Amanda Knox and Monica Lewinsky just might be the team-up people didn’t know they needed

At a time when people are revisiting past treatment of women in pop culture, two outspoken personalities have joined forces for a new project. Amanda Knox and Monica Lewinsky are pictured in a split image. (Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

At a time when people are revisiting past treatment of women in pop culture, two outspoken personalities have joined forces for a new project.

Amanda Knox and Monica Lewinsky are both serving as executive producers on “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” an eight-part dramatic limited series debuted Wednesday with Grace Van Patten starring in the title role.

Lewinsky and Knox are bonded in having been publicly shamed, scorned and mocked for things that happened when they were young women.

Knox told The Hollywood Reporter in an article published this week that she and Lewinsky became friends in 2017 after they shared a stage in a lecture hall. She said Lewinsky invited her up to her hotel room afterwards for some tea and talk.

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

In 2007, Knox was a 20-year-old exchange student living in Italy when she and her then 23-year-old Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were accused of murdering her 21-year-old roommate Meredith Kercher in their shared apartment in Perugia.

Knox was dubbed “Foxy Knoxy” (her MySpace user name) and there was an early theory that Kercher’s death was part of an “erotic game” involving her, Knox and Sollecito.

Knox and Sollecito were convicted and spent nearly four years in prison before their convictions were overturned and they were vindicated – though there is still debate and curiosity about the crime.

There was a media frenzy surrounding the case, and if anyone knows what Knox has lived through, it would be Lewinsky.

Lewinsky was also in her early twenties in the 1990s when she engaged in a sexual relationship with then-U.S. president Bill Clinton while serving as his intern.

Since then she has become a writer, producer, podcaster and an activist. On Monday she talked to CNN’s Erin Burnett about what drew her and Knox together.

“I could see that there was a pain in her and it’s a very unique pain that I recognized,” Lewinsky said. “So I think there was an instant connection, an instant understanding of two young women who had become public people who hadn’t wanted to, and had lost a lot of their identity.”

Years after Knox was first launched into the public eye, Lewinsky read a New York Times interview in which Knox spoke of wanting to turn her memoir into a movie.

“I had a first look deal at the time, and I thought, you know, a story that we think we know that we don’t is kind of right up my alley,” Lewinsky recalled.

Hulu is marketing the limited series as telling the story of “the eponymous American college student, who arrives in Italy for her study abroad only to be wrongfully imprisoned for murder weeks later,” adding that it “traces Amanda’s relentless fight to prove her innocence and reclaim her freedom and examines why authorities and the world stood so firmly in judgment.”

Knox told THR, “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,” the now married mother of two young children said.

“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.”

By Lisa Respers France, CNN