Entertainment
Ryan Murphy Defends ‘Monsters’ After Erik Menendez Criticism
Ryan Murphy is defending his Netflix series, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, after one of its main subjects, Erik Menendez, criticized the project.
“I think it’s interesting that he’s issued a statement without having seen the show,” the co-creator of the Monsters anthology told Entertainment Tonight on Monday. Murphy was speaking while on a New York red carpet for the premiere of another show he’s launching this month, Grotesquerie on FX. “It’s really, really hard if it’s your life, to see your life up on screen.”
Since its release last week, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story has been capturing the news cycle. The true-crime drama from Murphy and Ian Brennan chronicles the case of real-life brothers, Erik and Lyle Menendez, who were convicted in 1996 for the murders of their parents, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez. It’s currently the No. 1 show on Netflix in the U.S.
The Menendez brothers are incarcerated in Donovan Correctional Facility in California, and don’t have Netflix access in prison. But one day after the show released, Erik had shared his thoughts in a social media message that was posted by his wife, Tammi Menendez. Netflix and Murphy hadn’t commented at the time, but The Hollywood Reporter spoke with journalist and Menendez trial expert Robert Rand, who said Erik was likely given a description of the series by his wife as to how he and Lyle are depicted.
Erik, in his statement, had expressed his disappointment with both Murphy and Netflix for how Murphy “shaped his horrible narrative through vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander.”
“It is sad for me to know that Netflix’s dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward — back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women,” Erik said. Adding, “It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to [sic] do this without bad intent.”
When speaking on Tuesday, Murphy addressed Erik’s criticism head on.
“The thing that I find interesting that [Erik] doesn’t mention in his quote is, if you watch the show, I would say 60 to 65 percent of our show in the scripts and in the film form center around the abuse and what they claim happened to them,” said the prolific showrunner. “And we do it very carefully, and we give them their day in court, and they talk openly about it. In this age, where people can really talk about sexual abuse, talking about it and writing about it and writing about all points of view can be controversial.”
Monsters — which sees Nicholas Chavez and Cooper Koch in the roles of Lyle and Erik, respectively — has also faced criticism from viewers for how some scenes have portrayed an incestuous relationship between the adult brothers (some of the sexualized interactions include the brothers kissing). During his retrial in 1995, Lyle testified that he had molested Erik while they were children. In the series, the brothers each discuss this as adults with their attorney, Leslie Abramson, played by Ari Graynor, while they recount the abuse they suffered at the hands of their father, José.
Erik did not directly address the show’s innuendo that the brothers were lovers. But Rand told THR this week that the show’s depiction of the brothers’ relationship is false and more about what others who involved in the trial thought at the time. “I don’t believe that Erik and Lyle Menendez were ever lovers. I think that’s a fantasy that was in the mind of Dominick Dunne [the reporter portrayed in the series by Nathan Lane],” Rand said. “Rumors were going around the trial that maybe there was some sort of weird relationship between Erik and Lyle themselves. But I believe the only physical contact they might have had is what Lyle testified, that when Lyle was 8 years old, he took Erik out in the woods and played with him with a toothbrush — which is what [their father] José had done with him. And so I certainly wouldn’t call that a sexual relationship of any sort. It’s a response to trauma.”
Murphy echoed that when speaking to Entertainment Tonight, saying Monsters takes a “Rashomon kind of approach” in its storytelling over the course of the nine episodes.
“There were four people involved — two of them are dead,” said Murphy about José and Kitty Menendez, portrayed by Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny in the series. “What about the parents? We had an obligation as storytellers to also try to put in their perspective based on our research, which we did.”
When asked directly about the show implying that the brothers had a sexual relationship, Murphy said, “If you watch the show, what the show is doing is presenting the points of view and theories from so many people who were involved in the case. Dominick Dunne wrote several articles talking about that theory. We are presenting his point of view, just as we present Leslie Abramson’s point of view. And we had an obligation to show all of that, and we did.”
After Monsters launched, Netflix announced that Erik and Lyle Menendez will be participating in a documentary, The Menendez Brothers, where they will share their story via audio interviews from prison. Streaming Oct. 7, The Menendez Brothers will see the brothers “for the first time in 30 years, and in their own words, [revisiting] the trial that shocked the nation. Through extensive audio interviews with Lyle and Erik, lawyers involved in the trial, journalists who covered it, jurors, family and other informed observers, acclaimed Argentinian director Alejandro Hartmann offers new insight and a fresh perspective on a case that people only think they know.”
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, meanwhile, is currently streaming all episodes on Netflix.