Grace Van Patten doesn’t remember exactly how the trials of Amanda Knox unfolded in real time.
The star of Hulu’s eight-part limited series “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” was only 10 when the body of British student Meredith Kercher was discovered in an Italian apartment on Nov. 1, 2007. Authorities quickly arrested Knox, then 20, who was Kercher’s roommate and also studying abroad, and her boyfriend of about a week, Raffaele Sollecito. Knox and Sollecito were convicted, then acquitted, found guilty once more and finally cleared in 2015.
“I knew that name,” Van Patten, 28, says. “I didn't know the details because I was younger, but as soon as I did, I could not believe it. It was such a shocking, tragic story.” The “Tell Me Lies” star felt “shocked by the sequence of events that happened … the flaws in the system and the lack of evidence and how this even came to be, the frustration of all of these things happening that should not have happened.”
“The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” (first two episodes now streaming, then weekly on Wednesdays), revisits the details of Kercher’s death and the investigation that largely ignored them. Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before being acquitted in 2011. Even after she was exonerated in 2015, Knox still faced public scrutiny, despite the conviction of a man named Rudy Guede. (Guede was released in 2021 after serving 13 years.)
