Lyle and Erik Menendez are once again objects of enormous public interest. Photo / Getty Images
Lyle and Erik Menendez are once again objects of enormous public interest. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION
The fantasy driving the glut of true crime reappraisals is that we’re different now. We’re not.
Thirty-five years after they killed their parents in their Beverly Hills home, Lyle and Erik Menendez are once again objects of enormous public interest. So are details of their first, highly publicised trial, which set the stage for the O.J. Simpson case and put Court TV - a fledgling operation at the time - on the map.
There’s a perfectly respectable reason for that: The brothers, who are serving consecutive life sentences after they were convicted in 1996 for the first-degree murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez, might go free.
Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced this week his office was reviewing two new pieces of evidence that could provide sufficient basis for a resentencing, or even a new trial. Both appear to corroborate the brothers’ claim - which many found implausible back then - that their father, a brutally demanding steward of their tennis careers, was also sexually abusive. A hearing scheduled for November 26 could conceivably overturn the controversial verdict.
The brothers’ supporters are understandably ecstatic about this legal development. If it secures the pair’s freedom, it would correct an outcome they see as an egregious miscarriage of justice borne of a historical moment (the ‘90s) when the public knew less about sexual abuse and tended to revictimise rather than support survivors.
Their release would also reframe the exploitative rubbernecking in which we engage while consuming (and producing) true crime as something a little more grand; something closer to moral action. You aren’t gawking at dead bodies or relishing the lurid details of someone’s life-breaking trauma, you’re participating in a crusade.
The sleazier (but related) reason that the brothers’ case is back in the news is that Ryan Murphy, true crime TV’s most lurid and prolific bard, made a show about it.
His latest Netflix series, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, premiered September 19. The semi- fictionalised, campily irresponsible, sometimes moving production has generated fresh outrage over and interest in the case.
Erik Menendez issued a statement condemning the crime drama, but the show’s mounting popularity despite or because of all the controversy it has generated suggests our contemporary relationship to true crime TV isn’t quite as sophisticated, or as distinct from those long-ago days when people gawped at Simpson’s white Bronco, as we’d like to think.
The series reintroduces audiences to the gory crime scene, the brothers’ shopping spree after their parents’ deaths and their extremely distressing testimony about how their father, a powerful media executive, sexually victimised them.
A believer in “teaching the controversy”, Murphy portrays how sceptically that testimony was received while, at various points, replicating that scepticism.
The series comprises several conflicting perspectives, including those of Kitty and Jose (Chloë Sevigny and Javier Bardem), defence counsel Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor) and Dominick Dunne (Nathan Lane), the gossipy Vanity Fair journalist who was later accused of paying a source to lie that she had overheard Lyle Menendez say: “We’ve snowed half the country. Now we have to snow the other half.” (That allegedly fabricated quote made it into Dunne’s story not once but twice. The episode does not, however, make it into the show.)
The series is not a mash note to the brothers. It notably omits the new evidence that might set them free. The first is a letter from Erik to his cousin, dated eight months before the murder, in which he alludes to his father’s ongoing abuse. The second is former Menudo band member Roy Rosselló's claim that Jose Menendez - who signed Menudo to RCA Records - raped him when he was 13. (Rosselló and Erik Menendez are the same age.)
Monsters reintroduces audiences to the gory crime scene and the brothers' testimony about how their father sexually victimised them. Photo / Netflix
Murphy takes a Solomonic approach to the question of what really happened, largely endorsing Erik’s (Cooper Koch) account of his abuse while casting doubt on Lyle’s. The latter (played by Nicholas Alexander Chavez) is portrayed as an arrogant, drug-addled hothead. Manipulative and injudicious, TV Lyle’s struggle to get more dimes with which to call people from prison - to urge them to lie for him - is played for laughs. So are medical records concerning a throat injury common in sexual assault victims, which Erik (in reality) sustained when he was 7. The bruising is alluded to and dismissed via a slapstick scene in which the adult Erik slips while eating a Popsicle.
But Murphy’s most controversial contribution to the Menendez discourse is probably a scene in which Dunne, the journalist, speculates that the true motive for the murder was an incestuous relationship between the brothers (as he speaks, the series shows Kitty finding Lyle and Erik in flagrante in the shower). The show bolsters that baseless and unsavoury rumour by showing the brothers kissing in a scene that (unlike the one in the shower) doesn’t seem to be channelling Dunne’s point of view.
These are slimy interventions. They do not improve our understanding of the case. They do, however, attract eyeballs.
Monsters was the most-watched streaming series in its first week with 2.7 billion minutes. That’s without counting the other true crime show Murphy had launched two days earlier: FX’s American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez.
Created by Stuart Zicherman and based on Gladiator, a podcast by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team, Hernandez tracks the rise and fall of Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez (played by Josh Rivera), a football wunderkind who committed suicide after being convicted of murder.
That there’s enough demand for true crime to support not one but two Murphy productions about athletes who became killers debuting the same week - neither of which Murphy even bothered to slot into his well-regarded American Crime Story anthology series - suggests that a reappraisal of some sort is in order. Not of the crimes themselves, but of how we, the supposedly enlightened reappraisers, are still fooling ourselves about why we watch.
Morality has always been the ostensible reason people flock to true crime: to bear witness to the horrors of which humans are capable and participate in the ongoing, culture-wide discussion of what justice means. That the genre is also not so secretly a guilty pleasure is pretty well-documented. So is the much-cited fact that women consume crime stories in greater numbers, perhaps to educate themselves in an effort to avoid becoming victims.
A true crime show explores the perpetrator’s experience, the larger social context, and how the justice system responded to extralegal pressures. Photo / Netflix
Over the past decade and a half, however, the ideological thrust of true crime stories has shifted.
Historically, the format focused on the gory details of a murder and the clues by which the murderer was caught. These days, creators favour a more anthropological approach.
A true crime show explores the perpetrator’s experience, digs into the larger social context, and records the way the justice system responded to extralegal pressures. These repackagings usually retain most of the scandalous detail available in the original tabloid takes (you want viewers, after all). But the tone, despite these indulgences, is corrective; rather than celebrate the murderer’s conviction, the viewer tends to emerge swathed in reasonable doubt.
That’s a fairly extreme transformation. The true crime shows of yore were, like their fictional counterparts, straightforward and reassuringly unambiguous stories about catching and jailing bad guys.
The true crime glut that began with Serial and exploded with The Jinx and Making a Murderer satisfies different urges. These shows aim to generate righteous uncertainty, often casting the perpetrator’s sentence - or the process that put him behind bars - into question. Viewers are treated as co-investigators rather than passive consumers of closed cases. They might learn a little history as they watch. They’ll almost definitely sneer at the ways society “back then” got everything wrong.
That last bit - that buried fantasy about our present-day moral superiority - is one of the chief pleasures viewers seem to take from the flood of projects rehashing sensational events from the ‘90s (besides the Simpson case, recent projects have revisited the murder of Gianni Versace, Lorena Bobbitt’s trial for maiming her husband, and Michael Jackson’s alleged victims, to name just a few).
It feels dangerously delusional to presume we’re in any position to judge, especially considering we’re living through a moment when a former president - who was convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud and found liable for sexual abuse after his attempt to overturn an American election - is nevertheless neck-and-neck with his opponent. Hindsight isn’t actually 20/20, but the truism exists for a reason. It’s awfully nice to pretend that we’re above the story, rather than in it.
A popular theory of the Menendez case is that the brothers were sacrificed to the public’s needs. Photo / Getty Images
Take the DA’s announcement about the Menendez brothers. Seen one way, it’s a welcome instance of the legal system working as intended. Prosecutors should consider new evidence! Seen another, it’s the latest extraordinary TV moment in a case filled with them, and not as distinct from all that came before as we might wish.
One popular theory of the Menendez case is that the brothers were sacrificed to the public’s need for an actual conviction after prosecutors in Los Angeles had failed to obtain guilty verdicts for the men who beat Rodney King and for O.J. Simpson. The DA’s office was in crisis.
If the first televised trial of Erik and Lyle Menendez set the scene for the Simpson circus, the brothers’ second trial, which was not televised, needed - for reasons having more to do with the national mood than the details of the case - to make up for all the convictions prosecutors had failed to secure. The judge accordingly hamstrung the defence by drastically limiting the evidence they could present of the alleged abuse.
The national mood should, of course, have no influence on the legal process. Neither should a TV show. But Gascón himself acknowledged that his office was flooded with calls after the release of Monsters. It’s therefore almost impossible to usefully disentangle Gascón’s announcement - or the possibly relevant fact that he’s up for reelection, polling 20 points behind his challenger and perhaps in need of a political Hail Mary - from the discourse Monsters inspired. Or from Kim Kardashian’s rather opportunistic op-ed advocating for their release, timed to publish shortly after the show aired. Or from the anaemic Netflix documentary The Menendez Brothers, which debuted on Monday and shed less light on the case than it did on Netflix’s new strategy for capitalising on the outrage Murphy shows tend to generate. (The streamer used much the same strategy for the entertainment mogul’s series about Jeffrey Dahmer, deploying the sensational series and airing a more journalistic take several weeks later.)
Gascón's office was flooded with calls after the release of Monsters. Photo / Showtime
That’s a grubby mix of perverse incentives, none of which seem to be responding primarily to the Menendez brothers’ actual needs. If you’re convinced Erik and Lyle Menendez were indeed sexually assaulted, traumatised, frightened enough to murder their parents and then forced to confess the worst, most personal things that ever happened to them to an audience of millions, only to be mocked and then jailed for life because the DA needed a win that year, your takeaway now might be that it’s kind of happening again. All the aforementioned parties seem to be using their plight to profit in one way or another.
When the trial became streamable in 2020, a new generation discovered the case. While they were certainly more sympathetic, that development turned the brothers back into freakish objects of obsessive interest. That, for them, may be the price of freedom. But it seems awful. Even their most outspoken fans, including the teenage TikTokers who back in 2021 were calling for their release, get outrageously personal, narrating the brothers’ personalities, debating which is the hotter one, and combing the internet for hints about their lives. They are also, of course, claiming credit for the November hearing.
So is Ryan Murphy. “The Menendez brothers should be sending me flowers,” he told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about Erik Menendez’s statement condemning the series. “They haven’t had so much attention in 30 years.”
God knows what the 2044 series about all this will say.
