How to Survive a Scandal: Life Lessons From Monica Lewinsky and Amanda Knox

When Amanda Knox walked into a lecture hall in 2017 to give her first-ever public talk, she was terrified. For years, her face had been splashed across tabloids, her words twisted into headlines, her silence filled in by strangers. Luckily for her, sharing the stage that day was a woman who’d been through the same media meat grinder — indeed, who’d become a household name before she was old enough to rent a car.

Knox begged the event organizers for a chance to meet Monica Lewinsky privately. So, Lewinsky later invited her up to her hotel room, made her a pot of tea and ended up sharing the kind of big-sister guidance that only a fellow scandal-press survivor could offer. 

 “She had a lot of advice about reclaiming your voice and your narrative,” Knox says. “That ended up being a turning point for me.”

Knox took that advice about reclaiming her narrative literally. Which is how these two veterans of the 24-hour news cycle — and now friends — ended up co-producing The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. The new eight-part Hulu limited series (out Aug. 20) dramatizes the brutal 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher and the media circus that followed — a case that saw Knox, then a 20-year-old American exchange student in Italy, relentlessly pursued by prosecutors, twice convicted and twice acquitted, all while being turned into shorthand for suspicion and scandal by a rabid global press machine.

The genesis of the show occurred a few years after their first meeting, when Lewinsky happened on an interview in The New York Times in which Knox of about her desire to tell her story onscreen. Lewinsky took the idea of a show to 20th Television, where she has a first-look deal. “They jumped at it,” Lewinsky says. After meeting with several contenders, the duo brought on K.J. Steinberg as creator and showrunner. “She had this innate sense of what this story was,” says Lewinsky. “She blew everyone else at the water. With respect to everyone else.” Powerhouse producer Warren Littlefield (Fargo, The Handsmaid’s Tale, Dopesick) signed on to the project soon after meeting with them. “It wasn’t something they just slapped their names on,” Littlefield says. “I was blown away by their sincerity and determination. They had a story to tell and they were committed to it. And for three years they rolled up their sleeves and did it.” Grace Van Patten stars as Knox in the series, which was elaborately shot in Rome, Vancouver and Budapest.

Our conversation took place earlier this month at a cramped Hollywood photo studio. Flanked by a small phalanx of publicists and handlers, they sat for their first joint interview seeming slightly nervous, but articulate and self-aware. For over an hour they spoke about enduring the spotlight, rewriting their own stories, working on the show and taking back control — not just of the narrative, but the entire framing of it. “I’ve spent years feeling like I was silenced,” says Knox. “It’s a relief to finally be heard.”

At a very young age, you both went through the kind of media firestorm that would be unimaginable to most people. You’re members of an exceedingly small club. Did that make it easier to open up to each other?

KNOX Of course! Living through this kind of experience leaves this lifelong mark on you that nobody can really understand. There’s a great desire to connect with people, but after being burned and taken advantage of for so long, you live with this constant terror that people will view everything you do or say in the worst possible light. When I met Monica, I was just glimpsing what it could mean to stand up for myself — and hope strangers would actually see me as a human being. So talking to her was a huge relief. No one had walked that walk before me more than she did.

LEWINSKY When we met, I saw in her the pain that I saw in myself. She was desperate to get out of this box she had been put in. But you don’t often see people reclaiming a narrative in public. There wasn’t a road map for us. Our situations were different, but with all the betrayal I experienced, I’ve felt lucky that I still trust people; I’m still optimistic about the world and people — maybe that’s naive of me, but it helps.

KNOX The truth is, I would never have done this without Monica. She told me she would have my back, and she did. She made me feel safe. From the start, we both felt strongly that this series would not be just a courtroom drama that ends when Amanda Knox gets out of prison. It’s anchored in the long consequences of the trauma and how a person rebuilds their life — and their faith in humanity — by taking risks. There is life after trauma. There is growth. There is opportunity. Moving forward takes courage, compassion, curiosity. It’s a story worth telling.

LEWINSKY It was really important to us to go beyond the courtroom. It would have been so easy — and trite — to just say, “Here’s six episodes, we’re going to end with the acquittal.” There was a lot of resistance, but we insisted on eight because the story doesn’t end at the courtroom. Everyone else moves on but then you have to spend years trying to reorient yourself and make sense of your life. I hope that what people take away from this is seeing what happens to people when the headlines quiet down, when you’re with your family, trying to find a way forward, figuring out who you are now. It’s not just a true-crime show or a courtroom drama. It’s a look at the media and the rush to judgment you often see in cases like this. People forget there are human beings behind all this. With some of that understanding, maybe it won’t happen — or happen as badly — to the next person.

Monica, you’d worn the subject-and-producer hats before, when you worked with Ryan Murphy on Impeachment: American Crime Story. It must be difficult to see the worst moments of your life turned into drama. How did you guide Amanda through that process?

LEWINSKY Wearing both hats is challenging. But coming into Impeachment, I knew no one wanted a hagiography. Everyone wanted a compelling story that revealed the things people thought they knew — until they saw something different. And Amanda got that, too.

KNOX  There are scenes in there that I find kind of embarrassing. (Laughs.) But you know, I was young! That’s how it was. Going in, I was afraid I’d have to push back constantly against scandalizing or sensationalism. But KJ understood — bringing her on was the best decision we made as EPs. She understood that as human beings, we are doing our best in the world, that we’re bumping into each other and there’s sometimes a perfect storm of personalities and circumstances that lead to misunderstandings and injustices. That gave me peace of mind — to trust the person at the helm to do what’s right and ethical — so the creative part became easier. She even invited me to co-write the final episode. No one in my position is ever given that kind of respect and opportunity.

Was the interrogation sequence the one you were most concerned about?

KNOX Yes. The hardest thing is conveying what it feels like to be behind a closed door at the mercy of authority figures. There’s resistance to acknowledging the depth of that trauma. The dynamics aren’t as clear cut as we see on TV shows, this cartoonish interaction. It’s way more complicated and nuanced. Multiple people in the room, some yelling, some hitting me, others comforting and coaxing. I was very young, emotionally vulnerable, and didn’t know what was going on. I wasn’t just coerced into implicating myself — I was coerced into believing I might have witnessed a crime. That subtle psychological shift is deeply traumatic, very real, and hard for people to understand. Watching Grace go through that psychological journey — never missing a beat — that was shocking. I cried at the end.

You were interrogated, too, Monica, during the Clinton impeachment.

LEWINSKY Exactly. We were joking the other day, my interrogation was 13 hours and hers was like 50 hours, so she won. Also, mine was at the Ritz Carlton, so… [Laughs.] Even before I knew her I had so much compassion for Amanda, but after we met, I realized how little I knew about her, how much I had gotten wrong. This is embarrassing, but I thought that Amanda and Meredith had been roommates for years and that Amanda and her boyfriend had been together for a long time, not just a week. I thought that you guys had found Meredith’s body and you’d accidentally touched the knife. I had no idea. I think so many people have no idea that Meredith’s killer was caught and put in prison. They certainly don’t know his name. And that is a really important part of this story — we needed to set the record straight.

You’ve both pointed out that there’s a lot of prurient fascination and judgment about women in the media, especially about young women — how quick we are to label and how long the labels stick. 

KNOX It goes back to how the human mind works — how we project fears and fantasies. It’s easy to project things onto women because we’re objects of other people’s fantasies. And it’s not just men. Plenty of women were invested in my persecution too. Where does that impulse to condemn and diminish come from? Women always get pitted against each other — virtuous versus vice. We are meant to represent ideals instead of being allowed to be flawed, fragile human beings. We’re not given the grace to be complicated.

LEWINSKY The misogyny also becomes internalized — not just for the target but for all the women who consume this media. It permeates how we think and feel about ourselves. I hope it’s getting better, but that’s why showing the “afterwards” matters: Once you’ve been labeled and buried, how do you emerge as someone more complex, with more value than what society gave you credit for? To stand up for yourself takes … well, not balls. (Laughs.) Something else!

I remember when I first met Monica, back in the ’90s, we couldn’t enter a room without every single person turning around to stare at her. It was a small, surreal taste of what that kind of notoriety feels like. Amanda, what was the aftermath like for you?

KNOX I know that surreal feeling really well. There’s no such thing as anonymity. But the last thing I wanted after getting out of a prison cell was to be cooped up in a house where I couldn’t even look out the windows — reintroduced to the world with a new prison around me. In prison, I pushed back: “I’m not the monster they say I am; I don’t deserve to be here; I won’t be broken.” Once you are free, you think you’ll get your life back, but you don’t. You have to slowly rediscover who you are — it takes a lot of trial and error — hoping people will embrace you, because we’re not islands. Early on, I made some big mistakes, hiding alone in my apartment, then trying to go out — karaoke!— just trying to live my life and connect. And for a long time, things were thrown back in my face, the fact that I was alive and free was somehow offensive to some people. I wasn’t allowed to exist outside the box the world put me in.

LEWINSKY I still struggle — almost 28 years on — with the construct that my mistakes are expensive. Even prepping to talk about this show today, I panicked. What if I mess up and I lose everything? That’s very real. Most people have a before and an after. What’s hard about the after is being publicly defined by the media, and then trying to find a way forward in a land that doesn’t necessarily want to see you do it.

The indignities of fame — the strange rules you learn to live by…

LEWINSKY In New York, if a restaurant sent you free dessert, you learned to get out fast — it meant they’d called the paparazzi. If Page Six is reporting what you ate, the tip came from the restaurant. There’s a recognizable look you see on celebrities when they’re photographed from a distance — the “Is that a camera?” face. It’s one thing if you’ve sought out that celebrity. But when you haven’t chosen public life, you don’t have infrastructure. You try to learn when the goons are coming out — we call them goons in my family. But you don’t know even how to plan — you get coffee in the morning in New York and there’s a gaggle of goons waiting outside for you with cameras— and it’s just exhausting. But even people watching the show who weren’t in a presidential scandal or wrongfully convicted will still recognize the emotions.

KNOX You live with paranoia, but it’s justified paranoia. Not that someone confronts you every day, but it could happen anywhere. Someone might be stalking you; someone might say something nice to your face and then run out and tell [the tabloids]. You always are gauging what people want from you.

I know that both of you relied on your families as a lifeline.

KNOX From the second I remember existing, my family conveyed that I matter, that I’m loved. Even when the world deconstructed me — past, present, future — and told me I don’t matter, deep down I knew they were wrong. That love prepared me to endure and not be broken.

LEWINSKY Our families stood by us. I don’t know if I could have survived this without mine.

KNOX And that’s not something to take for granted. A lot of people go through rough experiences and their families abandon them. I met many of them in prison.

Your families are also not immune from all the attention. Monica, didn’t your family get recognized while they were on an African safari?

LEWINSKY It was actually one of my relatives who is an anthropologist, and he was out in the field in remote Africa studying a tribe that spoke an obscure language, I don’t even remember what it was called. They didn’t speak a word of English. But somehow they knew “Monica Lewinsky!” (Laughs.)

I remember you once telling me that when you lived at the Watergate, you spent eight months without ever leaving the house. Even the balconies were off-limits for you.

LEWINSKY My mom and I lived in the Watergate. The buildings face each other, plus the hotel. There were all these photographers and reporters camped outside the building for weeks. They did crazy things to get to my door. A lawyer warned us there might be people renting offices across the way with microwave mics or long-range cameras. So we closed the curtains and never left the house. At night, we’d crawl out on the balcony for a few minutes just to get fresh air. That was the extent of it for a long, long while. My mom would say, “You’ll see — you’ll be able to go outside without a hat; you’ll sit at a restaurant.” At the time it seemed so pollyannish. I hated it — and also drank it up. I needed the hope. Now she likes to say, “See? I was right!”

Amanda, did becoming a mother change the way you thought about your story?

KNOX As soon as I figured out that I was pregnant, I suddenly became really scared. I felt a deep, visceral dread that the dark cloud hanging over my life — unresolved — would pass to my daughter just by being next to me. I’d seen it with my husband — headlines, people photoshopping knives into his Facebook photos. After the news of my daughter came out, people messaged me wishing her to die, to be murdered so I would “understand.” I needed to figure out: Am I just a victim of this story, or do I have a say? If I do, what does that look like? I wanted to tell a story that wasn’t just the horrible thing that happened to me, but what I did about it — to define myself on my own terms.

You’re both understandably wary of media but now you also are the media. You host podcasts and write columns for magazines. You produce shows on TV. Is that complicated for you?

LEWINSKY It is complicated. The media can be awful. But you learn to adjust. Things slowly started to open up for me, and I had to leave that trepidation behind. One way was talking to journalists who hadn’t covered ’98. And I overprepare for everything, including this interview! It helps my PTSD.

KNOX Media isn’t bad by definition; it’s a tool that can be used for good or evil. Having been on the wrong side, you appreciate the power of sharing information — and the responsibility to make it more ethical, fair, compassionate, more uplifting of humans.

LEWINSKY One guiding principle Amanda brought was that everybody in the show should be dimensionalized. That became a principle for KJ and the writers, and for directors and costume people and set people. They worked hard

How did you two come together to make this show? 

LEWINSKY I read a fantastic New York Times interview where Amanda talked about wanting to take her memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, and do a film of it. I had a first-look at 20th Television. I quickly went to my executive — Taylor Morgan — and luckily she was savvy enough to get the yeses very quickly. I reached out to Amanda, brought everyone together for breakfast, and then as EPs we set out to meet showrunners.

You interviewed a whole bunch of showrunners before you landed on KJ Steinberg. What clicked with her? 

KNOX It was kismet! KJ really understood the intention behind the series from the beginning. She had spent weeks looking into the story. She also had this crazy story about being in a therapy session and using a photo of me in a collage she had made years ago — it was that picture of me behind the prison bars where I’m just staring out. She showed it to me when we met: “Is that you?” Yes. That’s me. A lot of things came together. But Monica and I knew she was the one.

What was the writing process like for the show? 

LEWINSKY It was researched and written over three years. Amanda was a main resource, but it was like a huge research project. KJ and the producers — Warren Littlefield and Lisa Harrison and Ann Johnson — just devoted their lives to this thing. It was this consuming passion for them. We spent three years poring through transcripts and newspaper accounts and legal documents, literally, tens of thousands of pages. It was vital to get all the facts right. KJ ran an incredible room; the writers brought their own experiences that resonated with Amanda’s story. We wanted to make something resonant and meaningful — not something easy and trite.

KNOX In the room, I talked through arcs. One thing I wanted to convey was the love-lost story between me and Raffaele — we’d met and were just eight days into young love before we were arrested. Then there’s survival and grief. We wanted to bring authentic knowledge to the table, then whittle and sculpt it into a show. I was interrogated for 53 hours over five days — we can’t show that — so how do you write a scene that conveys that emotional truth?

LEWINSKY This idea of emotional truth — I got such an incredible education from Ryan about that while making Impeachment. I would tell him things and he would always say, “I don’t so much need the details — it’s more helpful to know how it feels.” 

The show’s spine — as you’ve both said — is the “anatomy of bias.” What does that mean?

LEWINSKY It’s not a “Who did it?” It’s “How did this happen?” How did an innocent 20-year-old American kid in a foreign country, without any family around her or any language, end up wrongfully convicted and spending four years in prison? How did she become this dangerous seductress in the press? Many people don’t know the facts they think they know. That’s the sociology and psychology we wanted to unpack — hopefully in an entertaining way.

Casting Amanda is a big swing. Why Grace Van Patten?

KNOX I’d seen Tell Me Lies and knew she had the range to be 20-year-old me, go through the worst experiences of my life, and also portray 35-year-old me. It turned out that she had watched a documentary about me years before. She was kind of obsessed with this tory. Early on, she asked very precise, interesting character questions. And she hit the ground running. She even got my snort.

LEWINSKY The laugh. Yes, even the snort!

Knox Her attention to detail, her ability to turn it on and then turn it off, she just has this crazy, innate talent.

LEWINSKY The subject-actor relationship is special — these actors become a proxy for you. People think they know a story, until they watch a performance like Grace’s. It lets them step outside what they knew and see it with a new lens.

I’m assuming you’ve both had a flood of offers over the years from Hollywood.

KNOX Most aren’t offers; people just do what they’re going to do without your consent. But, yes, there are offers — and I turn plenty down.

LEWINSKY If I’d taken all the offers over the years, I’d be very wealthy. There were many groiss and horrific ones. But there’s a lot of integrity in the world, too. People in the Watergate who worked for very little turned down a lot of money [to spy on me]. There’s a lot of good — even with the darkness. 

Amanda, you host true-crime podcasts; Monica, you produced 15 Minutes of Shame. Why does true crime draw such a large female audience? 

KNOX At its best, true crime offers a human puzzle — a dilemma you want to solve. But this show will draw people who are into true crime as well as people who are averse to it. We push back against the unethical parts of it: scandalmongering, black-and-white narratives, turning people into caricatures for a moral argument. The best true crime is when people genuinely care about the worst experiences of other people’s lives and want to do right by them — to understand how human perfect storms happen, to untangle them, and to help.

LEWINSKY One thing that was important to everybody in this show is respecting and trying to honor Meredith’s memory in this. We tried to carry her memory with a lot of care.

That must have been complicated, given that her parents are not convinced of Amanda’s innocence.

KNOX Her parents are passed, but she has three siblings. What they’ve conveyed is a distancing from me, but that’s understandable, considering the myriad lies they were told about me. Honestly, it’s very common in wrongful conviction cases. But she was a young 21-year-old girl who went to Italy to have the best experience of her life. And she didn’t get to go home. We were both just young girls who were trying to live our best lives. So, we are trying to honor that.

Last question, for Amanda — when audiences finish the series, what do you hope lingers?

KNOX I think the ultimate message that our show conveys is that you can survive, and literally can become a person that is not limited by the box that society put you in. You can stand up on that box and tell your own story, be a bigger person than society wanted you to be.

This story appears in the Aug. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.