In last week’s opening of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a glossy new Hulu miniseries produced by Knox herself, the wrongly accused heroine walks the cobbled streets of Perugia, her movements elegant and weighted, like a character in a Greek tragedy revisiting the site of her fate. A voice-over by Grace Van Patten, playing Knox, set to a montage establishing the well-known details of Knox’s 2007 murder trial in the Italian city, reflects bitterly: “I have heard of the concept of universal truth. But from this day forward, I never believed it.”
It’s a strange contradiction. Knox spent years insisting that her own innocence was a hard truth. Afterwards, once the world began to agree with her, she became a tenacious advocate for the rights of the wrongly accused. Yet she’s also an example of the way truth has increasingly become privatized in our society, especially when it comes to the trauma narrative. We each have our “own truth”, and the more shapely and compelling the story — and the slicker the redemption arc — the better. It used to be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. But that old judicial motto has been replaced by another: “lights, camera, action.” A new genre is emerging. Call it the age of the trauma blockbuster.
As the Knox show dropped, there were also developments in the Menendez brothers’ case, a kind of first test of whether a television redemption can translate into a judicial one. Lyle and Eric were convicted of the brutal murder of their parents in 1993, and the trial was one of the first to be broadcast live. Millions tuned in to watch the prosecution paint the brothers as spoiled rich kids, and the defence lay out the years of sexual abuse the brothers endured at their father’s hands. They expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison, until Ryan Murphy’s sensationalised account of their life, Monsters, aired on Netflix last year.
The brothers’ family objected to the retelling, it featured grotesque re-enactments of the brothers’ abuse, as well as the implication of incest (in a soapy shower scene). But Murphy was right when he proclaimed his own series “the best thing that has happened” to the brothers in decades. They have a chance at freedom now. Though their requests for parole were denied, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is now considering the brothers for clemency, and their lawyers are pursuing promising other legal avenues. Since O. J., since Lorena Bobbitt, since Casey Anthony, justice has been a spectacle. But now spectacle is justice.
The Menendez brothers “own truth” — that their moral compasses were mangled by the repercussions of sexual abuse — wasn’t enough to lessen their sentences in 1994. But it might be now, under our new shared understanding of trauma. If criminality requires a guilty act and a guilty mind, we are now inclined to absolve the minds of the traumatised. The reasons some might kill are complex, personal and potentially exculpatory.
Certainly, the Italian authorities didn’t have much understanding of these wider contexts at the time of Knox’s trial. Her conviction rested significantly upon the weird “vibe” that she gave after her friend Meredith Kercher was found murdered. Knox took a shower after mistaking blood stains for period blood, and kissed her then-boyfriend Raffealle Sollecito at the crime scene, who was also convicted and then acquitted of the murder. The Italian detectives took her behaviour as signs of her guilt, but the less complicated answer — that she didn’t understand what she was seeing, and that she didn’t process it afterwards — also required the abandonment of certain assumptions about what shock, horror and grief should look like.
“Since O. J., since Lorena Bobbitt, since Casey Anthony, justice has been a spectacle. But now spectacle is justice.”
Sollecito, who also served four years in prison, never garnered the public shaming or subsequent fame that Knox did. According to Instagram, he’s now a “vegan yogi”, and had no part in the Hollywood retelling of his story. We might wonder if he is better off than Knox — unable, or maybe unwilling, to capitalise on his trauma or rehearse the unfairness of his story.
Our culture’s love of the trauma plot line risks telling the version of events that feels truer not because it is more accurate, but because it is more emotionally satisfying. When Johnny Depp and Amber Heard faced off in court in 2022, I listened to some of my devoted feminist friends call Heard a “liar” who was betraying women. The harrowing details of her allegations ceased to matter, the “truth” had been rendered irrelevant in the algorithmic court of public opinion. Heard and Depp were flattened into TikToks, memes, and YouTube supercuts.
Meanwhile, that same year, the Netflix show Inventing Anna transformed Anna Delvey from a convicted fraudster into a media darling. The internet reappraised her as a kind of camp icon, who walked fashion runways and sold her own merch. It seemed we didn’t mind her stolen money, or her imprisonment — not if she was willing to sashay on Dancing With the Stars. Depp returned to the silver screen; but Heard, broken, faded into oblivion. Maybe she’s found peace there, but her case demonstrates that there are certain rules for women, and then there are exceptions, mostly made for those who bleed on cue, according to the rules of TV.
The Knox series is unusually forthright about the power dynamics involved. Knox’s creative control and the imprimatur of fellow trauma star Monica Lewinsky, who executive produced the series, are designed to reverse a decade and a half of tabloid mythmaking (“Foxy Knoxy”) by monetising empathy. It’s a defensible project, an exonerated woman insisting on her version of her life, but the meta-move matters. The claim isn’t simply “I am innocent”; rather, it’s “my authorship is innocence’s proof”. The show’s authority comes not from a judge’s final opinion, but from the right to tell and sell one’s own story in the most persuasive medium of our time.
The medium has no interest in arbitrating fact from fiction; it rewards sexiness and the appearance of truth. There’s a reason why the Menendez show cast two very good-looking actors as its protagonists and had them shirtless often. Ditto with Knox. Our appetite for watching alleged criminals is driven by their undeniably seductive power. Perhaps we all become trauma stars in our own minds.
Justice used to borrow the theatre’s stage, now it borrows its logic. For 30 years, we’ve lived with “trial as show”, from the Menendez brothers on Court TV to O. J., then the Depp-Heard livestream. But the true-crime boom has completed a cultural inversion: television isn’t the shadow of justice anymore; it’s the forum where guilt, innocence, and redemption are negotiated and sometimes won.
The form’s best ambitions shouldn’t be dismissed. If a series helps us understand how an interrogation breaks down or how misogyny distorts a case, that’s a public service. If clemency for the Menendez brothers reflects a better grasp of youthful culpability, good. The trouble is the genre’s gravitational and manipulative pull. The Greeks knew that drama purifies through pity and fear; today we purify through pity and fandom. Truths — whether “own truths”, or the actual kind — tend to be erased in the white-hot glare of the public appetite. And Knox, at least, should know better. The “mystery” of her guilt was always a narrative contrivance: Italian prosecutors, the tabloids, and then Hollywood all found the beautiful American exchange student a more compelling protagonist than the obvious culprit. The trauma industry, no surprise, is good for no one.
