UPDATE (Oct. 24, 2024, 5:30 p.m.): L.A. District Attorney George Gascón said in a press conference on Thursday that he will ask a court to resentence Erik and Lyle Menendez and make them eligible for parole “immediately.”
Since their initial trials in the 1989 shotgun murders of their parents, Lyle and Erik Menendez have consistently argued that their father, José Menendez, sexually abused them with the full knowledge of their mother, Kitty Menendez. Since their 1996 convictions of first-degree murder, there have been multiple made-for-TV movies, documentaries and “Law & Order” episodes about the brothers and their motivation. Now, 35 years after the fact, there’s a new irresponsible take from Ryan Murphy, who uses “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” to hint at an incestuous relationship between Lyle and Erik.
Now, 35 years after the fact, there’s a new irresponsible take from Ryan Murphy, who uses “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” to hint at an incestuous relationship between Lyle and Erik.
Though Lyle testified during his trial that he never had an intimate relationship with Erik, Murphy’s show depicts the brothers kissing and showering together, thereby intimating that their sibling relationship evolved into something romantic.
While Murphy’s show shot to the top of Netflix’s Top 10 list, it also sparked an immediate backlash. Among the critics is Erik Menendez who, like his brother, is serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. “It is sad for me to know that Netflix’s dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward — back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women,” he said in a statement posted on X by his wife, Tammi Menendez.
Murphy disagrees, telling “Entertainment Tonight” that his show aims to adequately capture multiple viewpoints, including the brothers’. “We had an obligation as storytellers to also try and put in their perspective based on our research, which we did,” he said. He justified including an incest storyline by telling E! News, “In every episode, you are given a new theory based on people who were either involved or covered the case.”
The incest storyline is based on a series of stories the late journalist Dominick Dunne reported for Vanity Fair in the ’90s. Murphy claims it was the show’s duty to offer that perspective. “We are presenting [Dunne’s] point of view, just as we present [the Menendez brothers’ therapist] Leslie Abramson’s point of view,” Murphy explained. “We had an obligation to show all of that, and we did.”
But Dunne’s theories are presented in the show as fact rather than possibilities, even though there is no actual evidence the brothers had an incestuous relationship. Instead, the episodes devoted to Lyle and Erik’s perspectives, specifically, also portray incest as if it unequivocally happened, without noting the very real possibility that it didn’t. Instead, the incest narrative is used to paint the brothers as deviants who, if they’re capable of hiding a relationship, are capable of premeditating their parents’ murders and then fictionalizing childhood abuse to justify their crime.
Erik's response to the Netflix's series.#NetflixMonsters #Netflix #RyanMurphy pic.twitter.com/Xz1waxA2u3
— Tammi Menendez (@TammiMenendez1) September 20, 2024
“I don’t believe that Erik and Lyle Menendez were ever lovers,” Menendez biographer Robert Rand, told The Hollywood Reporter, though he says Lyle testified that when he was 8, he took Erik into the woods and sexually played with him with a toothbrush, something he testified that José had done to him. “And so I certainly wouldn’t call that a sexual relationship of any sort,” Rand said. “It’s a response to trauma.”
To be clear, prosecutors said the brothers fictionalized their father’s abuse and their mother’s indifference, and the state was eventually able to convince a jury (and much of the American public) that Lyle and Erik murdered their parents to gain access to their large inheritance. During the trial, prosecutors presented evidence of the brothers’ embarking on an elaborate spending spree for six months before they were arrested. While the inheritance could have been a motive, there is more evidence that the brothers were sexually abused than there is evidence that they were, as Murphy’s show suggests, intimately involved with each other.
Their cousin Brian Andersen testified that José forced his sons to shower with him after every tennis practice. “As soon as José took either one of the boys into their room, the door was locked behind them, and Kitty made clear you did not go down the hallway,” Andersen testified. Another cousin, Andres Cano, testified that an 8-year-old Erik asked him whether it was normal for a father to give his son genital “massages” and said that “he wanted them to stop.”
In addition to building an incest plotline, the show sensationalizes the sexual abuse the Menendez brothers say occurred for our entertainment.
In addition to building an incest plotline on a flimsy foundation, the show sensationalizes the sexual abuse the Menendez brothers say occurred for our entertainment. It is a sin that plagues many true crime recreations. Rather than increasing understanding about the impact of sexual violence on children, especially male children, “Monsters” instead feeds into our cultural impulse to gawk at a horrific crime without interrogating what many signs point to is the actual root: childhood sexual assault.
Erik and Lyle Menendez aren’t the only ones who have accused José of sexual assault. In the 2023 Peacock docuseries “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed,” Roy Rosselló, a former member of the 1980s pop band Menudo, said José, an executive at RCA Records when he was killed, drugged and raped him. It’s upsetting that “Monster” sensationalizes the case of the Menendez brothers and brings it back into the spotlight without bringing awareness to the impacts of childhood sexual assault. If it is important to re-litigate the case against the Menendez brothers more than three decades later, as Murphy obviously thinks it is, then it should be done with the knowledge we now have about how sexual assault alters those who experience it. It doesn’t matter if “Monsters” is fictionalized; inserting incest into an already traumatic story is cruel and unnecessary. Rand, who believes José repeatedly assaulted his sons, said they should have been convicted of manslaughter, not murder, and sentenced to far less than life. I tend to agree. Our cultural understanding of sexual violence has evolved tremendously since the 1990s. We understand that sexual violence knows no gender, meaning boys and men are vulnerable to being assaulted just like any other person of any gender. We know sexual violence is about power, and when people are violated repeatedly by authority figures who are supposed to protect them, it often has lifelong traumatic effects. We know that the courts, far more often than they did in the ’90s, consider prolonged childhood trauma, including sexual assault, as a mitigating factor when sentencing people for violent crimes. If Murphy had fully considered these elements, he would have removed the incest storyline, especially given the likelihood that many viewers may be learning about the Menendez case for the first time through his show. But he seems to have yielded to the desire to entertain at the expense of those who’ve likely been victimized, an impulse that seemingly superseded the humanity needed to tell this story with the nuance it deserves. We understand that sexual violence knows no gender, meaning boys and men are vulnerable to being assaulted just like any other person of any gender. Murphy tells “Entertainment Tonight” that “60 to 65% of our show in the scripts and in the film form center around the abuse and what they claim happened to them.” While the show does attempt to carefully navigate the childhood sexual abuse the brothers say they experienced, if they were sexually abused, then their trauma is, again, being repackaged as entertainment. Where is the concern for the impact another show about their childhood trauma may have on them psychologically and emotionally? Apparently, that level of care and consideration has been sacrificed in the name of making television, a claim other survivors have made against Murphy for previous true crime shows he’s made. If that is what will continue to happen when we tell the story of the Menendez family, perhaps it is time to stop retreading the terrain and give Erik and Lyle something their stories of abuse suggest they may never have known: peace.
