Amanda Knox knows what you think when you hear her name. She also knows most of it probably isn't true and there's not much she can do about it.
Falsely accused and wrongly convicted of murdering her roommate 14 years ago while an international student in Italy, Knox spent nearly four years in prison until the conviction was overturned and the true killer imprisoned.
The director of a new film Stillwater, starring Matt Damon, says what happened to Knox inspired the movie. But no one asked Knox how she felt about that.
Amanda Knox Photo: Gerald Bostrum / CC BY-SA 4.0
"No one on the film thought to involve me or bother to give me advance notice that my name would be used to promote this film and the most traumatic experience of my life would be dredged up and recreated in this way.
"Stillwater took the most traumatic experience of my life, very very thinly disguised it and then used it as a plot device in this entertainment product.
"Fiction is always drawing from reality as a storyteller I know that, but there is always an ethical line about how the story is told and in what context."
You can read Stillwater director Tom McCarthy's response to Knox's criticism here.
Hollywood has a problem with telling stories of victims as it's assumed that victims don't themselves have a story because things happen TO them, she says.
Filmmakers seeking to tell stories based on real-life trauma, such as those who wanted to make a film about the Christchurch terror attack, need to reach out to victims in a real way and humanising way, she says.
"The makers of that film [should have done] the empathy work of reaching out to that community to ask them not just how can we tell the story the best way but should we be telling the story and how is that going to impact you?"
Amanda Knox in 2011 after her exoneration Photo: Oli Scarff / Getty Images
Knox says there is a "doppelganger version" of Amanda Knox existing in the public imagination that will likely be forever associated with a series of tragic events she says she had no part in.
"There is this ongoing assumption and stigma that I am somehow at fault for my own wrongful conviction and that I am somehow this weird, suspicious person who's, if not directly at fault, indirectly at fault and morally responsible for the bad things that happened to me.
"There's an idea of me that exists in the ether that I have no say over.
"As I walk through the world, I know I am constantly encountering this idea of me that is very much getting in the way of my ability to reintegrate into society successfully."
Yet Knox is forging her own path, as a podcaster and soon as a parent.
She interviews people who have lost agency as the result of a crime on her podcast The Truth About True Crime and recently talked about her struggles with infertility on Labyrinths - a podcast she hosts with her husband Christopher Robinson.
Knox says opening up about infertility led to a huge response from people who hadn't felt able to talk about their own similar struggles.
"People want pregnancy and fertility to be just this glorious thing but it's not always pretty. It's good to not feel any shame or blame for being one of the four people who struggle with this.
"Allowing people to be very candid and very raw about what this experience is like and how it changes you and how uncertain it is and how unfair it seems. All of those things are aspects of the journey people don't want to talk about."
