The latest reinterpretation of a sensational murder from the 1990s by successful television host Ryan Murphy is the second contribution in his Monster Series that goes into the plural because it is a Rashomon-like approach to reenacting the brutal murders of José and Kitty Menendez in 1989.
The series will chronicle the before and after of the night the couple were gunned down in their Brentwood home by their two sons. Following the world premiere of the pilot episode in New York last week, Murphy and show co-creator Ian Brennan revealed that the project was sparked by TikTok and Instagram creators who have been campaigning for the brothers’ release from prison for years.
Monster: The Story of Erik and Lyle Menendezwhich hits Netflix Thursday with all episodes available, has a unique tone and approach to the narrative that many Americans who watched the trial on court TV in the early ’90s felt was a clear case of greedy sons committing patricide to afford a luxurious lifestyle. Instead, the show presents as fact the abuse the sons endured for years in their defense trials: Their father, RCA executive José Menendez, abused them emotionally and sexually for years while their mother did nothing.
Belief in this once-discarded notion of ongoing abuse — which was not even allowed in their second, joint trial, which ended with both sons convicted and given life sentences without the possibility of parole — is central to the TikTok movement that inspired the series. The re-examination of the Menendez boys’ defense spread across several TikTok videos, then gained momentum after a former member of the boy band Menudo claimed in 2023 that he was sexually abused by José Menendez as a child.
“There are thousands of TikToks of young people, especially young women, talking about the Lyle and Erik case,” Murphy said at the Sept. 12 event in New York. “I was blown away because it seemed so timely to them.”
Brennan, who has been Joysaid that there is finally a common language in our culture to think about and discuss sexual abuse and mental health, something that did not exist in the 1990s when the trial was broadcast on cable television.
“I was a kid when the case happened and we didn’t have cable TV, so I didn’t want to watch it on court TV. All I knew of Saturday Night Livewhere the (premise of the) skit is that they were crying on the witness stand,” he recalled. “That was the degree to which people understood that: ‘Oh, look at these guys. Look at these men crying on the witness stand without really thinking about why they might be crying.'”
He added: “It just wasn’t a nuanced way of looking at trauma, which I think we understand better today. And I think that feels really electrifying and alive to a certain age group that looks back at their parents’ generations and thinks, ‘What did you do? You didn’t know how to see the world.'”
Jordan Wynn started a Menendez supporter Instagram account with the handle @revisiting_menendez after watching the entire process on YouTube. He said The New York Times in 2021 that he was “disgusted by the way the media downplayed the brothers’ abuse then and in the years that followed.” He also mentioned lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s 1994 book, The abuse excuseis certainly an example of how any belief in the effects of trauma has been pushed aside in order to accuse victims of falsely claiming abuse in order to avoid punishment.
For Whynn and other TikTok and Instagram creators, the climax of the Menendez trial infotainment in the 1990s is their fodder for the search for truth, justice and equality. The series coincides, by the way, with the third time the brothers have Habeas Hearing, a first step towards reducing the prison sentence to the time already served.
Whether Monster — which strikes a unique tone of horror and humor and whose pilot episode features one of the most brutal, shocking murder scenes ever filmed for cable — will help her case remains to be seen. But if Netflix can inspire a rethink about her motives for the brutal murders that have become as much a part of her as TikTok and Instagram, her freedom could be within reach. Already, it seems interest has been piqued: Google Trends shows that searches for her name have quadrupled this week.
