The Menendez Brothers Are Stars. Could the Attention Get Them Pardoned?

On Aug. 20, 1989, 19-year-old Lyle Menendez made a frantic call to Beverly Hills police. “Somebody shot my parents,” he screamed into the receiver. When police responded to the residence, they found a grisly scene: entertainment executive Jose Menendez and his wife Mary Louise “Kitty” shot dead by multiple shotgun blasts. The couple’s sons, Lyle and Erik, were first consoled by officers, who treated the pair as grieving orphans. But in the months to come, the Menedez brothers’ actions set them on a collision course with the law for the murder of their parents — and the revealing, shocking, live court proceedings that turned them into household names. 

It’s been 30 years since Lyle and Erik were convicted of the first-degree murder of their parents in a retrial. But in the new Netflix documentary The Menendez Brothers, director Alejandro Hartmann takes the already well-known story of the brothers and weaves in over 20 hours of exclusive interviews with them — the first interview they’ve done together in nearly 30 years. Since their arrest in 1990, the Menendez brothers and their case have been the subject of intense scrutiny. But in the three decades since Lyle and Erik were sentenced to life behind bars, there’s been a resurgence of audience interest in the brothers’ case. 

In October, American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy released his retelling of the case in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. Kim Kardashian has gone on a public campaign to free the brothers from prison. The interim investigations, books, and films about the Menendez murders have revealed new pieces of evidence that weren’t available at the time of Lyle and Erik’s trial, and the Los Angeles District Attorney announced earlier this month that he would review the evidence in their case — all of which has put the brothers in the center of a media storm they haven’t seen since the 1990s. People still think the Menendez brothers deserve to be released and were treated poorly by the criminal justice system. But could their treatment change the way people approach true crime stories? 

Much of the original interest in Lyle and Erik came from Court TV, the now-defunct channel that broadcast their first trial live — and eventually had people across America tuning in like it was a nightly soap opera. The public was fascinated by the trial, but the brothers became the butt of jokes. “I called Jay Leno’s show one time to protest them making fun of them. And that’s all they did. They just made fun of them,” their aunt, Joan Vander Molen says in the new documentary. “I was told that we were public property now and they could do what they wanted.” 

The Menendez brothers also have Court TV to thank for their resurgence in popularity with the newer generations. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the channel released the entire recording of the trial online. Thousands of people, many of whom either weren’t alive at the time or were too young to remember the trial, were suddenly self-proclaimed experts in the case. It wasn’t all roses: many social media accounts sexualized the boys, claiming their handsome looks proved their innocence. Others took it farther, saying the Menendez parents should have been murdered more brutally or deserved to die. But the renewed interest soon made Lyle and Erik staple fixtures on true crime TikTok accounts, with the majority calling their imprisonment a miscarriage of justice. “I watched the court trial and omg no one deserves that,” reads one of the thousands of comments. “[Prayer hand emojis] really hope they get out.” Many accounts review old videos with sympathetic bents. “Lyle gave up his whole life to help & get his little brother out of this hell & yet they try to make him out to be a monstrous manipulator,” reads another. “It’s just so sickening.” 

Kelli Boling, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has spent years conducting research on the ethics of true crime. She tells Rolling Stone while renewed interest has informed more people on the case, not all projects are helpful. One example: In September, Netflix released Monsters, a fictionalized depiction of the Menendez brothers’ lives and trials. Both Lyle and Erik denounced the versions of themselves presented in the show, saying they were so inaccurate that Murphy could only have meant harm. Murphy shot back, claiming the series was a “move towards justice” for the men. Boling notes that in cases that might be reviewed, or given retrials, the transformation of a crime into a storyline, one told from multiple angles and in the public, can taint the outcome of their cases.  

“The Menendez brothers have been very clearly against this series,” Boling says. “It has not just mental and emotional repercussions, but it can have real-life courtroom repercussions when cases like this are portrayed so many different times in so many different ways. It can hurt people in ways that a lot of producers may not even consider.” Since its release, Kim Kardashian not only visited the San Diego prison where Erik and Lyle are held to talk about prison reform with Monsters actor Jamie Mizrahi but penned an op-ed for NBC News. “With their case back in the spotlight — and considering the revelation of a 1988 letter from Erik to his cousin describing the abuse — my hope is that Erik and Lyle Menendez’s life sentences are reconsidered,” she wrote. “We owe it to those little boys who lost their childhoods, who never had a chance to be heard, helped, or saved.” 

The Menendez Brothers documentary attempts to distinguish itself from the crowded pack of content by prioritizing the direct words of Erik and Lyle. Hartmann got his interviews by recording individual 15-minute phone calls with the brothers over five months, reflecting on their crimes from the moment police arrived. “There should have been a police response and we would’ve been arrested,” Erik says in the film. “We had no alibi. The gunpowder residue was all over our hands… And if they would have just pressed me, I wouldn’t have been able to withstand any questioning.” Lyle also spoke up about his driving desire to not let the public or any of the jury know about his and his brother’s sexual assault. “I deeply did not want to talk about anything that had happened in our past,” he said. “My main concern was trying to avoid that at all costs.” 

The director also notes that much of the interest in the Menendez case lies in the feeling of it being unresolved. “Even though they got their conviction, the trial was over, and the legal system said, ‘Okay, this is over,’ there’s something unresolved,” Harmann said in a statement shared with Rolling Stone. “I think that’s what made people obsessed then and what makes people obsessed now. It has to do with something under the surface. This story is about something bigger and deeper than the brothers themselves and the victims themselves. It’s complex issues: abuse, crime, relationships inside the family, wealth, how you raise your kids, inside the private part of society.” 

Erik and Lyle’s story is still ongoing.  On Oct. 5, 2024, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced that he is “reviewing evidence” in the brothers’ case after hundreds of calls to his office from supporters and additional evidence revealed by Menendez brothers’ projects, the book The Menendez Murders, and the 2023 Peacock docuseries, Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed. Gascón did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment, but in a press conference announcing the news he said, “It’s important to recognize that both men and women can be victims of sexual abuse. We have a moral and ethical obligation to review what is being presented to us.” There’s no clear understanding of whether the new inquiry could actually lead to the brothers being released from prison. But Boling notes that the same interest that has made them the topic of so many fictionalized and documentary series doesn’t go away with the release of a new one. “True crime should be victim-centric,” she says. “In [the Menendez] case specifically, that particular dichotomy is what draws people into discussion around it. Are they victims? Are they perpetrators? Can they be both?”

From Rolling Stone US.