The mayor of Perugia, where the British student Meredith Kercher was murdered, has apologised for allowing a controversial TV series co-produced by Amanda Knox to be filmed in the Italian city.
Angry residents displayed banners reading “Rispetto per Meredith” (respect for Meredith) around the city as the crew arrived to film scenes of Blue Moon, an eight-part drama chronicling Knox’s battle to clear her name of the murder, that will be aired on the Disney-owned streaming service Hulu.
Kercher, 21, was murdered in the house she shared with Knox on 1 November 2007. Kercher’s body was found in her bedroom, partly undressed and with several stab wounds.
Knox, 37, and her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, were twice convicted of the murder before being definitively acquitted in 2015 in a court ruling that described “stunning flaws” in the investigation that led to their convictions.
Perugia, a medieval city appreciated for its cobbled alleyways, art and chocolate, has long struggled to shake off the image associated with it as a result of the notorious murder and the years of legal wrangling that followed.
“For too long, Perugia was sadly famous in the world as the city of Meredith Kercher’s murder,” Margherita Scoccia, a former councillor, said on Facebook. “Is it right that our community is associated with such a terrible crime again?”
Vittoria Ferdinandi, the mayor of Perugia, apologised in an open letter to residents, saying that when deciding to authorise filming, she had overlooked “the people and their sorrow, which is still alive in them”.
She explained that her administration could have refused permission, but that the scenes “would have been filmed in any other town in our region”. Ferdinandi said hosting the series allowed the authorities to have greater control over protecting the city’s image “because, as requested, we are able to view and authorise every scene”.
Hulu said Blue Moon was “based on the true story of how Knox was wrongfully convicted for the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, and her 16-year odyssey to set herself free”.
The Kercher family said last week that they found it “difficult to understand” how the series served any purpose.
Orvieto, another Umbrian town, has also featured in the series, which is being co-produced by Monica Lewinsky, who was at the centre of a 1990s media storm after an affair with the then US president, Bill Clinton.
Knox and Sollecito spent four years in prison before their release in 2011. Since then, Knox earned a reported £3.5m for her memoir, took part in a Netflix documentary about the case in 2016, and has been the subject of other books and films.
The filming of the drama comes a few months after a Florence court upheld a slander conviction against Knox for wrongly accusing Patrick Lumumba, who owned a bar in Perugia, of Kercher’s murder.
Carlo Pacelli, Lumumba’s lawyer, claimed last week that his client had still not received the compensation money that Knox was ordered to pay over the allegation.
Rudy Guede, who was the only person definitively convicted of the murder, was released from prison in November 2021 after completing 13 years of a 16-year-sentence.
