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Nicholas Chavez, one of the stars of Ryan Murphy’s new true crime drama, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, has shared his sympathies with the series’ subjects.
The nine-part Netflix show centers on the gruesome 1989 murders of José and Kitty Menendez by their sons, Lyle and Erik, portrayed by Chavez and Cooper Koch, respectively.
Speaking to People at the New York premiere of Murphy’s other new series, Grotesquerie, Chavez said: “I really sympathize with the brothers, the fact that this was the most traumatic moment of their life, and then having that put on television for the world to see. I would imagine that would be incredibly heavy.”
Of the show’s varied reception, he added: “It’s sensitive subject matter and I imagine that everyone is forming their own interpretations of what happened as we imagined and intended that they would.”
Chavez’s remarks come shortly after the real-life Erik Menendez, who is currently serving a life sentence at the RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in California alongside Lyle, accused Murphy of releasing “disheartening slander.”
“I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show. I can only believe they were done so on purpose,” Erik, 53, said in a statement shared to X via his wife Tammi.
The series includes the harrowing sexual abuse that Lyle and Erik alleged to have been perpetrated by their father, José (Javier Bardem).
However, Erik has hit out at Netflix over its “dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crime.” He said the series has “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.”
“Those awful lies have been disputed and exposed by countless brave victims over the last two decades who have broken through their personal shame and bravely spoken out. So now Murphy shapes his horrible narrative through vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander,” he said.
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Murphy has since responded to Erik’s claims, telling Entertainment Tonight: “Listen, I think it’s really, really hard if it’s your life to see your life up on screen. I think it’s been 30 years since that case – that’s hard.”
He added that “if you watch the show, I would say 60 to 65 percent” of the scripted narrative centers “around the abuse and what they claim happened to them. And we do it very carefully and we give them their day in court and they talk openly about it.”
“We present the facts from their point of view,” Murphy said. “We spent three years researching it – all of that is true.”
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is out now on Netflix.
