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Having allowed Ryan Murphy to make his case against Lyle and Erik Menendez with his eight-part dramatic series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, Netflix now lets the infamous brothers tell their own tale in The Menendez Brothers, a feature-length documentary, premiering Oct. 7, that paints them in a wholly sympathetic light.
Those who’ve rallied behind the siblings and their claims that they murdered their parents because of lifelong sexual abuse and an imminent fear for their lives will eagerly take to director Alejandro Hartmann’s non-fiction film, whose main draw is new telephone interviews with the imprisoned convicts. Anyone less convinced of their “abuse excuse,” however, are likely to find it a distasteful attempt to paint the men not as victimizers but as victims of their parents, the media, and an unjust legal system.
On Aug. 20, 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez used shotguns to literally obliterate their parents as they sat watching TV in the family’s lavish Beverly Hills home. The explanation they ultimately gave for this crime was a history of heinous rape and abuse at the hands of their father José, an entertainment industry powerhouse whom they both adored and feared, as did their mother Kitty, who they allege knew about and ignored their mistreatment.
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