Seventeen years after Amanda Knox, the American exchange student, was arrested and charged with killing her flatmate in Perugia, a picturesque university city in central Italy, some of its citizens are outraged that their city is once again being dragged into a tragedy that they would prefer to forget.
This month, when cast and crew arrived there for a two-day shoot for a Hulu television series about the case – a show for which Knox and Monica Lewinsky are executive producers – Mayor Vittoria Fernandi felt obliged to write a heartfelt letter of apology to the city for the hurt caused by their presence.
One resident, honouring the memory of Meredith Kercher, the slain roommate, draped a sheet from a balcony with “Respect for Meredith” painted in bold red letters. A council member questioned on social media whether the mayor should have allowed the production to shoot in Perugia, where the crime has long overshadowed the city’s “history, art and beauty”.
An editorial in the daily newspaper La Nazione wrote, “Perhaps Meredith and Perugia would have deserved more respect without having to sacrifice the dignity of a murdered student and a brutalised city to business.”
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It hardly mattered that after spending four years in prison, Knox was acquitted for the death of Kercher, a 21-year-old student from England who was murdered in the house they shared.
People forget “that she, too, is a victim in this case,” said Luca Luparia Donati, the director of the Italy Innocence Project, who is representing Knox in a slander case.
Knox, who was 20 at the time of the killing, was twice convicted with her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, of Kercher’s murder, but they were cleared in 2015. The only person definitively convicted of the crime, Rudy Guede, was released in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
Yet for many locals, as well as Italians nationwide, Knox may never shake off an image crafted in court, and magnified by the world’s media, as a diabolical, sex-crazed woman who murdered Kercher during what prosecutors initially described as a sex game gone wrong.
She has since rebuilt her life in the United States as an advocate for people incarcerated for crimes they did not commit and a campaigner for criminal justice reform. But the events of Perugia have never been far behind, and she has repeatedly tried to have her voice heard.
She exhaustively laid out her defence in a 2013 memoir, she participated in a 2016 true-crime documentary on Netflix, and she has written podcasts about it. The series is being filmed for Hulu is co-produced by the company she formed with her husband, Christopher Robinson.
Sollecito and Guede have also written memoirs, and Giuliano Mignini, the case’s lead prosecutor, has written a book about the trial.
While Knox may be trying to set the record straight, Kercher’s sister, Stephanie Kercher, said in a statement quoted by the British news media this week, “Our family has been through so much, and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose”.
A producer for the series did not respond to a request for comment. Apart from a few days in Perugia, much of the filming will take place in other parts of Italy and in a film studio elsewhere in Europe.
Perugia is eager to overcome the sinister moment in its 2,400-year history.
Paolo Mariotti, the president of a city business association, noted that “Perugia is a provincial city” not accustomed to such headline-grabbing crimes or the attention they bring. It is also a university city that has drawn exchange students from around the world, he said, and the killing hardly sent a message that they would be safe there.
In her letter, Fernandi said that City Hall was powerless to stop such a production from filming in Perugia, and that she hoped the series would show the city in its best light.
“I wanted to give Perugia a chance for redemption, an opportunity to show itself, even if part of a tragedy, for what it is,” she wrote in a letter published in several newspapers last week. “Yet in trying to protect the image of the city, for a moment I lost sight of people, and their pain which remains raw.”
Mariotti said it would have been opportune for the Hulu production to shoot in another city in Umbria, the region where Perugia is situated. “They are medieval, ancient, with narrow streets,” he said. “Wherever they shot would have been identical.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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