The egregious missteps of Ryan Murphy’s new Menendez brothers drama

The Menendez brothers, Lyle, now 56, and Erik, now 53, probably never had an incestuous relationship. There has never been any evidence presented anywhere that they did, and in court, both have vehemently denied a sexual relationship.

None of this stops Monsters, the new Ryan Murphy-helmed Netflix drama about the brothers — who were convicted of murdering their powerful Hollywood parents, José and Kitty Menendez, in 1989 — from suggesting that they did. 

The show is a spin-off of Monster, Murphy’s wildly popular series about Jeffrey Dahmer, another notorious killer whose trial in the 1990s scandalized Americans. 

That series drew significant backlash from survivors for heavily fictionalizing the crimes committed by Dahmer. And any true crime fans who wanted Monsters to take steps forward from that controversy must be recoiling in disbelief at the direction Murphy has chosen to go instead — not only fictionalizing details, but almost certainly fabricating a relationship between the brothers.

This portrait rests atop a depiction of the pair as greedy, entitled fortune hunters who coveted the $14 million estate of their father, a producer at RCA Records. Along the way, the drama suggests not only that Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) was a sociopath who used his brother’s affection to manipulate him, but that Erik (Cooper Koch) was a confused, closeted gay man — though, again, there is no evidence anywhere to suggest this.

The show does gain some complexity as Murphy and his longtime collaborator Ian Brennan (who also co-wrote Monster) begin to peel back years of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse the brothers say they endured from their father and mother. The brothers have maintained for over three decades that abuse underpinned their crime. 

But Monsters, with its slick, oversaturated ’80s filter, seedy tone, and obsession with wealth, mostly undermines the nuances of the notorious case at nearly every turn. It ultimately suggests that the pair made the whole thing up for sympathy — despite recently uncovered compelling evidence that suggests they were telling the truth all along.

At the time of their convictions, the brothers and their defense were entirely culturally dismissed; it would have been hard to find anyone in the ’90s and early 2000s who didn’t believe the Menendez brothers were guilty.

Rather than turn those assumptions on their head, Murphy’s approach in Monsters is to give them a new platform. It’s a tremendous, infuriating shame, because this case, and the way Americans understand and treat abuse victims at trial, particularly male abuse victims, is undergoing a slow public reckoning. Numerous other documentaries and articles have offered a different, extremely belated, and revelatory take: What if they had been telling the truth?  

To understand how much Monsters overlooks, and how much it distorts, it’s helpful to examine the facts of the Menendez brothers’ story. 

The way the public saw the Menendez case in the ’90s was very different from how we see it now

Media outlets have called Monsters “irresponsible” and suggested that steamy scenes between the brothers “blurs the lines between what’s ‘hot’ and what is absolutely inappropriate.” It’s also drawn scathing criticism from both brothers, and provoked defenses from nearly every member of the main cast. In a statement shared on X by his wife, Erik Menendez called Monsters a “vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and me” — particularly of Lyle, who was the target of a “caricature” that was “rooted in blatant lies.” 

Murphy, for his part, rebutted this in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, arguing that Erik had “issued a statement without having seen the show,” and that “60 to 65 percent of our show in the scripts and in the film … center around the abuse and what they claim happened to them.” 

Many of the show’s depictions of the brothers are rooted in the actual coverage of the case from the 1990s. In a famous 1996 interview with both brothers, for example, Barbara Walters downplayed the pair’s allegations of abuse and instead grilled Erik about whether he was gay. Erik firmly denied it. 

“The prosecutor brought that up because I was sexually molested,” Erik replied, “and he felt in his own thinking that if I was sodomized by my father that I must have enjoyed it, and therefore I must be gay, and the people that are gay out there must be sexually molested or they wouldn’t be [gay].” 

It was a trenchant summing-up of the prevailing cultural assumptions of the broadly anti-LGBTQ decade. 

In fact, corroboration that there was abuse in the Menendez home has come from at least three family members, all of whom took the stand in the brothers’ first trials. One of them, a cousin, witnessed José repeatedly physically abuse the brothers, and claimed he saw José go to shower with the boys; two others claimed that Erik and Lyle separately told them about the abuse as a child. They each still stand by these claims and believe the brothers today. In 2023, lawyers for the brothers announced the recent discovery of a letter written by Erik Menendez eight months before the murders — a letter to a cousin in which he goes into harrowing detail about the ongoing abuse:

“I’ve been trying to avoid dad,” Erik writes in the letter. “It’s still happening Andy but it’s worse for me now. … Every night, I stay up thinking he might come in. … I’m afraid … He’s crazy. He’s warned me a hundred times about telling anyone, especially Lyle.”

In their interview in the mid-1990s, Walters, apparently barely holding back an eye roll, called the brothers out on the “abuse excuse,” a phrase coined by lawyer Alan Dershowitz in a 1994 book and applied to this case by the prosecution in the Menendez brothers’ second trial. When she challenged Erik on why he was comfortable confessing to the murders to his therapist but not to the alleged years of sexual abuse, Erik explained, “Unless you’ve been molested, you can’t realize how hard it is to tell.”

“Because of shame?” Walters asked skeptically. 

“Because of shame,” Erik confirmed.

What actually happened in the Menendez brothers’ trials

Arguably because of the compelling nature of the brothers’ abuse claims, their first trials — the two were initially tried separately — each ended in deadlocked juries. 

One of the main stumbling blocks in the first round of trials was whether or not to convict the pair of manslaughter or murder; in Lyle’s trial, the decision was split by gender, with female jurors voting for the lesser charge and male jurors voting for murder.

For the second trial, in which the brothers were tried together, however, a number of things changed. Judge Stanley Weisberg disallowed nearly all defense evidence related to the brothers’ abuse claims, including mental health experts and medical experts, as well as the “minutiae” of evidence testifying to the abuse the brothers suffered in their daily lives, which wiped out a vast majority of the testimony on José’s controlling, temperamental, and physically violent behavior. 

Both defense attorneys for the duo have since stated that given what we now know about the impact of long-term abuse on children, a manslaughter conviction, which would have carried a much lighter sentence, would have been more appropriate for both Lyle and Erik. 

Instead, the brothers were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

Now attorneys for the duo are hoping to use the new facts in the case to win their clients’ retrials.

Murphy’s depiction of the case undermines all abuse survivors

Monsters could well bring about another tidal shift against the brothers and their quest for a cultural reframing.

Murphy has returned the Menendez brothers’ narrative 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,” Erik Menendez wrote in the statement shared on X. “How demoralizing to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma.”

Erik Menendez is right. Ryan Murphy has compellingly depicted the trauma and repression of the queer closet in his musical film The Prom as well as in Dahmer and an American Crime Story installment, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which he executive produced. His ability to accurately depict the impact of lifelong abusive situations on the innocent, and even the guilty, isn’t in doubt.

Murphy has claimed that Monsters attempts a “Rashomon kind of approach,” referring to Akira Kurosawa’s famous film in which the story of a sexual assault is depicted from multiple conflicting points of view. He further argued that he had an obligation to the “storytellers” to include their perspectives. 

That’s an incredibly disingenuous framing of the show Murphy made. It chooses to further victimize the Menendez brothers with a shocking and unfounded accusation, building the sibling incest narrative over the course of its nine episodes despite compelling evidence of extreme abuse at the hands of a parent.

 It’s not just an extremely irresponsible take on an extremely complicated case — it’s the most backward, regressive, and confounding approach Murphy could possibly have taken.

“[V]iolence against a child creates a hundred horrendous and silent crime scenes darkly shadowed behind glitter and glamor,” Erik wrote. 

He could easily have been describing Monsters itself.