Academy Award winner Matt Damon’s latest film Stillwater is under heavy scrutiny after being accused of stealing Amanda Knox’s story for the film. Knox is an activist, journalist and she wrote a book called “Waiting to Be Heard”, which details the events of her charge of murder that resulted in her spending four years in an Italian prison following her conviction of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher. The book also details her 2015 acquittal and the fallout after her release.
In Stillwater, Matt Damon plays an unemployed oil rig worker from Oklahoma who sets out alongside a French woman to prove his convicted daughter’s innocence. Knox posted a series of tweets that call out Matt Damon and director Tom McCarthy for stealing her story without her consent. You can check out some of the tweets below and can read them all in full by visiting Amanda Knox’s Twitter page.
Does my name belong to me? My face? What about my life? My story? Why does my name refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions because others continue to profit off my name, face, & story without my consent. Most recently, the film #STILLWATER.
/ a thread
— Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) July 29, 2021
While her tweets are a long thread, Some of her comments includes her stating,
“rip off my story without my consent at the expense of my reputation.”
“by fictionalizing away my innocence, my total lack of involvement, by erasing the role of the authorities in my wrongful conviction, McCarthy reinforces an image of me as a guilty and untrustworthy person.”
McCarthy has commented on the Knox connection to the film before by saying ”
There were so many characters around the case that I really followed pretty closely. But really the first thing that I took away from it was, what would that be like as an American student to go over (to Europe) for what should be one of the most exciting moments in a young adult life and to find yourself in that tragedy? There were so many layers to that story that kept anyone who was following pretty riveted…Who are the people that visiting (her), and what are those relationships? Like, what’s the story around the story? We decided, ‘Hey, let’s leave that Amanda Knox case behind but let me take this piece of the story, an American woman studying abroad involved in some kind of sensational crime and she ends up in jail, and fictionalize everything around.”
