Amanda Knox defended the comedy show she’s set to present at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in Scotland, maintaining that it honors her slain roommate, Meredith Kercher, amid allegations it trivializes violence against women.

Called “Cartwheel,” Knox said her production is “about motherhood, raising a daughter in a world that is unfair and dangerous for women, and what it costs to be the kind of mother who tells her the truth about that.” What’s more, the show’s title is a reference to claims she did cartwheels in the police station after Kercher’s death.

Since the show was announced, a petition aiming to have it axed from the festival has netted more than 33,000 signatures online. The petition alleges the performance “mocks the horrific events surrounding Meredith’s murder and aims to somehow turn this tragedy into entertainment.”

Kercher’s sister, Stephanie Kercher, echoed the sentiment in a recent interview with BBC, taking particular issue with the show being a comedy.

“It’s not about whether people think she’s guilty or innocent,” Kercher said of Knox. “If someone else was doing the show specifically against Meredith, I would still feel the same. It is obviously an added wound that it’s coming from her, at the same time. But I do feel very strongly that it should be something that’s not given a platform.”

In a recent social media post, Knox pushed back at the backlash, writing that “a petition to cancel a show no one has seen, on the grounds of false accusations intended to shame and vilify a wronged woman into silence, is not an argument against Cartwheel.”

Edinburgh Fringe “is the perfect place for a show like this,” she said, adding, “Cartwheel honors Meredith Kercher’s memory and calls out the violence that was done to her and to me.”

Knox, a Seattle native, was 20 and studying abroad in the Italian city of Perugia when she was accused of killing Kercher with Knox’s then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.

The case involved two convictions and two appeals before Knox was finally acquitted of murder in 2015. By then, she’d spent four years in an Italian prison.

The court at the time, however, did uphold Knox’s 2011 conviction for slandering Patrick Lumumba, and she was sentenced to three years already served for falsely implicating the Congolese bar owner in Kercher’s killing. Knox went on to appeal the decision, citing a 2019 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that concluded her rights to a lawyer and an interpreter were violated during her initial interrogations with Italian authorities. The Italian court opted to reconvict her of the charge last year, bringing a close to the dramatic legal saga, which spanned nearly two decades.

Another man, Rudy Hermann Guede, from Ivory Coast, was eventually convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was freed in 2021, after serving most of his 16-year sentence.

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