Amanda Knox has pushed back against a growing campaign to shut down her comedy show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. A petition calling for the cancellation of “Cartwheel,” Knox’s first full hour of comedy, has surpassed 10,000 signatures.
The show, running August 7-17 at Gilded Balloon Teviot’s Wine Bar, marks Knox’s Fringe debut. The petition’s most prominent voice is Meredith Kercher’s sister, Stephanie, who argues the show turns her sister’s rape and murder into entertainment and has asked how audiences would feel if the victim were their own sibling.
Knox, who spent nearly four years in an Italian prison after being convicted and later acquitted of killing her British roommate in 2007, answered the petition directly on Instagram. She wrote that neither the petition’s author nor any signatory has seen the show, calling its claims false and a complete mischaracterization of the material. She said the production instead honors Kercher’s memory and confronts the violence done to both women.
Knox described “Cartwheel” as a meditation on motherhood, on raising a daughter in a world she calls unfair and dangerous for women, and on what it takes to be a parent willing to tell a child that hard truth. She framed the cancellation effort itself as proof of her point, arguing that a campaign built on shaming a wronged woman into silence functions as an unintentional illustration of exactly what her show examines. She added that Fringe has long served as a venue for comedians tackling grief, trauma, addiction and identity, using humor not to belittle those subjects but to give audiences room to sit with them.
Festival organizers have also weighed in, with a Fringe leader stating that a family’s pain cannot serve as the sole lens through which the festival evaluates its programming. He added that Fringe has never shied from controversy and that any decision on whether the show proceeds ultimately rests with Knox and the venue itself, not festival leadership. The show, titled after a widely circulated but disputed claim that Knox performed a cartwheel inside a police station following Kercher’s death, opened as scheduled.
