Lyle and Erik Menéndez‘s family are questioning who’s the real “monster” following Ryan Murphy‘s recent Netflix portrayal.
On Wednesday, Erik’s wife Tammi Menéndez shared a letter written by his aunt Joan VanderMolen on behalf of 24 extended family members, showing their support for the brothers and criticizing Murphy’s “repulsive” depiction of their 1989 murder of parents José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menéndez in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story.
“We are virtually the entire extended family of Erik and Lyle Menéndez,” VanderMolen started in the letter. “We are 24 strong and today we want the world to know we support Erik and Lyle. We individually and collectively pray for their release after being imprisoned for 35 years. We know them, love them, and want them home with us.
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“Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story is a phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episodic nightmare that is not only riddled with mistruths and outright falsehoods but ignores the most recent exculpatory revelations. Our family has been victimized by this grotesque shockudrama. Murphy claims he spent years researching the case but in the end relied on debunked Dominick Dunne, the pro-prosecution hack, to justify his slander against us and never spoke to us.
“The character assassination of Erik and Lyle, who are our nephews and cousins, under the guise of a ‘story telling narrative’ is repulsive,” she continued. “We know these men. We grew up with them since they were boys. We love them and to this very day we are close to them. We also know what went on in their home and the unimaginably turbulent lives they have endured. Several of us were eyewitnesses to many atrocities one should never have to bear witness to.
This is the official response from Joan VanderMolen (Erik’s Aunt) and the Menendez Family to the Netflix Series” “Monsters, the Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” and to Ryan Murphy.#Menendez #NetflixMonsters #RyanMurphy pic.twitter.com/o7KEOEoYwr
— Tammi Menendez (@TammiMenendez1) September 26, 2024
“It is sad that Ryan Murphy, Netflix and all others involved in this series do not have an understanding of the impact of years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Perhaps, after all, Monsters is all about Ryan Murphy,” added VanderMolen.
After Tammi previously shared a statement from Erik, slamming the show as a “naive and inaccurate” depiction, Monsters actor Cooper Koch (who played Erik) visited the brothers at San Diego County’s Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, along with fellow Murphy collaborator Kim Kardashian. Meanwhile, Lyle actor Nicholas Alexander Chavez has expressed “sympathy and empathy” for the brothers in an interview with USA Today.
Murphy has since defended the show as depicting “many, many, many perspectives,” noting to E! News: “Some of the controversy seems to be people thinking for example, that the brothers are having an incestuous relationship. There are people who say that never happened. There were people who said it did happen.”
The Golden Globe winner said that 60 to 65 percent of the series “centers around Eric and Lyle Menéndez talking about their abuse, talking about their victimization, talking about what it emotionally put them through, those two boys in our show get their moment in court.”
After José was shot six times and Kitty 10 times on August 20, 1989, police initially investigated several mob leads. The brothers were arrested in March 1990 after Erik confessed to his psychologist, and they alleged in trial that they killed their parents out of fear for their lives after a lifetime of abuse, including sexual abuse from their father.
Although Erik and Lyle were convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, their attorney Mark Geragos told People he’s “cautiously optimistic” that new family testimonies will help get the case reduced to voluntary manslaughter.
According to the show’s official Netflix logline, Monsters “dives into the historic case that took the world by storm, paved the way for audiences’ modern-day fascination with true crime, and in return asks those audiences: Who are the real monsters?”
Koch and Chavez star as Erik and Lyle Menéndez, with Javier Bardem as José, Chloë Sevigny as Kitty, Nathan Lane as Dominick Dunne and Ari Graynor as Leslie Abramson.
Despite the controversy, which is all too reminiscent of Season 1’s depiction of Jeffrey Dahmer‘s killings, topping Netflix’s charts with 12.3 million views in its opening weekend.
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