Twisted Tale Of Amanda Knox – a dramatic recreation of the tragic real events with which that name is painfully and inextricably linked.

Amanda is played by Grace Van Patten, while Amanda herself served as an executive producer alongside Lewinsky, now 52.

This surprising pair have been furiously working the publicity circuit, promoting not just the drama, but their own extraordinary bond forged, as Amanda wrote in her most recent memoir, out of being fellow members of the Sisterhood Of Ill Repute.

‘She was vilified and sexualised and made to feel like she was worthless and her only choice was to disappear,’ said Amanda of Monica, in one radio interview this week. ‘All of those things are also what I went through.’

The sub-plot to this twisted tale, of course, is that Amanda, like Monica before her, is a victim too.

Four years in jail for a crime she did not commit, coupled with a stream of suspicion and conjecture is undoubtedly a heavy toll.

Yet, deafening with her silence, is the undisputed true victim in this story, one with no voice at all – and that is Meredith Kercher. 

Her body is buried in a cemetery in Croydon, not far from the home in Coulsdon, Surrey, where she grew up with her three siblings, John, Lyle and Stephanie and parents John and Arline, who died within four months of each other in 2020.

As the Daily Mail has discovered, there is disquiet both in the UK and Italy about the way in which the whole awful tragedy – one which did reach a conclusion of sorts in the conviction of drifter Rudy Guede for Meredith’s murder – continues to play out. He was released in 2021 having served 13 years of a 16-year sentence.

Last year, when crews arrived in Perugia to begin filming, Meredith’s sister Stephanie made a brief statement which underlined the Kerchers’ feelings. 

‘Our family has been through so much and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.’

This week the family’s lawyer Francesco Maresca went further. ‘I think it’s unbearable how a girl, now a woman, who has repeatedly contested the events and the trial keeps turning things over and over again like soup in a cauldron just to make money,’ he told us.

‘They [Amanda and Monica] are continuing to violate the memory of poor Meredith.

‘It would be different had Amanda done something else, an initiative, a project, to talk about the victim, her life and university plans… that would make sense.

‘Amanda has written books, shot documentaries; the time has come for her to stay quiet and avoid going back to those things.’

While Maresca has, as yet, seen only the programme’s trailer he will, he says, be carefully monitoring how Meredith’s memory and character are treated in the show, in case there are grounds for legal action.

Clearly bewildered, he adds: ‘I don’t understand what Amanda’s goal is. The Kercher family and I are baffled.’

Not, perhaps, the response Amanda was hoping for.

Today she spends her time advocating for criminal justice reform and campaigning against wrongful convictions, and recently appeared on Monica’s podcast, Reclaiming With Monica Lewinsky, where she declared that she hoped the drama might be a vehicle for reconciliation with the Kercher family.

‘Grieving her [Meredith] has been complicated and fraught, not least of which because I’ve never been able to reconcile with her family,’ she said.

‘One thing I really hope is that they do watch this show so that maybe they see that I’m someone to be reconciled with, you know, and that we have more in common than they may think.’

Maresca gives this short shrift. ‘No way, this could never happen. Impossible,’ he says. ‘If Amanda did something positive … that would be different. But Amanda is not doing so, she’s always focused on herself, putting herself in the spotlight in all ways.’

Is that what Amanda is doing? Certainly, she would disagree. As she said this week, in one of numerous interviews on the subject of her motivations, the drama and her bond with Monica: ‘Ultimately, the thing that I was seeking after having been ostracised and vilified and literally imprisoned was human connection.

‘And I wanted people to relate to my experience. I wanted them to say, ‘I understand’.’

One man who is unlikely to ever share that sentiment is Patrick Lumumba, the entirely innocent Congolese bar owner who was arrested after being falsely accused by Amanda and who, as recently as this year, Italian courts upheld was defamed by her.

Now living in Krakow, Poland, with his partner and children, Patrick told one Italian newspaper this week: ‘I have so many other things to do, so I don’t think I’ll watch it.’

And yet, Amanda’s determination is reiterated in the voiceover to the drama: ‘Many people think they know my story, but finally it’s my turn to tell it,’ says Van Patten, as Amanda.

Yet, many would argue she has told her story – repeatedly – through various media, on numerous occasions, making ‘finally’ a curious choice of word.

Her first book, Waiting To Be Heard: A Memoir, was released in 2013 and is thought to have netted a $4 million advance, although a sizeable chunk was swallowed by legal fees.

A second book, Free: My Search For Meaning arrived in March this year; meanwhile she was interviewed extensively for a 2016 Netflix documentary and has appeared on numerous podcasts, including her own, Hard Knox.

It’s easy to see why some are uncomfortable with her continuing to capitalise on Meredith’s death. She’s made no secret of the fact she needs the money.

Having married poet and author Christopher Robinson in 2018, she has spoken of her drive for financial security. ‘What I keep telling Chris is that I want to get to a place where I don’t have to keep living the worst experience of my life so that we can pay the mortgage,’ she told The New York Times in 2021.

And like some of her outfits during her trial in Italy (a T-shirt with the slogan ‘All You Need is Love’ on Valentine’s Day was particularly jarring), Amanda has a way of courting controversy.

She now sings in The Exoneree Band, with others who were wrongly convicted of crimes (clips of her belting out I Will Survive are not comfortable viewing) and also performs stand-up comedy, introducing herself as an Ex-Con Mom. Taste aside, it’s clear she’s grappled with finding a path for herself in the intervening years.

Her link-up with Lewinsky began in 2017 when she found herself at her first ever speaking engagement, in Seattle, alongside Monica. Over a cup of tea the pair forged a connection so strong that Amanda describes the older woman as like her ‘big sister’.

As relationships go, it’s effusive on both sides, as US audiences have witnessed in recent rounds of joint interviews. ‘The truth is, I would never have done this without Monica. She told me she would have my back and she did. She made me feel safe,’ Amanda told one US talk show.

Monica agreed: ‘There was an instant connection and instant understanding of two young women who had become public people who hadn’t wanted to, and had lost a lot of their identity.’

Lewinsky, for those too young to recall the events that gripped the world in the late 1990s, was fresh out of college and a White House intern when she met Bill Clinton in 1995 during his first term as President of the United States.

As we would come to learn in cringeworthy detail, a cigar and a stained dress featured as the pair became intimately involved.

As Monica would say in a 2016 TED Talk, viewed more than 21million times: ‘At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss. And at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.’

In 1998, Linda Tripp, a former co-worker, released secretly recorded phone conversations with Lewinsky to investigators, in which the intimate details were discussed.

Clinton famously flatly denied having sexual relations with ‘that woman’, yet his economy with the truth led to him becoming only the second President in US history to be impeached.

He was acquitted after a 21-day trial in the US Senate, yet Monica’s reputational punishment was severe. After initially trying to embrace life as a public figure, she stepped out of the limelight and remained silent for almost a decade.

She launched a handbag line in 1999 and in 2005 moved to London to ‘lay low’ and gain a Master’s in social psychology at the London School of Economics.

She struggled to find employment because of her past, never married or had children, but has, butterfly-like, emerged in recent years as a campaigner against cyberbullying and as a public speaker.

In 2021 she launched her own production company and more recently that podcast, Reclaiming With Monica Lewinksy. It was she who made the approach to Amanda to turn her memoirs into a drama for Disney+.

‘The show wouldn’t exist without Monica keeping an eye on me,’ Amanda told one television interviewer. 

‘She recognised that I was another young woman who had been completely demolished by the media and was attempting to rebuild my life and reclaim my story; and in a way she had been trailblazing that path ahead of me.’

Along the way, Amanda has found understanding in other unusual places.

She and Raffaele are still close. He completed his engineering degree in prison and now lives in Milan, where he runs his own company, but flew to New York to join Amanda for this week’s premiere.

She also struck up a curious rapport with her Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini – the man she calls her ‘hunter’ – but who now counts as a close friend and confidant.

Now retired, Mignini this week told the Daily Mail: ‘In time Amanda and I have become friends. We regularly exchange emails and also messages.

‘She has learned to trust me since the years of the trial and has always kept me up to date on what she was doing … of the way she was taking back her life.

‘The last time we got in touch was a few days ago. I have come to appreciate her as a person, as a grown-up woman.’

Almost benevolent now, he says he sees Amanda as someone on a journey to self-discovery, trying to free herself from the past.

Yet, behind the smiles, the cameras, the deals and new beginnings, for Amanda one memory remains.

‘I think about Meredith all the time,’ she says.

‘She was a young 21-year-old girl who went to Italy to have the best experience of her life. And she didn’t get to go home. We were both just young girls who were trying to live our best lives.’

And, finally, there is the untwisted truth.

Additional reporting: Barbara McMahon and Silvia Marchetti