By Molly Walsh
cleveland.com
LOS ANGELES — Erik Menendez is slamming Netflix’s show “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” based on the 1989 murder of Jose and Kitty Menendez , in a statement shared by his wife.
Tammi Menendez, who married Erik in 1999, posted a statement from him on social media platform X Sept. 19 calling “The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” “horrible” and “inaccurate.” The show is the second season in Ryan Murphy’s “Monster” anthology, which started with a series on Jeffrey Dahmer.
Brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted of killing their parents Joe and Kitty on Aug. 20, 1989. They were sentenced to life in prison without parole and are both incarcerated in California still. The show follows the lead-up before their parents were murdered and the trial afterward.
“I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show,” the statement posted by Tammi Menendez said. “I can only believe they were done so on purpose. It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent.”
Prosecutors at the first trial argued the brothers killed their parents for their estate’s money. The brothers testified that their father started abusing them when they were each 6 years old. In a 1995 trial, the allegations of abuse were deemed inadmissible.
“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,” the statement posted by Tammi Menendez said.
“How demoralizing is it to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma,” the statement continued. “Violence is never an answer, never a solution, and is always tragic. As such, I hope it is never forgotten that violence against a child creates a hundred horrendous and silent crime scenes darkly shadowed behind glitter and glamor and rarely exposed until tragedy penetrates everyone involved.”
Murphy has not released a statement following criticism from the Menendez family.
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