A Review of Two Netflix Menendez Brothers 2024 Portrayals

• parricide
• family murder
• sexual abuse
• therapy

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is the second season in Ryan Murphy’s Monster anthology series, the first of which was Dahmer-Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022). Although in Dahmer, there is a clear monster and an illustration of the making of the monster, the monsters in the Lyle and Erik Menendez Story are less clear.

The series opens with a depiction of the lavish lifestyle that Lyle and Erik are leading after the death of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, followed by their eulogies at their parents’ funeral in 1989. Ryan Murphy’s usual flair and campiness shines through glitzy imagery and a fabulous 80s soundtrack that features “I’m Gonna Miss You,” “Girl You Know It’s True,” and “Blame It on the Rain” by Milli Vanilli; “Songbird” by Kenny G; “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House; and “The Power (Punch Mix)” by SNAP!.

The ensemble cast delivers compelling performances, including Javier Bardem as Jose Menendez, Chloë Sevigny as Kitty Menendez, Nicholas Alexander Chavez as 21-year-old Lyle, and Cooper Koch as a guilt-ridden, 18-year-old Erik, who eventually confesses everything to his therapist, Dr. Jerome Oziel, played by Dallas Roberts. Dr. Oziel’s patient and mistress, Judalon Smyth (played by Leslie Grossman, known for her many roles in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story) tells the police that Kitty and Jose Menendez were killed by their sons after overhearing one of Dr. Oziel’s taped sessions. Dominick Dunne, played by Nathan Lane, is a smug and skeptical investigative journalist who brings the Menendez brothers’ case into public awareness. He has an ax to grind because his daughter had been murdered, which fueled his opinionated pieces about the brothers. Ari Graynor shines as defense attorney Leslie Abramson, delivering a performance that rivals Edie Falco’s portrayal of Abramson in Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Brothers, which premiered on NBC on September 26, 2017.

Despite the compelling performances, Ryan Murphy and the Monster writers took dramatic license in telling the story, which was criticized in the press.¹ A seasoned journalist, Robert Rand, who uncovered new evidence about the alleged sexual abuse told Newsweek, “I think the general public doesn’t really know the difference between a fictionalized scripted series and a documentary, and that’s problematic because people see different scenes play out with real-life characters and believe it actually happened” (Ref. 1, p 1).

The documentary explains that evidence of the alleged sexual abuse was excluded by the judge at the 1995 trial. Murphy’s series dramatizes that Lyle was unable to take the stand in the second trial because he supposedly confessed everything to a woman with whom he had a relationship while incarcerated. This woman then went on to write a tell-all book, bringing up concerns about Lyle’s credibility and the content of this book.

Furthermore, the sexual abuse that the Menendez brothers experienced, including the abuse between Lyle and Eric, was seen through the Hollywood lens depicting a potential incestuous relationship surmised by the Nathan Lane character. These scenes depict the brothers as overtly sexual with one another, and their relationship is generally portrayed with a sexual subtext. Erik stated in an NPR interview,²It 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. (Ref. 2, p 2)

Murphy responded that the goal of the show was to embrace multiple narratives and to present all the information to the audience. He is quoted as saying to Tudum (a Netflix fan-focused website).

They look at anything that dares to talk about something, and they get confused as to whether [the series] is condoning and it’s not. It’s merely asking the question. This season really holds a mirror up to people and to society, and it makes a lot of people uncomfortable—I think it’s good that they’re uncomfortable…It’s informed an entire generation about that case and launched millions of conversations about sexual abuse. (Ref. 3, p 3)

Recently, there have been more media depicting male sexual abuse, including shows like Baby Reindeer, that have allowed male sexual abuse survivors to tell their stories.⁴

Despite these criticisms and creative licenses, the story in the dramatized series and the documentary overlap in many key ways. In both, compelling evidence of physical and sexual abuse was revealed and contributed to one of the most controversial concerns in this case. In the 1993 trial, there were witnesses to the history of abuse and much of the defense relied on the testimony to the abuse to establish their theory of imperfect self-defense. This first trial resulted in a mistrial with the jury largely divided on gender lines. The female jurors believed the theory of imperfect self-defense and found sympathy for the brothers who shot their parents out of fear for their lives because of ongoing abuse and threats from their parents. In contrast, the male jurors found the brothers’ story less credible.

Both the dramatic series and the documentary revealed the deep impact on the LA prosecutors and on public perception of the O.J. Simpson trial and subsequent verdict. O.J. Simpson’s acquittal led to a shift from support of the brothers to a greater focus on the victims. In the second trial, Lyle did not testify and much of the history of abuse was not admissible, removing a possible consideration of manslaughter for the jury.

There has recently been a movement for Los Angeles County to revisit the sentencing of Erik and Lyle Menendez, who have served 32 years of a life sentence without parole. A primary concern is that, at the time of sentencing in 1996, there was a mistaken belief that males could not be the victims of sexual abuse. This idea was further explored in the documentary when using quotes from both family members and members of the legal system indicating that the problematic defense of “battered woman syndrome” is only applicable for women.

In the Netflix documentary, it was explained that, after 35 years, this public perception has finally changed. The documentary attributes much of this shift to Oprah’s airing of her special episode, “Oprah Winfrey Presents: After Neverland,” which aired after the second part of HBO’s Leaving Neverland.^5,6 In this episode, many grown men stood up with the pictures of themselves as children, revealing that they had been sexually abused by a trusted adult. Oprah explained the concept of grooming, which was also explained by Erik and Lyle on the stand in the first trial. For the Menendez brothers, grooming was exhibited when their father started providing massages after sports practices, which eventually led to the sexual assault of both brothers. In Erik’s case, Erik alleged that his father raped him until only a month before the killings and that this discovery by Lyle was a key inciting incident in confronting their parents and the following events.

Recently, new evidence has been uncovered that has led to a habeus corpus petition. The first piece of evidence is a letter written by Erik to his cousin, Andy Cano, revealing the alleged sexual abuse at the time. Interestingly, Andy Cano had testified at trial about this abuse but did not have physical proof of his allegations at the time. Since the trial, Andy Cano tragically died of an overdose of sleeping pills in 2003.⁷ Some of this letter was published in a Newsweek article:I’ve been trying to avoid dad. It’s still happening Andy but it’s worse for me now. I can’t explain it. He [is] so overweight that I can’t stand to see him. I never know when it’s going to happen and it’s driving me crazy. Every night I stay up thinking he might come in. I need to put it out of my mind. I know what you said before but I’m afraid. You just don’t know dad like I do. He’s crazy! He’s warned me a hundred times about telling anyone. (Ref. 7, p 7)

The second piece of new evidence is testimony from former Menudo boy band member, Roy Rosello, that alleges sexual abuse by Jose Menendez in 1984 when he was a teenager.⁸

During both Menendez trials, the public had a difficult time understanding why the brothers killed their mother if their father was the abuser. Both the dramatic series and the documentary reveal that Kitty Menendez knew about Jose’s molestation of the boys. She heard him in their room, and the brothers asked her to help keep Jose away from them, yet she took no action.

In the dramatic series, Dr. Oziel uses the term “parricide” and explains to Erik that it means children killing their parents and that most people do not kill their parents. On this point, Dr. Oziel is correct. The chapter on parricide in the book edited by Susan Hatters Friedman, Family Murder Pathologies of Love and Hate, begins with a description of the Menendez brothers’ case.⁹ Pinals explained that parricide is rare, but when it does occur, “like other intrafamilial murder, presents a window into complicated family dynamics and is generally the culmination of factors that may or may not have been recognized before the murder” (Ref. 9, p 115-116). Both the documentary and the Murphy series explore the complicated family dynamics in the Menendez home.

The documentary explains how evolving public perception of sexual abuse in the younger generations, particularly generation Z, has garnered more interest in the Menendez case by a trend of publishing Tik Tok videos arguing that the Menendez brothers deserve to be freed. The documentary posits that this generation understands that sexual abuse can happen to anyone, not just girls, which has led to further advocacy for male sexual abuse survivors. Furthermore, the documentary is sympathetic to both Erik and Lyle whose voices, via recorded phone interviews, are in the documentary, which highlights their own insight into their responsibility for the fateful 1989 night and brutal killing of their parents. The documentary balances the brevity of these actions while highlighting the importance of sexual abuse awareness, as this has become a concern for advocacy, particularly in Lyle Menendez’s life.

Dr. Oziel’s character and storyline is of particular interest to forensic psychiatrists. Dr. Oziel not only records his sessions and violates confidentiality statutes by speaking to his girlfriend and patient about the brothers but also slept with patients and exploited their vulnerabilities. Before his patient and girlfriend reported him and the brothers to the police, he proposed a business arrangement with the Menendez brothers, believing they would come into significant money and feel indebted to him if he stayed silent. In both the series and the documentary, the forensic psychiatrist for the defense, Dr. William Vicary, is portrayed as a good example of an objective expert witness who educated the jury on the impact of sexual abuse. Unfortunately, Dr. Vicary was not able to undo the reputational damage to the field by Dr. Oziel, the brothers’ treating psychologist, who inserted himself heavily in the trial and who exemplified unethical therapist behavior.

Despite some of the overdramatizations and creative licenses taken by Ryan Murphy and the writers, this series is worth viewing. The Menendez brothers are now in the zeitgeist and the renewed attention has contributed to real-time developments in their legal cases by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. Additionally, the documentary provides an interesting and timely depiction by separating fact from fiction in the media’s narrative surrounding this fascinating and tragic case of parricide.

• © 2026 American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law