Crass, titillating and (at best) casual with the truth, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story takes an instance of real-life cruelty and violence and twists it into oversexed entertainment. It implies an incestuous connection between the two brothers whose story it dramatises under the prurient guise of righting past tabloid wrongs. It has been the most-streamed show on TV since its release in September. And as much as it traduces its subjects, it could also be the best thing to have happened to the Menendez brothers in decades.
The strange thing about Monsters’ exaggerations is that, even in its barest facts, the Menendez brothers’ case could hardly have been more operatic. In August 1989, Lyle (then aged 21) and Erik (18) executed their parents José and Kitty in their own living room in Beverly Hills, using shotguns at point-blank range. Everything about the murders — the glamorous location, the extreme wealth of the Menendez family, the initial suggestion that this was a mafia hit — made the boys’ story immediately irresistible.
Sensationally, the two brothers were arrested after Erik confessed to his therapist, who taped their sessions. The killing was assumed to be motivated by the brothers’ expectation of an inheritance, which they set about spending extravagantly and with little sense of a decent interval. Two spoiled little Patrick Batemans, on a bloodstained spree of hotel suites and Rolexes.
And then, even more sensationally: the brothers’ defence was that they themselves had been the victims of their parents. That the perfectionist José had tyrannised his sons, emotionally, physically and sexually; and that the downtrodden Kitty had silently conspired to protect her husband. Erik and Lyle had killed their parents, it was argued, because they believed their parents were planning to kill them in order to protect the family from shameful revelations.
One reason the case held such allure was that it landed on a faultline in public understanding of trauma, and was one of the first high-profile cases in which long-term abuse was advanced to claim the murder had been a form of self-defence. Dr Ann Burgess, a former FBI profiler who acted as an expert witness for the defence, testified that Erik’s brain had been “rewired” by the molestation he suffered; the prosecution accused her of emitting “psycho-babble”. Another reason is that reactions to the brothers split down gender lines, including in the jury room: Erik’s first trial ended in a hung jury, with female members opting for manslaughter while their male counterparts pushed for murder.
Dominick Dunne, who reported the case for Vanity Fair, claimed scathingly that the women on the jury “fell for [the brothers’] pretty faces, their crocodile tears, and their extravagant lies”. He did not believe the defence — although this wasn’t because he was in denial about the prevalence of child abuse, but rather because he knew brutality first-hand from his own father. “I have had welts on my legs and thighs. To this day I remain partially deaf from a blow to the ear when I was in the fifth grade. I was a sissy. I was not good at sports. I embarrassed my father,” wrote Dunne in one article. He might have recognised himself in the account of the family Burgess gave on the stand. He might not have enjoyed the parallel.
His question about the brothers was a bitter one: if he had been able to resist murder, shouldn’t they — if they were equally authentic victims — have been able to do the same? “Perpetrators need only to scream out ‘I was abused’ and there is an expectation of forgiveness,” he concluded, deeply unconvinced by their story. Dunne believed instead that the Menendez brothers had killed purely for their inheritance. He was similarly sceptical about Lorena Bobbit’s claim, made at her own trial around the same time, that she castrated her husband after being serially raped by him.
Dunne did not grow up to be a violent man himself (though he did, as his son Griffin has written in his own memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, grow up to be desperately secretive about his homosexuality, partly in consequence of his vicious upbringing). But his was a worldview in which extreme cruelty was a commonplace — something that must be punished, but something that victims are obliged to come to terms with. There is an implication in what he writes that the truly abused would choose, as he had, not to repeat what was inflicted on them. (Dunne is portrayed in Monsters, a rather shallow caricature played by Nathan Lane.)
A generation earlier, perhaps nobody would have questioned the financial motive in this crime, not even the defence. But in the Eighties, the Western workforce had undergone a drastic remaking, as women entered the professions. It is significant that Ann Burgess — not only female, but a mother — had been able to rise through the FBI. It is significant, too, that the Menendez brothers had a female attorney, and a very respected one, even if that respect was laced with contempt: Dunne called Leslie Abramson “tiny, mesmerizing, brilliant, overpowering” but also “mean, harsh, crude, and gutter-mouthed”.
Women like Burgess and Abramson were changing the public understanding of violence, from accepting it as an unpleasant inevitability to recognising it as a source of trauma that could echo down generations. Because they sat outside the perspective of masculinity, they were able to unpick some of its prevailing assumptions. Not completely successfully: at the second trial, the evidence about abuse was restricted and both brothers were convicted of double first-degree murder. They were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Dunne was right that women responded differently to the brothers, and wrong to attribute it to girlish susceptibility to a sob story. (It’s worth noting that the female jurors did not seem overburdened with empathy towards Kitty, who was a bad mother but never accused of acts as serious as those alleged against her husband.) Perhaps women were simply informed by a different understanding of what violence and terror can do to a person. The notion that Burgess was not peddling “psycho-babble” but rather offering a major insight into human psychology would begin to be accepted in courtrooms within a decade. It would even be used successfully to defend women who killed men.
In 1996, British woman Sara Thornton was retried for the 1989 killing of her husband. Originally, she had been found guilty of murder for financial motivations, even though her husband was a violent alcoholic. Women’s groups rallied around her case as an example of the unequal treatment of men and women under the law: a woman who killed her abuser would be treated more harshly in court than an abusive man who “snapped” and murdered his wife. At retrial, Thornton’s team successfully argued that she had stabbed him in self-defence, and she was convicted of manslaughter instead.
By 2024, few people seriously doubt that José Menendez abused his sons — and crucially, the surviving Menendez family are among those who believe Lyle and Erik, who are now 56 and 53. In a collective statement condemning Monsters, the family called the series “repulsive” and wrote: “We know these men… We also know what went on in their home and the unimaginably turbulent lives they have endured. Several of us were eyewitnesses to many atrocities one should never have to bear witness to.”
Ryan Murphy, the executive producer of Monsters, has defended the show on the grounds that “We show many, many, many perspectives.” On the incest issue (which, understandably, is especially painful to the brothers), Murphy said: “There are people who say that never happened. There were people who said it did happen.” In other words, his job is to teach the controversy. Which, conveniently, allows for almost anything that has ever been alleged about the case to be put on screen, with the alibi that the drama is simply moving between different viewpoints.
The title has an implicit question mark after Monsters. Are they or aren’t they? It’s the second part in an anthology show, the first of which was a series about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer: in that case, it was the victims’ families who were outraged about the way the story was told. “It’s retraumatizing over and over again, and for what? How many movies/shows/documentaries do we need?” asked one relative.
In Murphy’s favour, Monster season one also represented the salaciousness of the media; but this could equally be a sign of Murphy’s hypocrisy. “You don’t get credit for lamenting the existence of a circus when you happen to be the ringmaster,” wrote TV critic Jen Chaney. But whatever squeamishness viewers may feel, it doesn’t stop them from watching. Monster is Netflix’s third most viewed English-language show ever. Monsters is on its way to a similar level of success.
Murphy understands what people want to see, and the Monster franchise can be seen as the commercially brilliant coming together of two of his previous megahit properties. First, American Horror Story, which pushed the bounds of TV decency to thrill audiences with its grand guignol sensibility (many of its plots have ripped-the-headlines inspiration). Second, American Crime Story which turned real-life cases into compelling but considered drama: The Assasination of Gianni Versace, The People vs OJ Simpson.
Monster brings together the trash sensibility of Horror Story (watch these hot brothers kiss!) with the truth-telling pretensions of Crime Story (but we’re only showing you the incest to demonstrate what people were saying about the Menendez brothers!). It is, obviously, offensive. Yet the popular attention Murphy has brought to the case has also brought renewed legal attention: Kim Kardashian (in her guise as a justice campaigner) has written an essay in support of the brothers, and last week, the Los Angeles district attorney recommended they be resentenced and made eligible for parole. If this is accepted, Lyle and Erik could be released before the end of the year.
Should that happen, they’ll owe their freedom — at least in part — to their lascivious portrayal in Monsters. Liberty, but at the price of having been effectively fan-fictioned into an incestuous fantasy version of themselves. If you’re wondering who could possibly enjoy watching such a thing, the answer is women, who are the primary audience for both true crime and the kind of “shipping” (as in, invented relationships between characters) erotica of which Monsters is an example.
The appeal of shipping to women is fairly obvious: it allows for the appeal of the forbidden which is so crucial to arousal, within the safety of known characters or narratives. The lure of true crime — a genre that is, on the whole, fixated with terrible things done to women by men (even in Monsters, Kitty suffers a spectacularly gruesome end) — is more complicated. A sympathetic take says that women are fascinated by understanding, and so potentially controlling, the forces that might threaten them. A more cynical one says that it’s about identifying with the enacter of the violence, rather than passively waiting to become the victim. Monsters, in any case, offers both.
In the early Nineties, the arrival of high-powered women in the legal system helped formulate an understanding of violence and trauma that underpinned the brothers’ (unsuccessful, but ultimately widely accepted) defence. Today, the fact of women as primary consumers of media — not passively watching whatever their male partner puts on, but seeking out shows that serve their interests, their gaze — has given the brothers a platform from which to argue their case again. Two victims of sexual abuse, turned into sexualised entertainment: the last and strangest abuse in the guise of care to be heaped onto Lyle and Erik Menendez.
