Most viewers of the new trailer for Ryan Murphy's upcoming limited series, Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez, will find the TV spot jarring. Not because of its concept, where smiles fall from the Menendez family's faces after they pose for a portrait while the mother and father's voices are heard in a voiceover and the two sons, now shirtless, embrace as a gunshot rings out, spraying blood into the face of one of the young men.
Certainly, the cracks that appear in the portrait of a “perfect” family set a dark tone. But it’s the narration of Chloe Sevigny and Javier Bardem, who play Menendez’s murdered parents, that might cause some whiplash. “I need to know what’s happening to you and the kids,” is whispered, followed by “I won’t tell anyone” and “I’ll fix this family,” suggesting what no one in the mid-’90s could believe: that RCA president Jose Menendez was molesting his children while his wife helped cover it up, is, in fact, true.
That was the defense presented by the legal teams of Lyle and Erik Menendez in court after the brothers shot their parents, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menéndez, in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion on August 20, 1989. The idea that it was a self-defense killing by two children fearing for their lives was rejected by half of the two deadlocked juries in separate trials and then barred from mention in a second joint retrial in which they were found guilty. But their story of self-defense after years of horrific abuse was rejected not only by the men and women who made up the juries in their trials, but also by the Americans who watched the entire case unfold on the new cable sensation, Court TV. After their convictions for premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit murder, both boys were sentenced to consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Thirty-five years after the murders, Murphy's new Netflix series taps into a new trend of reexamining the sensationalized, smeared news stories of the 1990s, and with this release, the star producer turns on its head the entire theory behind the Menendez murders that remains entrenched in American perception of the case. Looking at the brothers through a new lens captures the zeitgeist after more than a decade of appeals were rejected by California courts and they decided to spend their entire adult lives in prison. This comes after what they have always insisted was a childhood marked by unspeakable abuse from their father, abuse that was, they have said and may now believe, both physical and emotional, hidden from view and covered up under the guise of wealth, with Jose Menendez's high-flying job as an RCA Records executive, and perfection, as encapsulated by the family, whose patriarch is a first-generation immigrant with the perfect Beverly Hills home. But before Murphy's show and before the Menendez brothers' firing turned into a SNL final punchline for a TikTok cause and now, for a real possibility of a new habeas corpus petition, journalist and writer Robert Rand took care of it from the second day.
Now, Rand’s dedication to the Menendez brothers’ story could lead to their convictions being overturned and their release from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, where they have been held in separate cells since 2018; the author has visited the brothers there several times, meeting with Lyle most recently this month. In addition to covering the Menendez brothers’ story for the past 35 years for various publications and media outlets, her investigation has uncovered a compelling piece of evidence that could lead to their freedom. By pursuing multiple leads in the case and speaking to nearly every family member, attorney, and law enforcement official surrounding the case, her book, The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the murders that shocked the nationwas first published in 2018. The definitive text on what many are starting to believe is the truth about the family whose tragedies gripped the nation has now been updated with a crucial new chapter and epilogue. It is scheduled for re-release next month, around the same time that Murphy’s series will likely occupy a permanent spot in the top 10 most-watched Netflix TV menus nationwide.
“I had a deadline, I was about to finish my original book, and she let me go to her house and look at a file cabinet full of Andy's papers,” Rand said. The Hollywood Reporter of his trip to the former home of Menendez’s late cousin in 2018. “And within 15 minutes, I found this letter, and I looked at it and I said, ‘Oh, my God, this could be really important to the case.’”
In 2003, the brothers' cousin, Andy Cano, who had testified at their trials that he had been told about Jose Menendez's abuse of the boys at a young age, died from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. Having been the most dedicated reporter on the case, Rand was invited to go through his belongings by Andy's surviving mother at their home in West Palm Beach. The letter, from Erik Menendez to Andy, details and complains to his cousin about his father's ongoing abuse, which he had previously disclosed.
This letter was written when Erik was 17, a year before the murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez. Never brought into any of the three trials in the mid-1990s, it is physical evidence that supports the story of their upbringing that the brothers brought to trial, a story that was derided by many in the Los Angeles courtrooms and by those who reported it and watched the trial unfold on TV across the nation. At the time, Lyle and Erik were seen as opportunists whose lavish spending while their parents’ killings were being investigated made them more notorious than likable.
Now, the letter is the only hard, physical evidence that their story of unspeakable abuse is more likely true than the fiction of two young murderers, and it rests in the hands of appellate attorney Cliff Gardner, who is representing both brothers after they filed papers in 2023 seeking a new indictment. habeas corpus petitions.
The other key piece of evidence, which has rekindled hopes that the brothers were not lying about the abuse they suffered in the family, was established in a docuseries produced by Rand for Peacock, entitled Menendez + Menudo: Betrayed Boys. In the early 1980s, Roy Rosselló was a member of the Latin boy band Menudo from 1983 to 1986, when the group was signing a multimillion-dollar deal with Jose Menendez, then president of RCA Records. In the docuseries, as well as in a Today segment of the show promoting it, Rosselló revealed how at age 14 he was drugged and raped by Menendez when he was visiting the family's home in New Jersey. The docuseries suggests, by implication, that Menudo's manager, Edgardo Díaz, had offered Rosselló to Jose Menendez to seal the group's RCA deal.
The connection to the abuse allegations that have dogged Diaz for years, as well as establishing through another victim that their father had indeed abused boys, now lends credence to the argument the brothers have been making all along. When the two Menendez boys became men, and following a series of conversations and revelations in the family home in the weeks before the murders, they threatened to expose their father as the abuser. The two brothers, who had suffered years of physical and emotional abuse from their parents, elites in public but monsters at home, killed their parents in self-defense, rather than allow their abusive father to kill them to save his reputation and the family’s way of life.
“Defense therapy experts who examined Erik and Lyle determined that their emotional ages were between eight and 10, even though their chronological ages were 18 and 21, respectively,” Rand explained. DAY. “The outside therapy experts we had on the documentary also told me that Erik and Lyle were living in a tunnel. And to you and me, that makes no sense. Why didn't they just walk out the front door? But if you're an abuse victim and you're living in this tunnel, you can't imagine life without your parents.”
Jose and Kitty Menendez’s physical and emotional abuse was no secret to those around the family. The couple made the siblings very dependent on them, even completing their schoolwork, Rand said. Teachers noticed that while the work they brought home was impeccable, the siblings were failing quizzes and tests in class. While the abuse their father claimed was clear, it was Kitty Menendez who allowed it to happen for years, she said, explaining how she knew what was happening and did nothing to stop it. In confrontations the siblings had with their parents in the days leading up to the murders, Kitty Menendez told the siblings, “I always knew what was going on. What do you think I am stupid?”
AS Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez debuts Sept. 19, Lyle and Erik Menendez continue to prepare for their final attempt at freedom and to make the world understand why, as they say, they did what they did. Rand says they have both become model citizens in their prison communities, teaching classes, working on a massive mural on the inside wall of their prison yard, and even counseling inmates who were abused as children. Rand recalls visiting Lyle in August and sharing what he had to say with DAY as he reflects on freedom and a reversal of the worldview of what he and his brother believe they were pushed to do at a young age.
Rand says: “I went to see him and Lyle said to us, 'Look, we have great hopes that there will be a favorable outcome of the Habeas corpus plea. But you know, if he's not there, Erik and I are resigned to living our lives, our entire lives, in prison.'”