“Welcome to the most controversial show at the Edinburgh Fringe.” This is Amanda Knox performing her one-woman stand-up comedy show Cartwheel, inspired by the experience of being falsely accused and imprisoned for the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher while studying on her year abroad in Perugia, Italy.
The show is not, she has stressed, making jokes at the expense of the murder and rape of her roommate, even though 44,000 people have signed the Kercher family’s petition that she cancel the show. Instead, it’s meant to find the funny side in a messed-up world in which an innocent, naive 20-year-old girl can be found guilty of a crime she didn’t commit and be constructed into a she-devil by the global press – or Luciferina, as she was dubbed by the Italian tabloids.
Cartwheel is set in a cluttered kids’ playroom. “Looks like a crime scene in here,” Knox says, just about managing not to wink at the audience. She acts out normal parent stuff like tidying up and folding laundry very, very slowly. There’s lots that feels laboured about this performance; her Chandler Bing cadence, the pause before every punchline, her vibrato singing.
Knox gives you the impression that she only survived what she went through with a level of self-acceptance most Brits could only dream of. She notes her “adorable weirdness” and “award-winning quirks”. Sitting in Edinburgh’s Gilded Balloon venue, I wondered how many others in Scotland’s capital could straightfacedly utter her claim to being “profoundly loved by everyone who knew me”.
Self-acceptance is no crime. In some cultures, it’s actively encouraged. And it’s no crime to do the splits in a police waiting room. Or wear a graphic T-shirt bearing the words “ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE” to your trial for the rape and murder of your friend. Neither is having that crime and its aftermath spun out into a six-part franchise made up of two memoirs, two documentaries, a drama series and now a stand-up comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Isn’t that what we’re all told to do? Farm our stories, trauma and authentic selves for content to build brand empires.
At one point, Knox says, “The people who think I’m innocent think I didn’t do it, but I did make it weird.” She turns to the audience and says, “Did I?” The room is silent. She asks again, apparently really wanting an answer. One lone squall from the gallery, “Yes.”
Too rehearsed to be stand-up and too disjointed to be theatre, the show sits somewhere in the realm of female empowerment performance. On the occasions Kercher’s name is mentioned her voice breaks and she raises a hand to brush a tear from her face. But she’s not crying at all. This is rehearsed, play-crying. Then a split second later, she’s launched into another joke.
The premise of the show is that Knox is trying to find the words to explain to her daughter why Mommy’s in the papers and doesn’t want spaghetti for dinner. So she tells her through nursery rhyme, “When Mommy was young, Mommy went to Italy, and she made friends and she had fun, but then someone hurt her friend and the police put her in jail.”
At the time of Meredith Kercher’s death, Amanda Knox worked for the Congolese pub owner Patrick Lumumba at his bar, Le Chic. When Knox was being interrogated by police she was threatened with 30 years in jail. Under pressure, she said Lumumba did it. This led to Knox being imprisoned because her accusation implicated her at the scene of the crime. Lumumba was also arrested, and spent two weeks in jail until a customer provided an alibi for him and he was released. When Knox stood trial for Kercher’s murder, she also stood trial for calunnia – the Italian offence of making a false accusation.
Knox and her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted of Kercher’s murder in 2009 and acquitted on appeal in 2011. In 2013, the court of cassation overturned those acquittals and ordered a retrial; a Florence appeals court convicted them again in 2014. In 2015, the the court of cassation definitively acquitted them of murder. Knox’s conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba followed a separate route and was ultimately upheld again in January 2025. Knox maintains that the false accusation was produced under intense police pressure during an overnight interrogation in which she had neither a lawyer nor an adequate interpreter.
In the original 2009 trial, Knox was ordered to pay €40,000 in compensation to Lumumba, who lost his business after his release from jail and emigrated to Poland. This has still not been paid; Lumumba’s lawyer says his provisional compensation and accumulated legal costs mean this sum now totals €82,000. In his book published in December 2025, Lumumba wrote that Knox had never apologised to him.
That is not necessarily the final legal word. Knox has brought a second application before the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the Italian proceedings which reinstated the conviction in 2014 were unfair. (The first application was partially upheld: the ECHR acknowledged that Italy had failed to investigate Knox’s allegations of police mistreatment but found insufficient evidence that she had been subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment.) The court communicated the case to Italy in November 2025 and it remains pending.
Since she was released, Knox has rehabilitated her reputation by campaigning for the wrongfully convicted. She has said those who first welcomed her into the community of exonerees at the Innocence Network were mostly older black men. Yet Patrick Lumumba remains an awkward absence from her activism.
Since she was 20 years old, Amanda Knox has been confronted with the terrible power of storytelling. Her working life has been a public exercise in retelling hers. She still remains the face of this case while the man who actually murdered and raped Kercher, Rudy Guede, has slipped into obscurity. When he was released in 2020, the New York Post ran the headline, “Man who killed Amanda Knox’s roommate freed”. The dropping of both Kercher’s and Guede’s names from the headline suggests that neither the killer nor the victim are the reason we still remember this case. Because she was attractive (“foxy Knoxy”), hailed from relative American white privilege, and because she made it weird.
When Knox and Sollecito were acquitted in 2011, the judge’s statement read, “Our decision to find not guilty is the result of the truth created within the context of the trial, but the real truth may be different.” The judge left open, too, the possibility that Knox was present in her apartment during the murder. The ruling, in other words, asks us to believe that two truths can exist at the same time.
When I arrive to interview Knox, she sits with her PR manager on one side and her husband on the other. The latter, Christopher Robinson, wears his trademark borderline novelty glasses and sips an Aperol spritz through a straw. Knox is different to how she presents on stage, with little of her trademark kookiness. She seems like someone who works hard and has gritted her teeth through a lifetime of being forced to explain herself. On stage she wore neon-paint-splattered leggings and a unicorn T-shirt; now, she’s pared back in darker clothes.
Knox speaks eloquently and then at length and then repetitively about “processing”. She emphasises her maternal instinct to make her daughter aware of the evils of the world, while also protecting her from them. She repeats an idea she raised on stage. “I know that one day something bad is going to happen to my daughter.” I ask if maybe she’s too used to seeing the bad in the world, but Knox thinks her ordeal is universally relatable, reflecting the extreme experiences of grief, loss and trauma that we all go through.
Clearly, Knox loves her children fiercely and thinks deeply about her responsibilities to them. Perhaps that sincerity is also why the performance never feels quite as hard-hitting or illuminating as it promises to be. By repeatedly returning to motherhood, she raises the emotional stakes while remaining within a register that is personal, sympathetic and comparatively safe. Eventually, the language of “reclaiming the narrative” and “vulnerability” begins to feel less like an advance on the story than a way of skirting the harder questions of what she owes Kercher’s memory, and what is achieved by retelling it as stand-up comedy.
Knox has taken pains to stipulate that Cartwheel is not about Meredith’s murder, but her own story of vilification. “I don’t joke about Meredith’s death. I joke a lot about how I was vilified, but I don’t joke about her murder.” The trouble is, these stories will always be linked and when Knox casually jokes about her playroom looking like a “crime scene”, there’s only one crime scene that is brought gruesomely to mind: the shared flat in Perugia where Kercher was raped and murdered.
I’m not the only person who feels like this. Andrea Vogt is an American journalist who covered the case extensively from inside the courtroom for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a publication from Knox’s hometown. She tells me over Zoom: “I think there are fair questions to be asked about whether or not she has overstepped a limit of decency in the process of ‘reshaping’ her narrative. In my opinion, Cartwheel not only maligns the memory of Meredith Kercher by callously reducing the events surrounding her brutal murder to cheap laughs, but in the process also manages to turn the truth upside down.”
But Knox feels she has to tell her own story. “Storytelling is how you make meaning out of the insanity of life,” she says. “Life is things happening and if you want to get really Buddhist about it you can be like, ‘Well, there’s nothing good or bad that happens. Things just happen.’” It seems unlikely that Kercher’s family would agree.
Central to Knox’s recent retelling has been her remarkable rapprochement with the prosecutor who investigated her in 2007, Giuliano Mignini, from whom she has sought an acknowledgement that he got her wrong. Although he has apologised for his former judgement of her character, he has neither withdrawn his interpretation of the evidence nor conceded that she was absent from the crime scene. The documentary Mouth of the Wolf, produced by her husband Christopher Robinson and released earlier this year, follows Knox’s return to Italy to meet with Mignini. While Knox’s first encounter with him is not filmed, she later recounts what happened on camera. She says: “He basically said, ‘I know you didn’t do it.’”
But, contrary to the cinematic arc of mortal enemies becoming forgiven friends, Mignini disputed this account of their reconciliation. In a legal letter to Disney, he claimed their meetings were filmed without his knowledge and he has sought to prevent Knox and Robinson from using the footage, arguing that a release form he later signed was invalid. But they have since smoothed things over. When I ask Mignini over email to clarify what happened with the legal notice, he graciously writes: “There was a series of misunderstandings on this point, which we resolved through mutual common sense.”
In the years after her initial conviction, Knox and Mignini were reconciled through a long exchange of letters. A quirk of linguistic translation moved Mignini when Knox addressed the letter, “To my prosecutor”. In Italian, this “my” pronoun denotes more tender affection than it does in English, and this misunderstanding allowed them to access a deeper correspondence and develop a good relationship. When I exchange emails with Mignini he seems anxious to preserve this truce: when I ask him what he thought of the Hulu drama series about her trial, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which covered the trial, he is careful to say that the programme was well made and the actors were excellent. However, he couldn’t vouch for Knox’s storytelling. “From a legal standpoint, anything that called Knox’s account into question was overlooked,” he writes. Witness statements placed Knox and her boyfriend Sollecito at the house on the night of the murder, in the company of Rudy Guede. Mignini says this is crucial evidence that the drama series doesn’t cover in proper detail. He has not accepted Knox’s account of the case or changed his belief that she and, probably, Sollecito were present.
Mignini tells me they are on good terms personally, but that they still hold “two opposing views of the trial”. Knox, too, has made clear that their reconciliation does not extend to agreement about the case. I ask if he thinks the outcome of the trial had been fair. “Justice has not been done,” he says. “Not in the slightest.”
The world doesn’t see her as innocent. And clearly, with her successive retellings, she cares what the world thinks. It’s an interesting feature of legal trials that the prosecution and the defence are required to assemble the facts and turn them into a compelling narrative. If the 2011 acquittal judge’s statement inculcated the idea that two incompatible truths can be held at once, Knox’s work today is built around its own dualities. She has said she respects the Kerchers and wants a relationship with them, yet she turns the circumstances of their daughter’s death into comedy; she acknowledges accusing Patrick Lumumba but, according to his lawyer, has resisted paying his compensation, while presenting herself as an advocate for wrongly accused people of colour. Across memoirs, podcasts, documentaries, dramas and now a stand-up comedy show, ostensibly prompted by her daughter’s questions, each retelling gives Knox another opportunity to resolve these contradictions and clean up the narrative. Yet this process obscures its thornier details.
“I’ve been a symbol and a morality play my entire adult life,” Knox tells me. It makes sense that, having been portrayed as evil and printed on front pages all over the world as Luciferina, Knox is trying to control her own story. But she is not the only secondary victim of this story. It’s hard to sing a nursery rhyme about rape and murder. Cartwheel isn’t funny, but then again I can’t imagine who’d expect it to be.
[Further reading: Love on the front line]
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