Amanda Knox enrages Italian city with filming of TV murder drama

Residents of the Italian town where Amanda Knox was accused of killing roommate Meredith Kercher 17 years ago are reportedly furious that she has returned to film a TV drama about the incident years after her acquittal in the murder case. 

When the cast and crew of Knox's upcoming biopic began filming beneath his window in Perugia, hotelier Walter Cardinali wrote a message for the actors on a bedsheet that he draped from his window: "Rispetto per Meredith" (Respect for Meredith). 

"Perugia was unable to defend Meredith, but we can defend her memory," he told The Times. 

Knox, then 20 years old and in Italy on exchange from the University of Leeds, found Kercher dead and stabbed 47 times in their shared apartment on Nov. 2, 2007. She and her former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were both accused in Kercher's murder.

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The Seattle native spent four years in an Italian prison after her British roommate was killed. Prosecutors claimed she had taken part in a "sex game gone wrong," but Knox was cleared of murder in Italy's supreme court after serving four years of her sentence. 

Rudy Guede, the only person definitively convicted in Kercher's murder and whose fingerprints and DNA were found at the scene, was released in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.

The eight-part docuseries on the saga is titled "Blue Moon" and produced by Disney-owned Hulu. Knox's case was previously depicted in a 2011 film for U.S. television, Knox's 2013 memoir "Waiting to be Heard" and a 2016 Netflix documentary.

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Local councilor Margherita Scoccia has criticized Mayor Vittoria Fernandi and Perugian authorities for letting Knox film in their city, which has long attempted to move on from the events of 2007. 

"Seventeen years ago, Perugia was shocked by the murder of Meredith Kercher, which sadly made us famous throughout the world," she said. "Today that tragedy is being recalled and sensationalized in a TV series produced by the American, a figure who exists in public memory exclusively for her involvement in that crime and the sensational acquittal."

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Fernandi has since apologized for allowing the filming to take place, the Times reported. 

"We were the Gotham City of Italy and ‘murder’ tourists arrived to see the house that Knox and Kercher shared," Scoccia told the Times. "We do not want to go back to that."

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Perugian bars, restaurants and clubs closed after Kercher's murder gained international notoriety, and enrollment in the city's two universities plummeted, the outlet reported. 

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Giuliano Mignini, the lead prosecutor in Knox's first trial who helped put her behind bars for four years, told The Times that he believes the Italian supreme court should have ordered a retrial in 2015 instead of throwing the case out, saying the decision was made under U.S. pressure on the judges.

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But he said he had a good impression of Knox when she visited him in 2022 and again in June this year. 

"I had asked for a life sentence for her, yet she came to see me, and it was a positive surprise. She said I had always been honest with her, even if I had been wrong about her. There was no rancor," he told The Times.

Angelo Messino, the new manager of the bar where Knox worked as a bartender while living in Perugia, which is close to being reopened since closing after the murder and is now called The Zoo and formerly Le Chic, was less forgiving. 

"I don't like them filming here," he told the outlet. "It's time she shut up."

This year, Knox was convicted of slander in an Italian court for accusing her then-boss at the bar, Patrick Lumumba, in Kercher's death during a tense police interrogation in a language she was still learning. She was sentenced to three years but did not return to prison due to time served.