Amanda Knox is complaining angrily that the new Matt Damon movie “Stillwater” — a drama about a young American jailed in Europe for a killing she insists she did not commit — cashes in on her own ordeal.
Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy while the women were students there.
The trial was a media sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and Knox spent four years in prison before her conviction was overturned in 2015.
“Stillwater” director Tom McCarthy told Vanity Fair magazine this week that his idea was to “leave the Amanda Knox case behind.”
“But let me take this piece of the story — an American woman studying abroad involved in some kind of sensational crime and she ends up in jail — and fictionalize everything around it,” he added.
Knox, now 34, erupted Thursday in a series of tweets.
“Does my name belong to me? My face? What about my life? My story? Why does my name refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions because others continue to profit off my name, face, & story without my consent. Most recently, the film #STILLWATER,” Knox wrote.
She took issue with Vanity Fair’s statement that the movie is “directly inspired by the Amanda Knox saga.”
“I want to pause right here on that phrase: ‘the Amanda Knox saga.’ What does that refer to? Does it refer to anything I did? No. It refers to the events that resulted from the murder of Meredith Kercher by a burglar named Rudy Guede,” Knox wrote.
Guede was convicted of the Kercher killing in a separate trial in Italy in 2008. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
In “Stillwater” Damon plays a burly American oil worker who travels to Marseille, France to help his daughter, who is jailed over the killing of her lover.
Knox blasted what she characterized as McCarthy’s depiction of her role in the killing.
“That story, my story, is not about an American woman studying abroad ‘involved in some kind of sensational crime.’ It’s about an American woman NOT involved in a sensational crime, and yet wrongfully convicted.”
