The Menendez brothers case was a very controversial topic during the 1990s that is coming back now more than three decades later due to a new series about the case. The latest installment in Netflix’s true crime series, Monsters, follows the case of Lyle and Erik Menendez, brothers who were convicted for murdering their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez. The nine episodes aren’t a chronological telling of their story, but rather jump back and forth throughout time. On the evening of August 20, 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez entered their Beverly Hills mansion carrying Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns while their parents were watching television in the den. The brothers went into the den and fatally shot their parents a total of 14 times. The brothers insisted that they killed their parents out of fear and in self-defense after a lifetime of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Netflix’s dramatic series based on the brothers Erik and Lyle Menendez drew more than 50% more viewers in its second week. The series took criticism from one of the brothers aimed toward creator Ryan Murphy; On September 19, the day of the show’s premiere, Erick Menendez shared a statement to X through his wife Tammi’s account that accused Murphy of “bad intent,” which caused the show to take a step backwards. The show made Lyle, one of the Menendez brothers, look like an awful person because of some of the things that actor who played him did in the show, but, in reality, Lyle never did half of the things that were shown in the series. Murphy said he found Erick’s commentary “interesting” because he knows the brother didn’t watch the show, and he also stated that he stands by how he portrayed the story.
On Tuesday, October 1, 2024, The Hollywood Reporter published an article with interviews from the show’s main actors, including Cooper Koch, who played Erik, and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, who played Lyle, the latter of which expressed sympathy for the Menendez brothers but also agreed with Murphy that press from the show stands to benefit, more than harm, the family. In the second episode, the actors that played the brothers shared a kiss, and, in the sixth episode, their mother finds them showering together. Murphy did this to show that the brothers were “lovers” at one point, but that wasn’t the case. Hollywood report stated that “[h]e doesn’t think the pair were ever lovers” and said any inappropriate contact between the two would not have been a real relationship, but a “response to trauma.”
Since the series has received so much backlash, both good and bad, it made a lot of people interested in watching the series, which brought attention to the case again. Now that the show has so much attention, and since new evidence came out, the brothers are having a Netflix documentary come out on October 7, 2024, talking about how they feel about the series, and they also have 60 days to have a new trial and see if they can finally be free after spending 34 years in prison.
