The mayor of Perugia, the place the British pupil Meredith Kercher was murdered, has apologised for permitting a controversial TV sequence co-produced by Amanda Knox to be filmed within the Italian metropolis.
Indignant residents displayed banners studying “Rispetto per Meredith” (respect for Meredith) across the metropolis because the crew arrived to movie scenes of Blue Moon, an eight-part drama chronicling Knox’s battle to clear her identify of the homicide, that will likely be aired on the Disney-owned streaming service Hulu.
Kercher, 21, was murdered in the home she shared with Knox on 1 November 2007. Kercher’s physique was present in her bed room, partly undressed and with a number of stab wounds.
Knox, 37, and her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, have been twice convicted of the homicide earlier than being definitively acquitted in 2015 in a court docket ruling that described “gorgeous flaws” within the investigation that led to their convictions.
Perugia, a medieval metropolis appreciated for its cobbled alleyways, artwork and chocolate, has lengthy struggled to shake off the picture related to it on account of the infamous homicide and the years of authorized wrangling that adopted.
“For too lengthy, Perugia was sadly well-known on the planet as the town of Meredith Kercher’s homicide,” Margherita Scoccia, a former councillor, mentioned on Fb. “Is it proper that our neighborhood is related to such a horrible crime once more?”
Vittoria Ferdinandi, the mayor of Perugia, apologised in an open letter to residents, saying that when deciding to authorise filming, she had ignored “the individuals and their sorrow, which continues to be alive in them”.
She defined that her administration might have refused permission, however that the scenes “would have been filmed in some other city in our area”. Ferdinandi mentioned internet hosting the sequence allowed the authorities to have better management over defending the town’s picture “as a result of, as requested, we’re capable of view and authorise each scene”.
Hulu mentioned Blue Moon was “primarily based on the true story of how Knox was wrongfully convicted for the homicide of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, and her 16-year odyssey to set herself free”.
The Kercher household mentioned final week that they discovered it “obscure” how the sequence served any objective.
Orvieto, one other Umbrian city, has additionally featured within the sequence, which is being co-produced by Monica Lewinsky, who was on the centre of a Nineteen Nineties media storm after an affair with the then US president, Invoice Clinton.
Knox and Sollecito spent 4 years in jail earlier than their launch in 2011. Since then, Knox earned a reported £3.5m for her memoir, took half in a Netflix documentary in regards to the case in 2016, and has been the topic of different books and movies.
The filming of the drama comes just a few months after a Florence court docket upheld a slander conviction towards Knox for wrongly accusing Patrick Lumumba, who owned a bar in Perugia, of Kercher’s homicide.
Carlo Pacelli, Lumumba’s lawyer, claimed final week that his shopper had nonetheless not acquired the compensation cash that Knox was ordered to pay over the allegation.
Rudy Guede, who was the one individual definitively convicted of the homicide, was launched from jail in November 2021 after finishing 13 years of a 16-year-sentence.
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