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Erik Menendez Says Ryan Murphy’s ‘Monsters’ Is Full of ‘Blatant Lies’
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Erik Menendez Says Ryan Murphy’s ‘Monsters’ Is Full of ‘Blatant Lies’



CNN

Erik Menendez criticizes the “unfair portrayal” of his life in the Netflix series “Monsters: The Lyle and Erick Menendez Story.”

Menendez was convicted along with his older brother Lyle in the 1989 shooting deaths of their parents Kitty and Jose Menendez. The two brothers, who are serving life sentences for the murders, have argued that they acted in self-defense after being abused by their father their entire lives. In a statement shared on social media by his wife, Erik Menendez called the series, co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, “ruinous.”

“I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, and had created a caricature of Lyle rooted in the horrible and blatant lies that were rampant on the show,” Menendez wrote. “It is with a heavy heart that I say that I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be so naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives to do this without malicious intent.”

The nine-episode series examines the crime from several perspectives, including speculation about the brothers’ relationship and prosecutors’ argument that the killings were motivated by money.

“It is sad to know that Netflix’s dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crimes has taken the painful truth several steps back — back in time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that men were not sexually abused and that men experienced rape trauma differently than women,” Mendendez wrote. “Isn’t the truth enough? Let the truth be the truth. How demoralizing it is to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in illuminating childhood trauma.”

Erik Menendez (R) and brother Lyle listen to the trial court during a May 17, 1991 appearance in the August 1989 shotgun murder of their wealthy parents. The California Supreme Court must decide whether to reconsider a lower court's decision to allow alleged taped confessions to a psychiatrist into evidence before a preliminary hearing can take place. REUTERS/Lee Celano

Murphy and Brennan have not yet publicly responded to Menendez’s post.

“(The show) is more interested in how monsters are made than born,” Murphy said during a panel at an early screening of the show’s first episode, according to Netflix. “We try not to be too judgmental about that, because we’re trying to understand why they did something, rather than the act of doing it.”

“Ultimately, no one other than the two people now in prison can know the truth about what happened,” Brennan added.

The second season of “Monsters” debuted last week and follows “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” Erik Menendez, now 53, and Lyle Menendez, 56, are serving sentences at the same prison near San Diego, California. Their attorneys argued in a petition last year that new evidence in the case should overturn their convictions.

“Violence is never an answer, never a solution, and is always tragic,” Menendez wrote. “I hope, then, that it will never be forgotten that violence against a child creates a hundred horrific and silent crime scenes, darkly shadowed by the glitz and glamour and rarely revealed until the tragedy has engulfed everyone involved.”