‘Don’t use my name’: has Amanda Knox’s life been ‘exploited’ by Matt Damon’s film Stillwater?

On July 30, Amanda Knox published a Medium piece about Stillwater, the Matt Damon film released in cinemas this week. Stillwater is, according to its director Tom McCarthy, inspired by what happened to Knox when, in 2007, she was falsely accused of killing her roommate Meredith Kercher – a saga with so many bizarre twists and turns that it has captivated people for more than a decade and inspired a clutch of films and TV shows.

In the film itself, there is no reference to Knox. The woman in the comparable position is called Allison (Damon plays her father, Bill) and she is imprisoned in France, not Italy. McCarthy, who also co-wrote the script, was one of the many people fascinated by the case – but he claimed in a July 29 interview with Vanity Fair that it served only as a starting point for the screenplay. He wanted, he said, to “leave the Amanda Knox case behind… Let me take this piece of the story – an American woman studying abroad, involved in some kind of sensational crime, [who] ends up in jail – and fictionalise everything around it.”

In her Medium piece, Knox points out that she was not involved in any sensational crime – that is the point of the injustice that she suffered at the hands of the inept authorities. The man convicted of murdering Kercher is called Rudy Guede. “And if you’re going to “leave the Amanda Knox case behind”, she wrote, and “fictionalise everything around it, maybe don’t use my name to promote it.” She added: “You’re not leaving the Amanda Knox case behind very well if every single review mentions me.”

But audiences are hungry for films with a titillating real-life story attached. “In today’s market, there is a cachet in being based on a true story,” says an anonymous producer who once made “ripped-from-the-headlines” TV dramas for Fox. “That might be something that drove them to refer to this as being ‘loosely based’.” As Knox says, this impulse is understandable: “there is money to be made”, she acknowledges, and more of it will probably be made as a result of any mention of her name.

“This is not new,” says veteran entertainment attorney Mark Litwak. “Many movies are fictionalised. Even those that purport to be based on a true story often take a lot of liberties. And they don’t disclose to viewers what is fictionalised and what is true, so the audience has no way of knowing.”

One legal guide, for instance, from the LA-based agency The Sterling Firm, advises that filmmakers making a true-life story take various steps to avoid being sued by the subjects, creating “a paper trail” to protect the project. These steps include obtaining a release from the subject and annotating the script with evidence of sources for all controversial elements.

Alternatively, the guide says, you can simply change people’s names. But changing names, as Stillwater seemingly has, remains a double-edged sword. It means that the subjects are less likely to successfully sue, but it also means losing the publicity that was part of the point in the first place.

One comparison Litwak raises is the 1959 film Compulsion, based on a murder committed by Richard Loeb and Nathan F Leopold Jr. The film changed the names of its subjects, but used the event as a trigger for imagining their private lives. Leopold – who, unlike Knox, was convicted of murder – took the producers of the film to court, arguing that they should not have been able to use his name in the advertising campaign. He lost.

Litwak empathises with Knox. “She spent years in jail for a crime she did not commit, and now her name is being exploited to market a movie that really has nothing to do with her.” But he says that courts tend to rule against the plaintiff in these cases. Though the above guide points out that people have the right not to “have their name or image exploited for commercial profit without their consent”, Litwak says that this is not an absolute right. And in America, “when the rights of a person to protect their image come into conflict with another person’s right of free expression (e.g. a journalist), the First Amendment right is often considered the paramount right.”

Again and again this has proved to be the case. In 1999, Michael Costanza, Jerry Seinfeld’s friend from college, unsuccessfully tried to sue the creators of Seinfeld for $100 million because he believed the character of George Costanza violated his privacy. In 2011, a war veteran called Jeffrey Sarver filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit arguing that he was the character Jeremy Renner portrayed in The Hurt Locker, and that the film had exploited him. He was also unsuccessful.

Though the anonymous producer suspects that McCarthy may have put the production in trouble by mentioning Knox in connection with the film, legally this is unlikely to be the case. Litwak says that McCarthy might have ended up in legal hot water by claiming the movie was based on Knox’s book. But, as it is, “themes, topics, subject matter, facts, [and] historical incidents are not copyrightable”.

If anything, says Michael Colleary, who wrote 1997’s Face/Off and has decades of experience in the industry, “Ms Knox’s outrage will likely have the paradoxical effect of raising awareness of the movie, and maybe even driving a slight uptick in box office.”

A lot of the discussion in the Stillwater case is about words, as opposed to crimes. When anyone refers to Meredith Kercher’s murder investigation as “the Amanda Knox saga”, it continues to tie an innocent woman to a murder of which she was innocent. This shorthand helps to sell products such as Stillwater, but it has a tangible impact on Knox’s life. Colleary thinks this is why Damon may extend an olive branch to Knox. “Based on his public persona, it’s hard to imagine he would feel good about Ms Knox’s raw and pointed criticisms of seeing her sad life once again strip-mined for mass-market entertainment.”

McCarthy may come to regret the heartache he has caused Knox, which was entirely avoidable. “This film would be fine if they’d never mentioned Amanda,” says the anonymous producer. But the awkward question is: would anyone have watched if they hadn’t?

Stillwater is in cinemas from Friday