Two of the most scrutinised women of the 21st century have formed an unlikely bond based on their shared experiences of public humiliation, tabloid headlines, and personal trauma.

Amanda Knox, now 38, made international headlines in 2007 when she was just 20 years old.

She was an American exchange student in Perugia, Italy, when her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, was found murdered in their shared apartment.

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Knox spent years in prison, having been convicted and reconvicted of the crime, before Italy’s highest court fully exonerated her in 2015.

Throughout her ordeal, sections of the media sensationalised her case, branding her “Foxy Knoxy”.

Monica Lewinsky, now 52, was in her early 20s when her private relationship with then-US president Bill Clinton exploded into public view in the 1990s, turning her name into a global symbol of scandal.

Knox said the two women met when she gave her first public talk in 2017, after years of feeling silenced and misrepresented.

“I was terrified of saying the wrong thing,” she told US network NPR.

“Or even if I said the right thing, everyone would find the wrong way of taking it, or that no one would listen to me or that I would be booed offstage.”

She sought guidance from someone who had been there before: fellow speaker Monica Lewinsky.

“I saw the same pain in her that I knew in myself,” Lewinsky later told The Hollywood Reporter.

The two connected after the event, when Knox reached out to Lewinsky.

They met for tea in Lewinsky’s hotel room, an encounter Knox describes as a turning point.

“She showed me how to reclaim my voice,” Knox said.

Despite their vastly different circumstances, the two women have a lot in common.

Knox endured 53 hours of questioning by Italian police, while Lewinsky faced 11 hours of interrogation by FBI agents and prosecutors.

Knox said Lewinsky was “vilified and sexualised and made to feel like she was worthless and her only choice was to disappear”.

“All of those things are also what I went through,” she said.

“I was hounded by paparazzi, my story and trauma was (and is) endlessly recycled for entertainment and, in the process, I’ve been accused of shifting attention away from the memory of Meredith Kercher, of being a media whore,” Knox wrote on her X account.

Lewinsky is now an anti-bullying advocate with a master’s degree in social psychology and has long campaigned to expose the toll of public shaming.

“Women, especially young women, are collateral damage when internalised misogyny is spewed out in the media,” she said.

Their friendship evolved into a professional partnership, and the two women co-produced The Twisted Tale Of Amanda Knox, an eight-part series on Disney+ revisiting the murder case and the subsequent media frenzy.

Knox’s legal ordeal spanned nearly a decade after Kercher was found dead in 2007. Knox was convicted in 2009, acquitted in 2011, re-convicted in 2014 and finally exonerated in 2015.

However, for many, her innocence was never enough to erase the judgement of public opinion.

“The story doesn’t end with acquittal,” Lewinsky said.

“That’s when the real fight begins.”

Now a mother and activist living in Seattle, Knox said the series and her collaboration with Lewinsky represent something bigger.

“You can survive,” she said.

Knox believes people are more than just the picture that others paint of them.

“Be defined only by yourself,” she said.

Lewinksy added: “We are living proof that you can survive and be more than the image others create of you.“