Amanda Knox: 'In my show, all of that unresolved rage and grief is coming out'
Making her Fringe debut, the Seattle-born activist and entertainer tells Claire Sawers that she won’t let the bullies (or reviewers) win
No one had it on their bingo card for Amanda Knox to drop in to the Edinburgh Fringe with a stand-up comedy show. She was the American student, notoriously wrongly convicted for the 2007 murder of roommate Meredith Kercher, sentenced to 26 years in prison, then eventually acquitted in 2015. Seattleite Knox is widely viewed now as the victim of a huge miscarriage of justice. For years, she was at the centre of a targeted campaign to paint her not only as a savage murderer, but an anarchist, drug taking, Satan worshipping whore and liar. Many Fringe acts have worked up an hour’s material out of a lot less. Now Knox is bringing us a one-woman debut: her own blend of storytelling, non-consensual notoriety, resilience and humour, with a feminist take.
As those who followed the case will remember, accusations about 20-year-old Knox began because she kissed boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito outside the crime scene, which was considered suspicious, even guilty behaviour. Increasingly wild theories were spread by Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (a pipe-smoking Sherlock Holmes fan) who concluded Knox must have staged a break-in after a demonic sex game went wrong. The tabloid press piled on with character assassinations, nicknaming her ‘Foxy Knoxy’ and the rest is history. Or not for Knox, who has spent her whole adult life clouded by controversy. She receives death threats (including some to her four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son) to this day.
That infamous false conviction, based not on proof but on anti-American, misogynist speculation and a pressure felt by local Italian police to quickly ‘crack the case’, means Knox knows what it feels like to be hated globally for decades. After being on the wrong end of a hysterical witch hunt, and doing jail time, Knox, now 38 and a mother of two, must feel bulletproof by this point, right? A trip to an arts festival will be a breeze, surely?
‘I’ve actually broken out in hives,’ she tells me over Zoom from her home on Vashon, the island just outside Seattle. ‘I’m really excited to be bringing my debut show, and I’ve heard amazing things about the Fringe, but it’s extremely nerve wracking. I heard the Fringe critics tend to be pretty harsh. They instill fear!’, she says, with a strained smile. Knox has tried to process as much as she can over the years. She attempted to get closure and clarity through writing two memoirs, appearing in a Netflix documentary, and Mouth Of The Wolf, a film released earlier this year and made by her husband when she returned to Italy to confront Mignini. She’s become an activist for justice reform, platforming the wrongly accused on her podcast Hard Knox, and drawing attention to disputed cases like Lucy Letby’s on another podcast, Doubt.
When Knox joins the call today, she is polite but starts out looking tense and vigilant. Who can blame her for having trust issues with the media? ‘In my show, all of that unresolved rage and grief is coming out. When you’ve gone through something traumatic, you can think, “ok, I’m done, I’ve found peace, I’ve moved on!” And then you become a mother and it all comes up again. Cartwheel is about being a mother to a daughter asking questions. It’s funny too because so much ridiculous stuff happened and deserves to be a punchline.’
After announcing her stand up plans, some critics found it insensitive, and the family of Meredith Kercher was reported to be offended. Knox is keen to point out that it is likely to be their lawyer and not Kercher’s parents who were outraged. ‘He’s an Italian man, assigned to them from my prosecutor in Italy. Frankly he’s a raging hypocrite. He wrote his own book about the case. He doesn’t say a peep when the actual murderer [Rudy Guede] writes his book [2022’s The Benefit Of The Doubt: My Story], or that the actual murderer is currently in an ongoing trial for sexual assault since his release from jail. The young woman was too young to have followed the case; she knew nothing about him.’
Knox prefers to keep her focus on not letting the bullies win. ‘When your very existence is controversial and offends people and if your story reminds people of something terrible that happened to someone else, the idea that being connected to that terrible thing suddenly disqualifies you as a storyteller or a person with something valuable to say... I suppose you could take that position, but I do not. I frankly don’t think anyone serious does. I think they invented this ethical dilemma for me.’
Knox describes Cartwheel as ‘70% comedy and 30% rage’. More than a decade has passed since her acquittal, yet the show combines ‘unresolved feelings of pain at the impossible trap of patriarchy’, with absurd humour, silly situations and ‘mom jokes’. Knox made her stand-up debut at the Los Angeles Comedy Store as part of The Roast Of Whitney Cummings in 2023 and has since opened for Nikki Glaser, Esther Povitsky and Damon Wayans.
‘The comedy world is notoriously hard on women. People have found astounding ways to be cruel and punishing towards me, in insane ways. I am aware there are tabloids who cannot wait to talk shit about me. They would love for me to fail. I am prepared for criticism. I’m speaking about personal things in Cartwheel: raising a daughter given my own history, being abused as a woman. Everyone is familiar with little kids saying “it’s not fair!” Oh! Yes! Really? Let’s talk about that! How do I explain injustice in an age-appropriate way to my four-year-old given what I know? I’m trying to explain how the world works to my kid. But also, in a way that doesn’t make her afraid to exist in this world. The “funny” is the tension between those two things.’
The title is a reference to Knox ‘cartwheeling’ in the Perugia police station where she was questioned. The alleged odd and inappropriate behaviour was, in fact, a lost-in-translation moment, sensationalised to vilify her. Knox did yoga stretches in the waiting room, which was translated by police as gymnastics, and then cartwheels, a misleading game of what Knox calls ‘telephone’ (better known here as Chinese whispers). ‘To this day, people believe I was just doin’ cartwheels and jugglin’ balls and circus acts in there!’ she jokes, incredulously. ‘Really? Really!?’
Cartwheels also nod to her daughter’s carefree innocence as well as her own. ‘I’m raising a daughter who likes to play and be silly, just like me, and do cartwheels. How do I set her up to succeed in a world that punished me for that very behaviour? I’m reclaiming it, giving a kind of defiant embrace to free-spiritedness. I want my kid to be carefree and whimsical and do a little dance.’
When I bring up that Knox used to be a musical theatre kid, it’s like the conversation has a key change. Her serious face melts into a grin. ‘Oh my god, yeah. I was a nerd singing showtunes in the hallways between classes at school. I was in Annie twice, Fiddler On The Roof; maybe Fringe audiences will hear a little riff on The Sound Of Music in my show…’
She loves the idea of coming back to her roots as a performer, and the light-hearted kid who grew up loving Robin Williams and Jackie Chan. Grown-up Knox is a fan of Bo Burnham, Tig Notaro, Flight Of The Conchords, Mike Birbiglia and Alex Edelman. US comedians Jena Friedman and Sarah Silverman have become her friends and she admires Riki Lindhome who turned a sad infertility journey into a fun, uplifting musical show, Dead Inside. ‘After this whole ordeal, I really didn’t get to embrace my creative side. I love that art transmutes ugliness into joy and beauty. Comedy does that in an incredible way. My god, when you have children you have to have hope. Let’s see if the audience and the reviewers give me a fair hearing.’
Amanda Knox: Cartwheel, Gilded Balloon Teviot, 7–17 August, 8.15pm.