Monica Lewinsky has revealed the similarities with Amanda Knox that helped bring them together to make a true crime miniseries about Knox’s wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
Lewinsky told The Daily Beast Podcast Wednesday that she and Knox, who was tried for murder in Italy, became unwilling subjects of global media coverage at a young age.
“Even though my situation was so different from Amanda’s—I don’t know what it’s like to be wrongfully convicted and spend four years improperly imprisoned,” Lewinsky, whose affair with Bill Clinton emerged in 1998, told host Joanna Coles. “But we both were thrust onto the world stage without choosing it at very young ages. Amanda was 20, I was 24, and had been completely dissected, torn apart, put back together as versions of ourselves that we didn’t recognize.”
“Amanda’s ordeal didn’t actually really finish for her until 2015. That’s when she was exonerated,” she added.
That year, Italy’s highest appeals court acquitted Knox of murdering her roommate, fellow exchange student Meredith Kercher of Great Britain. Knox’s boyfriend at the time of Kercher’s death, Raffaele Sollecito, was also acquitted. Rudy Guede, who was convicted of Kercher’s murder, served 13-years of a 16-year sentence.
“I saw a kind of pain in her that I recognized I had felt myself,” Lewinsky reflected. “And I was only a few years into this process of trying to reclaim my own narrative. And so that was sort of when we met in 2017 and stayed in touch here and there.”
Lewinsky described how she and Knox wound up as executive producers on the eight-episode Hulu series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which premieres Wednesday.
“So I had a first look deal with 20th Television at the time, and I thought, okay, not a film, but what about a limited series?” she recalled. “Went to my executive who was savvy enough to go to all the right people, including our mutual friend, the amazing Karey Burke, president of 20th Television. And Karey, having young daughters, was on board with this from moment one. I got a very fast get going.”
“I went back to Amanda and, you know, within a few weeks brought everybody to the table. Within several more months, we were then looking for a show runner,” she said.
Lewinsky said she believes Knox was persuaded in part by how Lewinsky gained experience producing American Crime Story: Impeachment, in which she was also a subject.
“I think that that helped Amanda know that I had a sense of the terrain that she would need to traverse in this process so that, you know, there would be somebody who would be able to say, okay, this is the really hard part’ or this might, you know, this is the fun part,” she said.
“I think back to how nervous I was for her to see the first draft of the pilot episode—just the sense of what it is to see someone else’s interpretation of you, of some of your deepest moments on a piece of paper on the page or the screen, I guess, in today’s world.”
Lewinsky added: “But she was great with it. So I think I might have joked last night, she was a lot more flexible than I was.”
New episodes of The Daily Beast Podcast are released every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Follow our new feed on your favorite podcast platform at beast.pub/dailybeastpod and subscribe on YouTube to watch full episodes.
The post Surprising Similarities I Share With Amanda Knox: Monica Lewinsky appeared first on The Daily Beast.
