It was a crime that shocked and captivated a nation.
On the night of 20 August 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez, then 21 and 18, stormed into their Beverly Hills mansion, shot their father, Jose, five times at point-blank range in the back of his head, and their mother, Kitty, nine times, including in the face as she tried to crawl away. In a frantic 911 emergency call, they then claimed that somebody had killed their parents.
The brothers eventually confessed, but always maintained that they acted in self-defence. During two harrowing trials, they claimed they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent the disclosure of their father’s long-term sexual abuse of them. Ultimately, the prosecution’s argument, that they killed in order to inherit a multimillion-dollar estate, won, and today they continue to serve life sentences without parole.
But over the past week, the story of the Menendez killings, and of what took place in the months and years leading up to the attack, has been thrust back into the spotlight.
More than three decades after the family became a tabloid sensation, the Netflix series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story has reignited the debate over the brothers’ culpability. The series jumped to the top of the Netflix charts, generating a growing body of Menendez defenders, many of whom were not born when the crimes were committed.
The nine-part series by the true crime impresario Ryan Murphy is a follow-up to his first Monsters series, about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and has ignited a public spat between the brothers and the show’s creator.
The biggest points of contention are attempts to tell the Menendez story using different perspectives, including the parents’, and the creative liberties taken in the script, like an implied incestuous relationship between Lyle and Erik.
One post on X, liked more than 180,000 times, said: “Taking a story about two brothers who suffered from sexual abuse from their dad and turning it into an incestuous fantasy is horrid.”
The show, starring Javier Bardem, Chloë Sevigny, Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, was viewed 12.3m times last week and ranks among Netflix’s top 10-watched TV shows in 89 countries.
Google searches for “Lyle and Erik Menendez” jumped by 2,000% in a week, and there were more than 2 million searches each for Erik and Lyle Menendez in the past month.
On TikTok, thousands of posts have defended the brothers, 80% of which have come from people aged 18 to 24. Clips from the trial are receiving up to 15m plays, and many have condemned the justice system’s “gender bias”. More than 300,000 people have signed a petition to free the brothers.
In a statement shared by Erik Menendez’s wife, Tammi, on X, Erik criticised the show, calling it a dishonest and inaccurate depiction of events and condemning the “ruinous” caricature of his brother.
Erik Menendez also accused Murphy of “bad intent”. “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.
Murphy quickly hit back, saying: “It’s interesting that he’s issued a statement without having seen the show.” The director acknowledged that it was “really hard” to see your life up on screen but said it was his obligation to portray both sides of the story.
Murphy said: “I would say 60%-65% of our show centres around the abuse, and what they claim happened to them. In this age where people can talk about sexual abuse, talking and writing about all points of view can be controversial. There were four people involved. Two people are dead; what about the parents?”
But it didn’t end there. On Thursday, Tammi posted another statement from the extended Menendez family saying they had been victimised by Murphy’s “grotesque shockadrama”. They criticised the “phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episodic nightmare” that “ignores the most recent exculpatory revelations”.
Those include claims from a member of the boyband Menudo that Jose raped him when he was a teenager, and a letter Erik wrote months before the murders about abuse and fear of his father. Lawyers are now using the new evidence to challenge the brothers’ detention.
Murphy said his show had “opened up the possibility” that this evidence could offer “a way forward for the brothers” and was “the best thing that has happened to them in 30 years” because it gave them “another trial in the court of public opinion”.
Even the celebrity Kim Kardashian, a champion of criminal justice reform, has visited the brothers in jail with Cooper Koch, who plays Erik. Afterwards, Koch said he “stands with” and “supports” the brothers in their call for a new trial.
Robert Rand, an investigative journalist and the author of The Menendez Murders, told the Sun: “I personally feel, based on the evidence I saw in court … that Erik and Lyle Menendez were in fear for their lives on the night they killed their parents.”
There’s little sign that the Menendez conversation will be over soon. Netflix has announced a documentary that promises to tell the brothers’ story “in their own words”.
In the trailer, Erik says: “Everyone asks why we killed our parents. Maybe now people can understand the truth.”
