‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’ Premieres: The Biggest Moments So Far

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox isn’t just another ripped-from-the-headlines true crime-based drama. The series is intended to recount the winding story details and also present the perspective of the person at the center of it: Amanda Knox herself, who serves as an executive producer.

As the logline tells us, the series “follows the eponymous American college student, who arrives in Italy for her study abroad, only to be wrongfully imprisoned for murder weeks later. The series traces Amanda’s relentless fight to prove her innocence and reclaim her freedom, and examines why authorities and the world stood so firmly in judgment.”

The first two episodes of the limited series dropped on Hulu on Wednesday (August 20), tracing Amanda’s (Grace Van Patten) journey all the way back to her very conception by two Halloween party-goers. Since the series is told from Amanda’s viewpoint almost exclusively, it serves as a window into the events as she saw them. Here are the highlights of how the case is presented in these first two segments.

She felt shunned by some of her roommates before anything went wrong.

In the opening episode, Amanda moved into her Italian villa with several roommates, and while she was close to Meredith, the eventual victim of a horrific crime, she didn’t feel as embraced by the others. “We tried to share our worlds, but her British friends didn’t take to me for some reason,” she recalled. (Those others would, notably, testify against her at her trial.)

She didn’t realize she was stepping into a crime scene until it was too late.

Amanda’s alibi for the night of the murder was that she spent the night at the home of her new boyfriend Raffaele (Giuseppe De Domenico) and came home to take a shower without realizing her home had been burglarized. In the series, after she left Raffaele’s house in the morning, she arrived home, called out and received no answer, showered and dried her hair, and was only spooked when she saw the toilet was left unflushed. She then summoned Raffaele, who tried to break into Meredith’s locked door, and called the police.

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She kissed her boyfriend in front of the detectives in a moment of nervousness.

Amanda and Raffaele got the attention of the police for all the wrong reasons by kissing as the detectives checked the crime scene, resulting in what would become an infamous photograph. Her version of the story, though, is that she was afraid she’d irked the detectives on site, and Raffaele tried to calm her nerves with a kiss.

The detectives relied on some pure speculation.

At the end of the first episode, the detectives’ suspicions were raised not just by Amanda’s ill-timed smooch but also, the fact that Meredith’s body was covered by a blanket. From that, they derived a conclusion that it must have been placed there by a woman.

Disney / Adrienn Szabó

Her behavior raised their suspicions even more.

After being forced to return to the crime scene so that the detectives could observe her reactions, she put on a pair of booties and said a spirited, “Tada!” After that, she raised their hackles even more by crying and slapping her head after being asked to rifle through the knife drawer.

There were major issues of translation in her initial interview with the police.

One of the biggest throughlines of the first two episodes of Twisted Tale is that Amanda’s lack of fluency in Italian was a major issue in her initial conversations with the detectives on the case, who struggled to find her an interpreter.

The interview became a pressure cooker that drew out a false statement.

One of the biggest points of contention in the case was the fact that Amanda Knox pointed the finger at her former bar boss Patrick Lumumba, accusing him of having something to do with Meredith’s murder. However, the second episode of Twisted Tale sets the stage for that by showing that her interview was intentionally distressing. The scene showed that she grappled with a language barrier, intense questions, the police’s false claims that they had hard evidence linking her to the scene of the crime on the night of the murder, and the fact that she was not allowed to speak to her mother or even use the restroom, despite having her period at the time. After sleeping, she attempted to recant her story about Patrick, but it was too late, as she and Raffaele were both immediately arrested.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, Wednesdays, Hulu