Amanda Knox hit back at Matt Damon (via The New York Post) over The Rip star’s controversial cancel culture remarks, which he made last week in a joint interview with Ben Affleck on The Joe Rogan Experience. Knox previously slammed Damon for starring in the 2021 film Stillwater, which was loosely based on Knox’s criminal trial.
Damon’s ‘Cancel Culture vs. Jail’ Remarks Drew Ire
“I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever and then come out and say, ‘No, but I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Like, can we be done?’” Damon said of cancel culture. “Like, the thing about getting kind of excoriated publicly like that, it just never ends. And it’s the first thing that…you know, it just will follow you to the grave.”
Knox Condemned the Actor’s Statement
“Another thing Matt Damon could have run by me before putting out into the world,” 38-year-old Knox wrote on X after the podcast dropped on Jan. 16. Knox was incarcerated for four years in prison after she and her ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were twice convicted of the 2007 murder of Knox’s roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy. Both Knox and Sollecito were later acquitted of the charges, and they were released from prison in October 2011. Rudy Guede was convicted of Kercher’s murder in a separate 2008 trial.
Several commenters on the post challenged Knox’s opinion, but she accused them of “missing the point” of her statement. “You don’t get to go to prison in secret,” she said. “It comes with its own stigma and lasting trauma. You don’t just get to ‘be done with it,’ personally or socially.” Since her release, Knox has become an advocate for justice reform, focusing on the wrongfully convicted and media ethics in such cases.
Knox Previously Took Damon to Task Over Stillwater
Knox previously took Damon and Oscar-winning Stillwater director Tom McCarthy to task when that film was released in June 2021. Stillwater follows an Oklahoma father (Damon) who travels to France after his daughter (Abigail Breslin) is accused of killing her girlfriend. With the help of a local woman (Camille Cottin), he sets out to prove her innocence. Knox objected to the film’s central twist in which it’s revealed that Breslin’s character paid a local man to evict her unfaithful lover from their shared apartment; but the situation escalated and she was murdered, though that was not the intent.
“Wrongful convictions don’t just happen to the individual. They happen to a whole network of human beings who love this person and know that they’re innocent and fight for their innocence,” Knox told Variety in August 2021.
“I don’t think that the filmmakers can honestly say that they went far enough away from my case so that it wouldn’t be recognizably my case,” Knox continued. “And I think that that’s clear in all of the coverage where everyone’s like, ‘Oh, this is recognizably the Amanda Knox case.’ And from that audiences can then draw conclusions about me, whether or not those conclusions are accurate or not. The question that Tom McCarthy really has to ask himself is, is it responsible to keep recycling that same story when we know what the consequences of that can be?” Though Stillwater was not advertised as being based or inspired by a true story, it was widely recognized in critics’ reviews and publicity materials that the plot bore a resemblance to Knox’s life.
“There’s been this ongoing idea that, ‘Well, as long as we call it fiction, then no one would honestly apply the ideas or feelings or conclusions that I bring with my imagination to the story to the real person,’” Knox told Variety. “And that’s simply not true. Especially when you’re looking at people like myself who continue to be brought up with a question mark, you deciding to tell that story in your own way is going to be adding to the ledger of how people understand and define me as a human being,” she continued. “And then Matt Damon and the director can walk away with a great story in their pocket, but meanwhile, I’m still living with the consequences of people thinking that I am somehow involved in this crime that I am not involved in.”
