‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’: Fact vs Fiction

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox may be a dramatization of the Amanda Knox case, but many of the events depicted in the series are true to the real-life story.

The eight-episode series, which premiered on Hulu on Aug. 20, reexamines Knox’s role in the investigation of her British roommate Meredith Kercher’s murder through her own lens: Knox served as an executive producer on the show alongside Monica Lewinsky.

“This is not a show about the worst experience of someone’s life,” Knox told The New York Times. “This is the show of a person’s choice to find closure on their own terms and to reclaim a sense of agency in their own life after that agency has been stolen from them.”

Knox and then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted of murdering Kercher in what police claimed was a drug-fueled satanic orgy with Ivory Coast immigrant Rudy Guede. Knox and Sollectio served four years in prison of their respective 26 and 25-year sentences for the crime.

Though their verdict was overturned in 2011, the acquittal was thrown out in 2013, and the case was retried, leading to a second conviction in 2014. The Italian Supreme Court exonerated both Knox and Sollecito in full in 2015 by overturning the case. (Guede’s 2008 conviction was upheld.)

Grace Van Patten, who plays Knox in the series, hinted that new facts would be revealed in the show, saying, “The show gives everyone the opportunity to understand it more and to form an opinion based on facts, and not what they were being fed at the time … It’s new information that the public does not know — especially in that last episode.”

But which parts of the show, which releases weekly until Oct. 1, are based on evidence and which parts are embellished for the sake of the story, if any?

PEOPLE breaks down all the facts versus fiction from the series below.

Warning: Spoilers for The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox ahead!

Had Knox only been dating Sollecito for one week at the time of Kercher’s murder?

As depicted in the series, Knox and Sollecito, who met at a concert Knox attended with Kercher, had only officially been a couple for seven days when Kercher was killed.

Despite not knowing her for a long time, Sollecito refused to implicate Knox in Kercher’s murder, despite the heavy pressure he faced from authorities. “(Amanda) told me that she thinks that I’m a kind of hero, but I don’t feel so,” he said on Today in 2013. “I did it because I know it’s the truth. It’s the good thing to do. It’s the only way for me.”

Were Kercher and Knox “inseparable?”

Kercher and Knox are depicted as becoming extremely close shortly after moving in together in the series. “We were inseparable at first,” Van Patten’s Knox narrates in the first episode. “That buzzy feeling of new friendship, fellow traveler in a foreign land.”

While she concedes in the series that Kercher’s British friends “didn’t take” to her, she tells viewers that her late roommate looked out for her.

Kercher’s British friends testified at Knox’s trial that they had a different read on the pair’s relationship.

According to The Independent, Kercher’s friend Robyn Butterworth described their interactions as uncomfortable. “I knew about the relationships in the house,” she claimed. “Meredith said it was a bit awkward. She didn’t know how to talk to Amanda about flushing the toilet and keeping the bathroom clean.”

Knox responded in her 2013 interview with ABC, reportedly saying, “It bothers me when people suggest that she wasn’t my friend.”

She elaborated on their closeness in her 2013 memoir, Waiting to be Heard, writing, “We were just getting to know each other, and I thought we’d developed a comfortable familiarity in a short time.”

Addressing the bathroom incident, she wrote, “I treated Meredith as my confidante. Meredith treated me with respect and a sense of humour. The only awkward interaction we had was when Meredith gently explained the limitations of Italian plumbing.”

Was Knox more alarmed by the human waste in the toilet than the blood in the bathroom?

In the show’s premiere episode, Knox arrives home after a night spent at Raffaele’s to find her front door open, specks of blood on the sink and a bloody bathroom mat.

She is only alarmed when she catches a glimpse of human feces in the toilet, however.

This detail rings true, according to the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox, Knox assumed that one of her roommates had cut themselves shaving, but felt fearful upon seeing the human waste. “That’s when I knew something was up,” she said.

In a 2013 interview with Diane Sawyer, Knox said that she considered the possibility that the blood on the sink had been her own, having recently pierced her ears.

She also told Sawyer that she didn’t see the blood on the bathroom rug until she was getting out of the shower. Recalled Knox: “I thought it was strange.”

Did Knox’s roommate ask her to lie about smoking pot?

In The Twisted Tale, investigators’ suspicions about Knox are aroused when she lies about smoking pot in her home — something that her roommate asks her to do in order to safeguard her job.

Knox made similar claims in a 2025 personal essay for The Atlantic. “One of my roommates also asked me to lie—to deny to the police that we smoked marijuana,” she wrote. “She said that they would lose their jobs if anyone found out. So I covered for them.”

According to Knox, the discovery of marijuana plants in the downstairs apartment made investigators question her story and “wonder if I was keeping more from them.”

Did Knox have a breakdown when revisiting the crime scene?

One powerful scene in episode 2 shows Knox having a nervous breakdown when she is taken back to the scene of the crime and asked to open the knife drawer in the kitchen to determine if any are missing in an effort to locate the murder weapon.

Knox and lead Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini both spoke about this real-life moment in the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox.

“It hit me all at once and I became hysterical,” Knox said at the time.

For Mignini, the response further implicated Knox as a criminal in his mind. “Undoubtedly I started to suspect Amanda,” he said.

Did Knox do the splits in the middle of the police station?

In episode 2, Amanda is admonished by a policewoman for doing the splits in the station.

Though Knox admitted to doing the splits “once,” she told ABC that she did not do a cartwheel, which she was accused of by Chief Superintendent Giacinto Profazio during his testimony. “I never did a cartwheel. I did do the splits … once,” she said, adding, “I could’ve been more sensitive to the people around me.”

Sollecito claimed that Kercher’s English friends were also “appalled” by the affection Knox showed to her partner at the police station early on in the investigation in his 2012 memoir, Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back with Amanda Knox — something he alleged also made him “uneasy.” “Amanda curled up on me like a koala bear,” he recalled. “Police officers passed by regularly and glared at us. ‘State composti,” one shouted. Behave yourselves.”

Sollecito said that when they were told to separate, he responded that it was “cold” — a line his character also says in the series. “In the moment, I didn’t want to make Amanda feel worse,” he explained.

In Knox’s own memoir, which was released a year later, she claimed that Sollecito instigated their touchy-feely behavior. “I suspect that Raffaele thought I was having a breakdown,” Knox wrote. “He sat me in his lap and bounced me gently. He kissed me, made faces at me and told me jokes, all in an effort to soothe my agitation.”

Did the police strike Knox during their interrogation?

One of the most disturbing scenes of the series occurs in episode 2, when Amanda is hit by a police officer during her Nov. 6, 2007, interrogation.

According to Knox, the incident really occurred. “I was hit on the back of the head, I was yelled at,” she told Nightline in 2020.

She also told the BBC in June 2024 that she was struck multiple times. “The police threatened me with 30 years in prison, an officer slapped me three times saying ‘Remember, remember,’ ” she said.

Knox wrote in a 2025 essay for The Atlantic that police denied her allegations. “The police, who did not record the interrogation as they were supposed to, deny that I was hit or pressured into making these statements,” she wrote at the time.

NPR reported in 2019 that the European Court of Human Rights ordered Italy to pay Knox $21,000 in damages, costs and expenses for denying her right to a lawyer while taking her statement. The court also called the room she had been interrogated in “an atmosphere of intense psychological pressure.”

The court did not find that Knox was subject to inhumane treatment, however, citing “insufficient evidence” to back these claims.

Did Knox recant her confession hours after signing it?

In Twisted Tale, after a grueling police interrogation, Knox is seen signing a statement in which she confesses that she was in the house with her boss, Patrick Lumumba, when her roommate was killed.

She wakes up at the station a few hours later and tries to recant her statement, but is told that it’s too late.

Knox wrote about how she experienced the moment in real life in her piece for The Atlantic.

“The interrogation I was subjected to remains the most terrifying experience of my life,” she wrote. “I was 20 years old, and was questioned for more than 53 hours over a five-day period in a language I was only just learning to speak.”

Knox continued: “I was berated, threatened, lied to and slapped, and eventually, my sanity broke—I began to believe the lies the police were telling me, and I agreed to sign statements placing myself and another innocent man in the house when the crime had occurred. I recanted only a few hours later, but it didn’t matter.”

Knox was later convicted of slander against Lumumba. She was sentenced to three years in prison, but was credited for the four years she already served after Kercher’s initial murder trial.

Did Knox and Prosecutor Mignini meet up in Italy?

The series opens with Amanda hiding under a blanket in the back of a car on June 16, 2022, while en route to meet Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, whom Knox has previously called “a boogeyman figure” in her life. “My prosecutor,” she says in the closing lines of the first episode.

In real life, Knox met up with Mignini seven years after her conviction was overturned in an effort to understand why he believed she was involved in Kercher’s murder. “I never set out to forgive him,” she told PEOPLE in March 2025. “There was this deep curiosity in me to try to understand this person who decided that I was a dangerous person.”

Knox said that his agency over her life lessened upon meeting him. “He was a real person,” she said. “He wasn’t this dark, dark, mythical figure. He was a real human being who had real feelings and real thoughts, not a boogeyman. And as soon as I saw that, I could empathize with him.”

Mignini previously admitted to making mistakes in his investigation in the 2016 Netflix documentary, though he did not elaborate on what those mistakes were. “If they are innocent, I hope they’re able to forget the suffering they’ve endured,” he said of Knox and Sollecito. “If they’re guilty, if earthly justice didn’t get to them, I hope they own their guilt.”

Mignini told The Telegraph in 2022 that he still believes Knox was present at the time of Kercher’s murder. “We have different ideas about the trial that involved us, but now I have a good opinion of her.”

He elaborated to The Sun in 2024, saying that while he believes Knox thinks she is telling the truth about her lack of involvement in the case, it’s because she can’t recall it.  “She does not remember,” he claimed.