Summary
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox lends some focus to Giuliano in Episode 3, and the show remains an affecting recounting of a profound injustice.
Episode 3 of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox begins by doing something that neither of the first two did, which is to attempt to characterise Giuliano Mignini. In the premiere, he was an inscrutable figure, a lawman with a peculiar bias against Amanda, but the second episode, which ended with Amanda meeting him privately many years later, floated the possibility of their relationship evolving beyond the level of hunter and prey. The only way that’s going to work is if we understand Giuliano a bit more.
But what’s to understand? We briefly glimpse his past as a child growing up near a women’s prison, watching the unusually attractive inmates being shuttled onto a bus, and then see him become the man of the house after the sudden death of his father. We see his early days as a policeman, seemingly informed exclusively by TV detectives and a religious imperative to clean up Perugia of its bad actors, including a Son of Sam-style serial killer dubbed the Monster of Florence, shooting young couples in their cars, and, of course, the encroaching Mafia. This episode is titled “The Guardian of Perugia” since that’s clearly what Giuliano imagines himself to be.
None of this jives with his treatment of Amanda, though, who here finds herself in prison, still naively assuming the place is some kind of witness protection program, though the strip-searches and metal bars quickly put paid to that idea. Amanda is deliberately being isolated from the public and the media, held without legal representation or even a clear understanding of what she has apparently done or the kind of punishment she might be facing for it.
What Giuliano seems to be guarding more than anything is his own reputation. The case is huge, with international implications, and he’s personally responsible for securing a conviction, which is being made more difficult by the fact that his initial efforts to control the crime scene made forensic evidence significantly harder to attain. And, of course, the people he’s determined to prove committed the crime didn’t, so none of the evidence lines up anyway. Seeing Giuliano freestyle a motive and a chain of events comes across like the first draft of one of the TV shows he modelled his prosecutor persona on.
What Giuliano comes up with is that Amanda was some kind of sex-crazed maniac who was having orgies all across Italy, seemingly for no reason other than she’s a pretty American girl. How the police build the notorious “Foxy Knoxy” angle is the most fascinating aspect of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox Episode 3, and probably its most effective stretch, because it all makes interesting use of what is essentially the stunt casting of Grace Van Patten. Primarily known for playing a character in Tell Me Lies who is essentially the person the Italian police are trying to claim Amanda Knox is, Patten’s comeliness is effectively contorted into a weapon to be used against her, with leering policemen asking her what she likes and how she likes it to build into the narrative of a foreign interloper polluting Italian decency with her wicked ways.
This takes a particularly heinous turn when Knox is told she’s HIV positive, instructed to make a list of her recent sexual partners with a mind to informing them, and then casually told the result was a false positive — after the seven-strong list of her recent conquests has been leaked to the press. It’s a deplorable exploitation of her emotional state and violation of her private life, all to perpetuate a completely fabricated narrative that the forensic evidence doesn’t even support.
And that detail is where “The Guardian of Perugia” ends. It’s a nice cliffhanger because it’s a neat inversion of how crime thrillers usually work. A breakthrough in the case thanks to a key clue is typically cause for celebration, but here it’s a problem for Guiliano because it contradicts his narrative, and he has staked his career and reputation on that narrative. He also seems to believe quite earnestly that he has a sort of divine mandate to uncover the truth, even though he gets to define what the truth is; I can’t tell, yet, whether that’s genuine delusion or the tale he tells himself to justify his own self-serving behaviour. The jury’s still out.
Either way, it’s difficult to see a way out of this for Amanda, which is perhaps fitting since she didn’t find a way out for quite some time after this. It’s still indescribably frustrating — very much in a deliberate way — to see her being interrogated in Italian despite barely speaking the language, and that even extends to her mother, Edda, who has to jump through her own linguistic hoops in this episode just to be able to briefly see her daughter. The reason this story resonates so many years later is that it’s such an injustice on so many different levels, and that point is very capably reiterated here.
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