Amanda Knox is speaking out against Matt Damon’s new film, Stillwater.
The 34-year-old writer and journalist called out the people involved in the movie that “profits off my name, face, & story without my consent,” she wrote on her website on Thursday. ET has reached out to Damon, director Todd McCarthy and Focus Features for comment.
“This new film by director Tom McCarthy, starring Matt Damon, is ‘loosely based’ or ‘directly inspired by’ the ‘Amanda Knox saga,’ as Vanity Fair put it in a for-profit article promoting a for-profit film, neither of which I am affiliated with,” she began. “I want to pause right here on that phrase: ‘the Amanda Knox saga.’ What does that refer to? Does it refer to anything I did? No. It refers to the events that resulted from the murder of Meredith Kercher by a burglar named Rudy Guede. It refers to the shoddy police work, prosecutorial tunnel vision, and refusal to admit their mistakes that led the Italian authorities to wrongfully convict me, twice.”
Knox made headlines after she was wrongfully convicted for the murder of a fellow exchange student in 2007. She then spent the next eight years fighting for her freedom, until she was acquitted in 2015. Knox was able to tell her side of the story in the Netflix documentary Amanda Knox.
Stillwater, meanwhile, follows Damon as Bill Baker, an oil worker from Stillwater, Oklahoma, who travels to France when his estranged daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) is charged with murdering her friend while studying in Marseille. Bill tries everything he can to help his daughter prove her innocence as time slowly runs out, while contending with stark cultural differences and a complex and radically different French legal system.
Knox continued by expressing that in the years she was wrongfully imprisoned and years of trial “everyone else in that ‘saga’ had more influence over the course of events than I did…I had no control over my public image, no voice in my story.”
