Erik Menendez has spoken out against the new Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story series created by Ryan Murphy, which portrays his and his brother's infamous murder of their parents.
The Netflix show delves into the brothers' crime, a story that gripped America throughout the 1990s.
During their trial, Erik and Lyle didn't deny killing their parents, but they disagreed about why they did it.
While prosecutors argued the brothers murdered their parents for inheritance money, Erik and Lyle told a different story. They claimed their father, Jose, had sexually abused them for years, and they killed him in self-defense. They said this was because he threatened them if they ever revealed the abuse. The court didn't accept this explanation, but the brothers have stuck to it ever since.
The show depicts their lives as almost the polar opposite, making their lives out to be as if they were having the times of their lives along with being incestuous. That seemingly fabricated addition to the story has created some backlash and even led Erik Menendez to speak out via his wife, Tammi Menendez.
“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,” he 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.”
“It is sad for me to know that Netflix's dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surround 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.”
“How demoralizing to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma,” the statement continues. “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.”
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