Convicted murderer Erik Menéndez has criticized the new Netflix show “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” claiming that the true crime-inspired series is “rooted in horrible and blatant lies” about the events leading up to the 1989 murders of his parents.
In a statement posted on his wife Tammi Menéndez’s account on X last week, Menéndez called the series a “dishonest portrayal” of his and his brother Lyle Menéndez’s lives. He accused the show’s co-creator, television producer Ryan Murphy, of crafting “Monsters” with “bad intent.”
Erik and Lyle Menéndez are both serving life sentences for murdering their parents, Jose and Kitty Menéndez, and allege they killed the couple in self-defense following years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
Family members have corroborated the brothers making abuse accusations before the murders. Prosecutors, meanwhile, argued that the brothers killed their parents for financial gain.
“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,” Menéndez wrote in his statement. “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.”
Menéndez characterized “Monsters” as “disheartening slander” and slammed Murphy for misrepresenting how trauma and sexual abuse affect male victims.
“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,” he wrote.
Menéndez finished by thanking “all those who have reached out and supported me.”
The series is the second installment in Murphy’s already controversial true crime anthology “Monster.”
The first focused on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Families of Dahmer’s victims criticized the series for “glamorizing” Dahmer’s crimes and capitalizing on their personal tragedy.
Read Menendez’s full statement here.
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