Amanda Knox and Monica Lewinsky are reclaiming their stories on the red carpet.
The “Waiting to Be Heard” author and the anti-bullying activist posed together on the red carpet Aug. 19 while promoting their new eight-part Hulu series “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” (now streaming).
For the show’s New York City premiere, Knox wore a long, lacy Giambattista Valli Paris dress paired with pink Aquazzura heels, while Lewinsky stunned in a gold dress and pumps.
It’s been nearly two decades since Knox, then a 20-year-old student at the University of Washington, traveled 5,600 miles to study abroad in Perugia, Italy, about two hours north of Rome. Knox moved into an apartment, which she’d share with Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old British student. The two had become friends, but police arrested Knox and charged her with murdering Kercher.
The new Hulu show follows Knox’s nightmare journey, spending nearly four years in an Italian prison before being acquitted in 2011. She’d be found guilty (again) in 2014 and finally exonerated in 2015.
Lewinsky, too, has faced the scrutiny of mainstream media’s sometimes harsh light. The media painted the former White House intern, who had an affair with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s while he was in office, as a “little tart” (The Wall Street Journal) and “a ditsy, predatory White House intern” (The New York Times).
Amanda Knox: ‘Twisted Tale’ asks, ‘in the wake of trauma, how do you rebuild your life?’
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Monica Lewinsky produced ‘Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’ on Hulu
Over the past decade, though, Lewinsky reclaimed the affair’s public fallout as a contributing writer to Vanity Fair with a viral 2015 TED talk about public shaming. In more recent years, Lewinsky – who is credited as an executive producer on “Twisted Tale” – has rebounded as a rising producer in Hollywood.
Knox said that Lewinsky “held my hand through this experience because she’s been a trailblazer in this regard of a woman who had her worst experience used to bury her and turn her into a punchline,” adding that she came “back and reclaimed her sense of self and her purpose in life and didn’t allow all of these external forces to diminish her.”
She first stepped into the industry in September 2021 as a producer on Ryan Murphy’s “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” partly inspired by events in her own life. That fall, she executive-produced the HBO documentary “15 Minutes of Shame.”
“From my own experience, the first step was surviving,” Lewinsky told USA TODAY. “Holding on to the hope that things can change. It won’t be as bad as it is in the eye of the storm forever.”
Knox told USA TODAY that Lewinsky’s reclamation made her believe that “there was perhaps a path forward for me in this world.”
So Knox asked to meet, and the pair later became friends. When Lewinsky learned four years later that Knox wanted to adapt her 2013 memoir, she reached out. The rest is history (or a Hulu series out now).
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Amanda Knox, Monica Lewinsky stun on ‘Twisted Tale’ red carpet
