Amanda Knox's Fringe comedy 'Cartwheel' sells out as Kercher family demands cancellation

Show premiere

Amanda Knox performed her first stand-up comedy show, "Cartwheel," at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe on Friday night, 7 August 2026, at Gilded Balloon's Teviot venue. The show is sold out for its entire run of 11 nights through 17 August. Dressed in patterned leggings and a turquoise and pink striped t-shirt, Knox performed in a set designed to look like a messy family living room, folding children's clothes and making jokes referencing her incarceration in an Italian prison. She performed a cartwheel across the stage, attracting applause, before correcting the record: "It wasn't a cartwheel, it was the splits." She explained she had been doing yoga stretches while held at a police station and an officer asked her to demonstrate her flexibility. More than half the audience gave her a standing ovation.

Kercher family response

Meredith Kercher's sister, Stephanie Kercher, condemned the show in interviews with the BBC and La Repubblica, calling it "shocking" and accusing Knox of profiting from her sister's name. She told the BBC the show turned the rape and murder of her sister into "entertainment" and asked how people would feel if it were their sister. She said the show left a "massive void" in the family's lives.

Amanda is naturally free to continue her life as she wishes, but the problem with this particular project is that it's a comedy, and while I appreciate that comedy pushes boundaries, it normalises and trivialises violence against women.

To La Repubblica, Stephanie said it bothered her that Knox constantly mentions her sister's name and that limits should be set on its use. She also rejected Knox's claim that Meredith would have enjoyed the show, saying her sister "would never laugh about such a comedy show." The Kercher family, whose parents died in 2020, has called for the show to be cancelled and asked for intervention from Labour politician Andy Burnham to prevent a precedent for shows that normalise violence against women. A Change.org petition demanding cancellation gathered between 8,000 and 10,000 signatures by Friday evening, depending on the source.

Knox's defence

Knox, 39, who lives in Seattle with husband Christopher Robinson and their two children, defended the show in an Instagram statement. She said the petition contained "many false assumptions" and that neither its author nor any signatory had seen "Cartwheel." She described the show as being about motherhood and raising a daughter in a world that is unfair and dangerous for women. During the performance, Knox spoke to the recorded voice of a child, ostensibly her daughter Eureka, and read from a book entitled "Fox and his Socks," a reference to her media nickname "Foxy Knoxy." She lamented that she "never really had an opportunity to mourn my friend," describing Kercher as "a 21 year old girl who did everything right."

The man who raped and murdered my friend, the men who threw me in prison, everyone who slut shames and vilifies me in the media and tries to silence me to this day. They are not a threat to my children. But the world that enables them, that doesn't hold them accountable - is.

Festival's position

Fringe Society director Tony Lankester told BBC Radio Scotland the festival was "not afraid of controversy" and that the decision to proceed lay with Knox and the venue. He said that while he could relate to the family's pain as a parent, "that can't be a criteria, it can't be one of the lenses that we look through." The Gilded Balloon Teviot venue said the Fringe was an open-access festival committed to freedom of expression within the law.

Background

Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted in 2009 for the murder and sexual assault of Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old British student found dead in Perugia in November 2007. Knox served four years in prison before both were definitively acquitted by Italy's highest court in 2015. Rudy Guede, convicted separately, was sentenced to 30 years, later reduced to 16 years, and has been free since the end of 2021.