Cooper Koch as Erik Menendez, Nicholas Chavez as Lyle Menendez (left to right) in episode 8 of Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menendez Story.
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Erik Menendez spoke out against the new Netflix series, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, which revisits the trials that convicted him and his brother, Lyle, of murdering their parents.
In a statement shared by his wife, Tammi Menendez, on X, Erik criticized the show, saying it misleadingly portrayed him and his brother and there are “blatant lies rampant in the show.” He accused co-creator Ryan Murphy of intentionally distorting the facts surrounding their crime.
“Murphy shapes his horrible narrative through vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander,” he said in the post shared on Thursday.
Erik added, “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.”
Ryan Murphy Productions and Netflix did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In 1989, José and Kitty Menendez were shot and killed in their Beverly Hills mansion. At the time, Lyle and Erik were 21 and 18. Police initially believed that members of a mafia went after their parents. But the brothers later said that they killed their parents as a result of years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
In 1993, their trial was aired on national television, becoming a media sensation that sharply divided public opinion on the brothers’ motives — whether they acted in response to abuse or for greed for the parents’ fortune.
A cousin backed the defense’s claims of molestation, saying Erik had previously talked about it. But prosecutors argued that the abuse claims were fabricated and the brothers were instead motivated by greed, specifically to inherit millions of dollars.
Their first trial led to deadlocked juries. But after a retrial, where the judge did not allow the defense to fully present the brothers’ sexual abuse claims, Erik and Lyle were found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 1996. Both are serving time in Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Southern California.
Nearly 30 years since their convictions, Netflix is revisiting the brothers’ crime and court proceedings in a 9-episode drama starring Nicholas Alexander Chavez as Lyle and Cooper Koch as Erik. In a press release, Netflix described the series as exploring the question “Who are the real monsters?”
It is the second season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s true-crime anthology series. The first season looked at the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.