The Menendez brothers in court. | Ted Soqui/Sygma via Getty Images
As a culture, Americans are coming to better understand the injustice that was done to Lyle and Erik Menendez. The brothers were convicted in 1996 of murdering their wealthy parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, seven years earlier in a gruesome double homicide, when Lyle was 21 and Erik just 18. Their trials unfolded amid a tabloid media frenzy that emphasized the brothers’ presumed greed and sociopathy while mocking the decades of emotional and sexual abuse they claim to have experienced at the hands of their father. Despite overwhelming witness testimony presented in their first trials that they were telling the truth about their abuse, they were each ultimately sentenced to life without parole.
Netflix’s recent Ryan Murphy docudrama, Monsters, takes a frank look at the brothers’ allegations of abuse, but it doesn’t do them any favors either, buying into the possibility that the pair made the whole thing up for sympathy and even implying an unfounded incestuous relationship between them. So it makes sense that in order to balance out those rather jarring claims, Netflix also recently launched a documentary film, simply titled The Menendez Brothers, that backs the abuse claims with an impressive number of first- and secondhand sources — including the brothers themselves, who appear via recorded phone calls from prison.
Several members of the Menendez family appear on the documentary with stories of the abuse the brothers suffered from their father, including Joan Vander Molen, Kitty Menendez’s sister, and Diane Vander Molen, a cousin of Lyle and Erik.
Diane spent most of her summers growing up with the Menendez family and has never deviated from the story she testified to at the brothers’ first trials — that Lyle had told her about their father’s sexual abuse when he was just 8 years old. Her testimony also implicated Kitty Menendez, who, she alleged, knew about Lyle’s claims and either disbelieved them or chose to ignore them. After that, the brothers have said the alleged abuse went on for years after that, with the brothers claiming that their father’s sexual abuse of Erik continued into Erik’s adulthood, with Lyle learning that his brother was still being abused just days before the murders.
Multiple Menendez family members recalled several chilling stories of abuse, but one about a trust fall gone wrong in Lyle’s childhood, the first story Diane Vander Molen relates in the documentary, seems particularly revealing as a glimpse into the lives the brothers lived.
“One time Jose put Lyle on a kitchen counter and prompted Lyle to jump off, and he was going to catch him. As Lyle did so, Jose backed off and let him fall to the ground, telling him that you can never trust anybody.”
Taken as an isolated example, we might consider this an anecdote of a cruel prank played on an innocent child. But in the context of everything we know about Jose Menendez and his children, it becomes much more significant. It’s a simple but revealing look at a man whose behavior seemed to be a textbook example of coercive control — a long-term behavior pattern in which a family member carries out an ongoing strategy of manipulation and emotional abuse against his partner and/or his children. This was just one example of a lifetime of alleged psychological torture. It’s anguishing to think what such an environment would do to two young boys forced to play these kinds of mind games by a parent whom they loved and trusted.
Coercive control often accompanies other dysfunctional behaviors, including domestic violence and sexual abuse. Although the term was first coined in 1982, it wasn’t popularized as a concept until the late aughts (via an influential book on the subject) and still has yet to be fully or widely understood by the general public. More and more states are beginning to incorporate coercive control into their civil procedures and guidelines for understanding domestic violence, but as of 2024 only a handful of states, including Hawaii and Massachusetts, actually prosecute coercive control as a criminal offense.
While most people recognize that strategic manipulation is a key factor in situations involving long-term domestic abuse, the justice system lacks sentencing guidelines that incorporate that understanding, including where juvenile and young offenders are concerned. In the case of Lyle and Erik Menendez, the court failed even to accept that prolonged abuse could be a defense to murder.
Lyle and Erik were initially each tried separately in 1993; both trials, in which the defense relied heavily on testimony supporting their abuse claims, resulted in hung juries. The next trial began in October 1995, just eight days after the O.J. Simpson acquittal — the timing of which, the documentary implies, may have increased a public thirst for vengeance against wealthy defendants. For this trial, which saw them being tried together, the judge rejected what he called the “abuse excuse” and thus disallowed nearly all of the expert and personal testimony corroborating the brothers’ claims.
The jurors in that trial, according to one juror who appears in the documentary, were also dissuaded from considering manslaughter as an option, which could have dramatically reduced their sentences. Given the overwhelming number of witnesses who back their claims of an abusive household of coercive control and the increased understanding we have of how long-term abuse can affect children, it’s generally understood — and their defense attorneys have argued — that their trials would have gone much differently today. The law increasingly recognizes coercive control and prolonged abuse as supporting a defense of diminished capacity, which can frequently result in a conviction on a lesser degree of a crime.
Fortunately, the brothers have a shot at a reprieve: a recently rediscovered letter purportedly written by Erik Menendez eight months before the murders in which he details his ongoing sexual abuse by Jose has been used as the basis for a motion to vacate the brothers’ convictions. A recent story in People magazine notes that the Los Angeles district attorney’s office will give the court a formal recommendation on the motion on November 26. That means the nightmare for the Menendez brothers could finally end.
vox.com