Amanda Knox Says She Dated a Domestic Abuser Who Was 'Very Much Like the Man Who Murdered My Roommate' By Rachel McRady

Amanda Knox’s troubles didn’t end once she left Italy. 

The 38-year-old, who was wrongfully convicted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher, has been sharing her truth for years. Now after the first two episodes of her Hulu series, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, have been released, she’s opening up even more about the circumstances that led to her wrongful conviction and the aftermath of that decision. 

The series, starring Grace Van Patten as Knox, follows Knox discovering that her roommate was murdered in the home where she was studying abroad in Italy. It cuts back and forth in time to show Knox returning to Italy in 2022 to confront her prosecutor and get answers. 

But because of the focus on Knox’s redemption, there were pivotal parts of her life that she didn’t get to show in the series. One major instance involved her dating life after returning home from Italy.

“So dating is kinda hard when you’re, you know, a sex monster in the eyes of the world,” Knox explained on the Monday, Aug. 25, episode of the Armchair Expert podcast.

“So then I stumble upon a very handsome, nice person who tells me that he just got out of jail for a crime he didn’t commit. And I’m immediately predisposed to believe him and to sympathize with him.” she continued. “And because I have spent years now trying to navigate a world that doesn’t seem to feel like there’s a place for me, that just wants me to disappear and wouldn’t be surprised or upset if I just offed myself, here’s somebody who could understand me.”

Knox said she was “all in” on the unnamed person before she realized “ that he was not, in fact, innocent of domestic violence and breaking and entering.” 

She chillingly added, “In fact, this person who now is in my home is very, very much like the man who murdered my roommate.”

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Things got even trickier when she tried to end her relationship with the man. 

“When I tell him to leave, he doesn’t leave,” she explained. “I think I’m rid of him, and then I come home and he’s broken into my house. And the last time I called the police for someone breaking into my house, I was the one who got sent to prison. What do I do? I’m still on trial. And if word got out that I was shacking up with a criminal. It would be over.”

Eventually, Knox shared that her stepdad stepped in to “save” her again, without detailing what that entailed. 

Thankfully, Knox was able to move past this disturbing dating phase of her life and fall in love with her now-husband, Christopher Robinson. 

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“He was not a true crime person,” she said of Robinson. “He got two master’s degrees in poetry and was totally oblivious. And then went out of his way to not Google me when he became my friend and only started sort of grappling with the entire ordeal when we started dating nine months later, and he started having people Photoshop knives into pictures of him on Facebook. And he was like, ‘Oh.’ He knew there was a thing in his approach to meeting me and falling in love with me. That wasn’t the thing that mediated our human to human interaction.” 

Knox recently spoke with PEOPLE at the premiere of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox and opened up about how seeing Van Patten, 28, portray her helped heal a part of what she’d lost. 

“I felt like I could finally grieve the young person that I was,” Knox, who served as an executive producer alongside Monica Lewinsky, told PEOPLE. “Someone recently said that what happened is someone stole my sparkle. They didn’t just steal my freedom, they stole my sparkle. And seeing her bring it back again — I’m just so grateful to her, that she’s honored that for me.”

“My main goal was to make her feel seen, and the fact that she did, that is all I care about,” Van Patten told PEOPLE. 

Knox served four years in prison of her 26-year sentence. After an acquittal and second conviction, in 2015 the Italian Supreme Court fully exonerated Knox by overturning the case. (Rudy Guede’s 2008 conviction was upheld.)

The first two episodes of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox are currently streaming on Hulu. New episodes will follow weekly.

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.