Monica Lewinsky, Amanda Knox dish on how to survive scandal

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When it comes to offering advice on how to survive a scandal, few people are as well-equipped as Monica Lewinsky and Amanda Knox.

Anyone not living under a rock will recall Lewinsky making international headlines in the 1990s when she admitted to having an affair with U.S. president Bill Clinton while serving as an intern at the White House.

The affair led to Clinton’s impeachment and forever cemented the name Lewinsky in the minds of the public across North America and beyond.

Knox is likewise a household name. As an American exchange student in Italy, she was thrust into the investigation of the 2007 murder of fellow exchange student Meredith Kercher, with whom she had shared an apartment.

Knox was twice convicted and twice acquitted of the murder, which gained international interest.

Today, Lewinsky and Knox are friends, and they’ve teamed up to co-produce The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a new eight-part Hulu limited series out this week.

The duo recently sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss a range of topics including how to survive a scandal and rewrite their own stories.

“I’ve spent years feeling like I was silenced,” Knox said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s Maer Roshan. “It’s a relief to finally be heard.”

For Knox’s part, getting to know Lewinsky, who dealt with similar public backlash, has been a blessing.

“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,” Knox, 38, 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.”

Lewinsky acknowledged that their situations were different yet similar.

“When we met, I saw in her the pain that I saw in myself. She was desperate to get out of this box she had been put in,” Lewinsky, 52, said. “But you don’t often see people reclaiming a narrative in public. There wasn’t a road map for us. Our situations were different, but with all the betrayal I experienced, I’ve felt lucky that I still trust people; I’m still optimistic about the world and people — maybe that’s naive of me, but it helps me to keep going.”

Lewinsky said she hopes the Hulu series can help anyone else who might be challenged by public scrutiny.

“Everyone else moves on but then you have to spend years trying to re-orient yourself and make sense of your life. I hope that what people take away from this is seeing what happens to people when the headlines quiet down, when you’re with your family trying to find a way forward, figuring out who you are now,” she said. “It’s not just a true-crime show or a courtroom drama. It’s a look at the media and the rush to judgment you often see in cases like this. People forget there are actual human beings behind all these headlines. With some of that understanding, maybe it won’t happen — or happen as badly — to the next person.”

Knox, who married in 2020 and has two children, said the process to reclaim her life is a slow and steady one.

“Once you are free, you think you’ll get your life back, but you don’t. You have to slowly rediscover who you are — it takes a lot of trial and error — hoping people will embrace you, because we’re not islands,” she said. “And for a long time, things were thrown back in my face, the fact that I was alive and free was somehow offensive to some people. I wasn’t allowed to exist outside the box the world put me in.”

What do they hope viewers of the Hulo series might come away with?

“I think the ultimate message that our show conveys is that you can survive, and become a person that is not limited by the box that society put you in,” Knox said. “You can stand up on that box and tell your own story, be a bigger person than society wanted you to be. You can withstand awful things. Don’t let anyone define you but you.”

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