The new Hulu series on The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox positions itself as an exposé of Italy’s broken justice system, but in doing so, it slips into a kind of national self-deception. The filmmakers spare no detail in condemning the investigative blunders in Perugia: contaminated evidence, overzealous prosecutors, a press corps hungry for scandal. Yet the story is framed as though such injustice is uniquely Italian, a foreign pathology. This selective outrage is its greatest weakness.
Because if we glance homeward, the picture is far uglier. The United States currently cages innocent immigrants in what detainees themselves call “Alligator Alcatraz,” facilities where urine floods cell floors and violence by ICE officers is a daily reality. These are not mistakes of procedure, not overreactions to tabloid headlines, but deliberate policies. While the Knox series urges sympathy for one American wrongly accused abroad, it stays silent on thousands of non-Americans brutalized within U.S. borders.
The contradiction is glaring. We are asked to see Italy’s courts as backward, while America’s mass incarceration system, its racialized sentencing, its death penalty errors, and its immigration gulags go unmentioned. Knox’s ordeal was real, but the way it is told here transforms her into a parable of American innocence victimized by the barbarism of others. That narrative is not only misleading, it is dishonest.
What could have been an opportunity to connect one woman’s trial to the global machinery of injustice becomes, instead, a pageant of selective memory. The series wants us to recoil at foreign incompetence, but it refuses to acknowledge homegrown cruelty. A more courageous documentary would have dared to show the parallel: Amanda Knox lost years to a flawed court abroad, while in America countless others—poor, Black, brown, immigrant—lose lifetimes, often in conditions far more degrading.
By ignoring that reality, Hulu has not made a series about justice. It has made a series about denial.
