Amanda Knox fires back at Matt Damon over cancel culture jail time comments

Amanda Knox revived her feud with Matt Damon after the actor and his "The Rip" co-star Ben Affleck weighed in on cancel culture.

During a recent interview on "The Joe Rogan Experience," Damon, 55, and Affleck, 53, shared their thoughts on how cancel culture can be taken to extremes. At one point in their discussion, Damon suggested that for some public figures, the perpetual ostracization and scrutiny of being canceled is worse than a jail sentence. 

"I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever and then come out and say, ‘No, but I paid my debt. Like, we're done. Like, can we be done?’" Damon said. "Like, the thing about getting kind of excoriated publicly like that, it just never ends. And it’s the first thing that… you know, it just will follow you to the grave."

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After the podcast episode was released Jan. 16, Knox, 38, who previously slammed Damon for starring in a 2021 movie inspired by her real-life wrongful conviction and imprisonment, called the Oscar winner out again on social media.

"Another thing Matt Damon could have run by me before putting out into the world," she wrote on X, formerly Twitter, alongside a Variety article about Damon's cancel culture comments.

Knox spent four years in prison after she and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were twice convicted and later acquitted in the 2007 murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy. The two were released from prison in October 2011. 

After Knox shared her post, she replied to several X users who commented in the thread.

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"Yeah, well, literally going to jail...not so good," wrote journalist Katherine Brodsky. "But frankly, given that some of these ‘cancelled’ people have taken their own lives, yeah, maybe they would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months and be done with it — instead, there's no end to it. No coming back. No being ‘square.’"

"People commit suicide in prison, too," Knox responded.

"Amanda is unfamiliar with the word some!" another social media user commented.

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"You're missing the point," Knox replied. "You don't get to go to prison in secret. It comes with its own stigma and lasting trauma. You don't just get to ‘be done with it,’ personally or socially."

Fox News Digital has reached out to Damon's representative for comment. 

After being released from prison, Knox returned to the United States and became an outspoken advocate for criminal justice reform with a focus on the wrongfully convicted and media ethics. 

She has penned two memoirs about her experiences, including 2013's "Waiting to Be Heard" and 2025's "Free: My Search for Meaning" and also hosts the "Hard Knox" podcast.

After Damon's movie "Stillwater" was released in July 2021, Knox denounced the film in a viral thread on X. "Stillwater," which was directed by Tom McCarthy, stars Damon as a father whose daughter was convicted of killing her roommate and imprisoned in France. The movie follows Damon's character as he travels from Oklahoma to France where he sets out on a quest to prove his daughter's innocence. 

McCarthy previously confirmed that the movie was inspired by Knox's real-life case. Knox slammed the filmmakers for further linking her name to Kercher's murder after she was exonerated and also took issue with the twist in the movie's storyline, which deviated from actual events and cast doubt on the innocence of the character based on her.

During an August 2021 interview with Variety, Knox explained why she felt it was necessary to go after Damon and McCarthy over their handling of her story in "Stillwater." 

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"Wrongful convictions don’t just happen to the individual. They happen to a whole network of human beings who love this person and know that they’re innocent and fight for their innocence," she explained.

Knox went on to note that the movie’s decision to make the character she inspired somewhat culpable in the murder meant that the lines between reality and fiction weren’t blurred in a responsible way, making it hard for her not to feel like Damon and McCarthy were opening wounds she’s worked hard to put behind her. 

"I don’t think that the filmmakers can honestly say that they went far enough away from my case so that it wouldn’t be recognizably my case," she told the outlet. "And I think that that’s clear in all of the coverage where everyone’s like, ‘Oh, this is recognizably the Amanda Knox case.’ And from that audiences can then draw conclusions about me, whether or not those conclusions are accurate or not."

She added: "The question that Tom McCarthy really has to ask himself is, is it responsible to keep recycling that same story when we know what the consequences of that can be?"

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She shared her view that the movie renewed the public perception that she had something to do with the crime. In her viral Twitter thread, Knox noted that the case is still referred to as the "Amanda Knox case" rather than the "murder of Meredith Kercher by Rudy Guede."

Guede was convicted of Kercher’s murder in a separate trial in 2008.

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"There’s been this ongoing idea that, ‘Well, as long as we call it fiction, then no one would honestly apply the ideas or feelings or conclusions that I bring with my imagination to the story to the real person,’" she explained. "And that’s simply not true."

"Especially when you’re looking at people like myself who continue to be brought up with a question mark, you deciding to tell that story in your own way is going to be adding to the ledger of how people understand and define me as a human being," she continued.

"And then Matt Damon and the director can walk away with a great story in their pocket, but meanwhile, I’m still living with the consequences of people thinking that I am somehow involved in this crime that I am not involved in."

Last year, Knox was involved in a retelling of her story when she served as an executive producer on the Hulu limited series "The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox," an eight-episode true-crime biographical drama that premiered on Hulu in August 2025. 

Fox News Digital's Tyler McCarthy contributed to this report.