“The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is an irresponsible retelling of the murder

“I don’t think Erik and Lyle Menendez were ever lovers,” Menendez biographer Robert Rand told The Hollywood Reporter, although he says Lyle testified that he took Erik into the woods when he was 8 and with him played with him sexually with a toothbrush, something José had done to him, he testified. “And so I would definitely not describe this as a sexual relationship of any kind,” Rand said. “It’s a response to trauma.”

To be clear: Prosecutors said the brothers fictionalized their father’s abuse and their mother’s indifference, and the state was ultimately able to convince a jury (and much of the American public) that Lyle and Erik murdered her parents to get her big inheritance. During the trial, prosecutors presented evidence that the brothers went on an elaborate spending spree for six months before their arrest. While inheritance may have been a motive, there is more evidence that the brothers were sexually abused than there is evidence that they were close, as Murphy’s show suggests.

Their cousin, Brian Andersen, testified that Jose forced his sons to shower with him after every tennis practice. “As soon as Jose brought one of the boys into his room, the door was locked behind them and Kitty made it clear that they were not going down the hallway,” Andersen testified. Another cousin, Andres Cano, testified that an 8-year-old Erik asked him if it was normal for a father to give his son “genital massages” and said that “he wanted to stop.”

Not only does the series build an incest storyline on a flimsy foundation, but it also sensationalizes the sexual abuse that the Menendez brothers say for our entertainment. It’s a sin that plagues many recreations of true crime films. Instead of improving understanding about the impact of sexual violence on children, particularly male children, “Monsters” Instead, it feeds into our cultural impulse to stare at a horrific crime without questioning what many signs point to the root cause: childhood sexual assault.

Erik and Lyle Menendez aren’t the only ones who have accused José of sexual assault. In the 2023 Peacock docuseries “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed,” Roy Rosselló, a former member of the 1980s pop band Menudo, said he killed, drugged and raped José, an executive at RCA Records became.

It’s troubling that “Monster” sensationalizes the Menendez brothers’ case and puts it back in the spotlight without raising awareness about the impact of childhood sexual assault. If it is important to retry the case against the Menendez brothers more than three decades later, as Murphy clearly believes, then it should be done with the knowledge we now have about how sexual assault changes those who experience it. It doesn’t matter if “Monster” is fictionalized; Incorporating incest into an already traumatic story is cruel and unnecessary.

Rand, who believes Jose repeatedly attacked his sons, said they should have been convicted of manslaughter, not murder, and sentenced to far less than life. I tend to agree.

Our cultural understanding of sexual violence has evolved enormously since the 1990s. We understand that sexual violence knows no gender, meaning boys and men are vulnerable to attack just like any other person of any gender. We know that sexual violence is about power, and when people are repeatedly hurt by the authority figures who are supposed to protect them, it often has lifelong traumatic effects. We know that courts are far more likely than in the 1990s to consider ongoing childhood trauma, including sexual assault, as a mitigating factor when sentencing people for violent crimes.

If Murphy had fully considered these elements, he would have removed the incest story, especially given the likelihood that many viewers are learning about the Menendez case for the first time through his show. But he seems to have given in to the desire to entertain at the expense of the victims, an impulse that seemingly exceeds the humanity needed to tell this story with the nuance it deserves.

Murphy tells “Entertainment Tonight” that “60 to 65 percent of our show, in the scripts and in the film form, is about the abuse and what supposedly happened to them.” While the series tries to carefully deal with the sexual abuse in her childhood, that the brothers supposedly experienced, their trauma of being sexually abused is in turn repackaged as entertainment.

Where is the concern about the impact another show about her childhood trauma might have on her psychologically and emotionally? Apparently, this level of care and consideration was sacrificed in the name of television, a claim other survivors have made against Murphy over previous true crime series he has produced. If that continues to be the case as we tell the story of the Menendez family, perhaps it is time to stop retreading the terrain and give Erik and Lyle something that their stories of abuse suggest they might have never knew: peace.