Why Did Amanda Knox Return to Italy? Her Hulu Series Unlocks the Truth Behind Her 2022 Trip
Amanda Knox’s return to Italy in 2022 is one of the lesser known parts of her tumultuous story but it’s taking center stage in Hulu’s The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.
The series, which premiered its first two episodes on August 20, covers 15 years of Knox’s life between the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Italy to her 2022 return to the European country.
Knox was 20 years old and studying in Perugia, Italy when she and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were arrested and imprisoned for the murder Kercher. Both were found guilty in 2009 and were acquitted two years later after an appeal. They spent four years in prison between their 2007 arrests and their 2011 release.
The saga continued in 2013 when the Italian Supreme Court overturned their acquittal and sought a retrial. Fearing arrest, Knox remained in the US until the court eventually overturned their convictions. It was determined that Rudy Guede, a local man who admitted to killing Kercher in 2008, had acted alone.
In 2022, Knox returned to Italy, though not for the first time, and that trip is central in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a drama series that Knox executive produced alongside Monica Lewinsky.
Why Did Amanda Knox Return To Italy in 2022?
In 2022, Knox returned to Italy to meet with Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor who put her in prison for Kercher’s murder. Knox said the meeting was an attempt to understand Mignini.
“I think that’s an important point to make as I’m not a person whose faith, for example, compels them to forgive,” she told People in March 2025. “That was not my goal. My goal was to understand him… there was this deep curiosity in me to try to understand this person who decided that I was a dangerous person, who deserved to spend the most years of my life in prison.”
Per The Guardian, Knox also hinted that she wanted Mignini to admit her was wrong. “I was haunted by this ‘Why?’ question,” she said in a March 2025. “Why did this happen to me? If they had done their job correctly, I would be a footnote in Meredith’s story.”
The June 2022 meeting was facilitated by a Catholic priest, Don Saulo Scarabattoli, who coincidentally served both as Mignini’s priest in his youth and as the prison chaplain at Capanne women’s penitentiary, where Knox was imprisoned.
Four months after the meeting, around the 15th anniversary of Kercher’s death, Mignini spoke about Knox to The Telegraph, saying, “Amanda has changed a lot and I think I can say that I know her.”
“She was defamed by the British tabloids and presented like a Circe but really she is a normal girl from the West,” he added. He said that while he still believes Knox was at the crime scene, he formed a friendship with her and they exchange greeting cards and personal updates from time to time.
“We have different ideas about the trial that involved us, but now I have a good opinion of her,” he said.
While there in 2022, Knox also reunited with Sollecito for the first time since he visited her in the US in 2012. In Italy, they met in Gubbio, 35 miles from the house Knox lived in with Kercher, a town they were planning to visit before that fateful day when Knox found Kercher’s body.
“It was bitter-sweet to go back as we were supposed to go there in such different circumstances, but it was just nice for us to be able to talk about something that wasn’t the case,” Sollecito told The Mirror.
Knox Has Visited Italy on Several Occasions Since Her Release
Before her 2022 visit, Knox made her first return to Italy in 2019 to serve as a keynote speaker at the Criminal Justice Festival in Modena. By this time, Knox had begun her advocacy for the wrongfully accused working with nonprofits like the Innocence Project.
Knox also went to Italy in 2024 for an appeal hearing for her slander conviction. Knox was convicted of slander in her initial murder trial after she accused an innocent man who owned a local night club of killing Kercher while being interrogated by police. That charge was maintained when her other conviction was overturned.
The court upheld this conviction in early 2025, ruling that Knox already served her sentence for the conviction.
In March, Knox told NPR’s Fresh Air that she regularly returns to Italy. “In a big way, I grew up in Italy. Italy is a part of me,” she said. I am an Italian American, in many ways.”
“Even when I revisited my house in Perugia, where this whole crime happened, I had this shocking realization that it was just a place. Like there was somebody else living in it as if nothing bad had ever happened,” she said. “And every place is the place of someone’s worst tragedy and someone’s best moments.”