On the day the cast and crew of Amanda Knox’s biopic started filming beneath his window in Perugia, Walter Cardinali flew into a rage and decided to let the actors know how he felt.
Writing “Rispetto per Meredith” (Respect for Meredith) in large letters on a bed sheet, he draped it from his balcony in full view of the actors.
It is 17 years since the British student Meredith Kercher was found stabbed 47 times in Perugia, a crime that earned her American flatmate Knox four years in jail after prosecutors claimed she had taken part in a “sex game gone wrong” before she was cleared by Italy’s supreme court of murder.
Now Knox, who has built a career podcasting about miscarriages of justice back in her native Seattle, is co-producing a TV drama for Disney’s Hulu streaming service about her Italian odyssey and has dispatched the American actress Grace Van Patten back to Perugia to portray her.
Also on board as co-producer is Monica Lewinsky, who has her own history with negative public exposure after she was villainised for her affair with the US president Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
Cardinali, 69, a hotelier, told me he was furious, claiming Kercher was being forgotten as Knox cashes in on her acquittal. “Perugia was unable to defend Meredith, but we can defend her memory,” he said.
“This fixation people have with Knox being guilty of murder is incomprehensible since her innocence has been proved beyond doubt in court,” said her lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati.
“Trials held under the spotlight of the media often start with an idea of guilt that doesn’t shift, despite the verdict. There is an ignorance of the fact that Amanda is a victim of this and suffers because of it,” he added.
Knox, now 37 and a mother of two, was first sentenced to 26 years for the 2007 murder then acquitted in 2011 on appeal, only to be convicted again after the supreme court ordered a retrial.
Supreme court judges then did a shocking U-turn in 2015, citing “stunning flaws” in DNA tests and threw out the case against Knox and her former lover Raffaele Sollecito, who she met in Perugia after arriving as a student in 2007. The court ruled that investigators had hurriedly pinned the blame on the pair during an inquiry riddled with “omissions” which degenerated into a “frantic search” for a killer as the world watched.
Her supporters argue that four years in jail means Knox can and should tell her story as long as she likes, but that view was not shared by the hostile crowd that gathered in Perugia to watch the filming.
“People often believe anyone who is arrested is guilty, and if they get off it’s due to a loophole,” said Perugia lawyer Francesco Gatti.
Covering her successful appeal in 2011, I watched as a mob of angry locals greeted Knox’s acquittal with fury, yelling “Shame!” and insulting Americans outside the court.
Returning to Perugia more than a decade later, I discovered attitudes have not changed, starting at the Bar Duomo on the main square where eight lawyers having lunch all had negative views of Knox.
“The US government intervened to get her off,” said one of the group, Francesco, who declined to give his surname.
Suspicious locals pointed to Knox’s initial confession that she was present as local barman Patrick Lumumba killed Kercher, even if Knox quickly retracted her statement, claiming she was slapped and cajoled into blaming Lumumba during an all-night police interrogation.
The European Court of Human Rights has criticised Italy for denying Knox a lawyer and official interpreter that night and she will go back to the supreme court in 2025 to appeal against a slander conviction after she accused Lumumba.
Lumumba had employed Knox at his bar, Le Chic, which later shut down after he moved to Poland. Last week the premises were close to reopening as new manager Angelo Messino, 32, finished redecorating.
“I don’t like them filming here. It’s time she shut up,” he said.
Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast drifter tied to the crime scene by DNA, was tried separately and jailed then released in 2021.
Knox has said: “Funny how the people who call me a psychopath, who are disgusted I’m not in prison, never have a word to say about Rudy Guede.”
Guede’s conviction has not been enough to satisfy Perugians the case is closed. Sollecito, now 40 and working in IT in Portugal, told me he blamed the media for Perugia’s view of him. “The media told people ‘There’s no evidence to convict them, but who knows?’ The rest is human nature which is always suspicious,” he said.
“I support Amanda’s bid to give her point of view with this TV project. People can doubt us all they want but we are victims of prosecutors who never apologised,” he added.
Manuela Comodi, one of the prosecutors who won the initial conviction is still convinced she did not put a foot wrong. “Amanda Knox acted in court and is now sending others to Perugia to act on her behalf,” she said.
Local opposition councillor Margherita Scoccia said apart from questions of guilt or innocence, Perugians opposed the filming of Knox’s series, entitled Blue Moon, because they remember the devastating impact the murder had on the city.
Enrolment at Perugia’s two universities plummeted, and bars, restaurants and clubs closed as the city gained notoriety after Kercher was killed. “We were the Gotham City of Italy and ‘murder’ tourists arrived to see the house that Knox and Kercher shared. We do not want to go back to that,” said Scoccia, who sharply criticised the mayor, Vittoria Ferdinandi, for handing the Blue Moon crew a permit to film.
Amid the backlash, Ferdinandi has now apologised to townspeople for giving permission.
Surprisingly, the one person in Perugia with a kind word for Knox is Giuliano Mignini, the lead prosecutor on her first trial, who helped put her away for four years.
Now retired, Mignini, 74, stands by his investigation and believes the supreme court should have ordered a retrial in 2015 instead of throwing the case out — and does not rule out US pressure on the judges.
But he says he had a good impression of Knox when she visited him in Perugia 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 rancour,” he said.
