Amanda Knox slams Matt Damon’s comments comparing cancel culture to jail time

Amanda Knox has revived her feud with Matt Damon after the actor suggested that, for some people who’ve been canceled and ostracized from the public, jail time would have been preferable.

Damon, 58, made the remarks during a recent episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, seemingly implying that jail time is a finite punishment while cancel culture “will follow you to the grave.”

“I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever and then come out and say, ‘No, but I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Like, can we be done?’” the Good Will Hunting star said. “Like, the thing about getting kind of excoriated publicly like that, it just never ends.”

Resharing the actor’s divisive comments on X, Knox, who was jailed for nearly four years in an Italian prison after being wrongfully convicted for the 2007 murder of her British roommate, wrote: “Another thing Matt Damon could have run by me before putting out into the world.”

The Independent has contacted Damon’s representative for comment.

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In the comment section of her post, the author and activist responded to one critic, explaining: “You don’t get to go to prison in secret. It comes with its own stigma and lasting trauma. You don’t just get to’be done with it,’ personally or socially.”

Journalist Katherine Brodsky also replied in the comments, arguing: “Well, literally going to jail...not so good. But frankly, given that some of these ‘cancelled’ people have taken their own lives, yeah, maybe they would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months and be done with it — instead, there’s no end to it. No coming back. No being ‘square.’”

“People commit suicide in prison, too,” Knox said. “That’s true,” Brodsky added, “I just don’t think he meant it in such a literal way.”

Knox, 38, and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were wrongly convicted for the 2007 murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy. The two spent nearly four years in prison before they were later acquitted and released in 2011. Upon her release, Knox became an advocate for prison reform.

In 2021, Knox slammed Damon’s participation in Tom McCarthy’s crime thriller Stillwater, which the director confirmed was inspired by Knox’s high-profile case.

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The film followed Damon’s Bill, a father who travels to France to visit his estranged daughter in prison for a murder she insists she didn’t commit.

“I don’t think that the filmmakers can honestly say that they went far enough away from my case so that it wouldn’t be recognizably my case,” Knox told Variety at the time. “And I think that that’s clear in all of the coverage where everyone’s like, ‘Oh, this is recognizably the Amanda Knox case.’ And from that audiences can then draw conclusions about me, whether or not those conclusions are accurate or not.”

She largely took issue with how the movie’s character, based on her, was held somewhat responsible for the murder, which she felt drew unfair and false conclusions that she too had anything to do with Kercher’s death.

“There’s been this ongoing idea that, ‘Well, as long as we call it fiction, then no one would honestly apply the ideas or feelings or conclusions that I bring with my imagination to the story to the real person.’ And that’s simply not true,” Knox said.

“And then Matt Damon and the director can walk away with a great story in their pocket, but meanwhile, I’m still living with the consequences of people thinking that I am somehow involved in this crime that I am not involved in.”