Adeline Courtney, 27
The Netflix series Monsters has recently released its newest season, this one about the Menendez brothers. Although this series has been noted as one of Netflix’s top-rated, it has also been met with a lot of hatred. Let’s explore how accurate the show truly is.
To sum up the story of the Menendez brothers, Erik and Lyle Menendez murdered their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, in their Beverly Hills family home in 1989. After seven years and three trials, they were finally found guilty. Throughout the emotional trials, the boys claimed their parents had emotionally and sexually abused them. The jury did not entirely believe these allegations, because many points contradicted their claims. It didn’t help when the boys inherited a 14.5 million dollar estate and spent 700 thousand dollars of their father's money after his death. With witnesses testifying that the boys were terrible to their parents and that they had stayed in the family home and never witnessed any sort of abuse towards them, the boys lacked evidence to support their claims. The boys had confessed the murder of their parents to their family therapist, so the question of the case was now if the boys were justified in their actions. Without crucial evidence to prove if their parents genuinely abused them, the jury decided the boys had murdered their parents for money, ultimately convicting them of first-degree murder and life without the possibility of parole.
While receiving much praise, the Monsters series has also been met with much hatred, including from Erik Menendez himself, who said the show was a “blatant lie” and contained “vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and [him].” With a lack of key evidence and a clear bias towards the parents, many viewers claim the show is inaccurate and portrays the boys negatively. By including scenes showing how the boys spent $700,000 of their parents' money and scenes showing the boys screaming and intimidating their parents, the boys' claims of killing their parents for self-defense no longer seem reasonable. The show lacks evidence or weight that could help justify their claims. Instead, viewers watch scenes where no family members recall seeing or hearing anything about abuse in the family and scenes where Jose Menendez is praised for how good of a man he was. The show simply lacks any support for the brother’s arguments.
A group of six students was interviewed to better understand how this show was perceived by its audience. All students agreed that the show heavily favored the parents, making the boys seem evil and unjust in their actions. Many students claimed that the show only focused on the brothers' negatives, rather than showing their parents' faults as well. Overall, the interviewees concluded that the show was not an accurate portrayal of what likely and truly happened. Undoubtedly, it has an extreme bias towards the Menendez parents. If six out of six viewers of the show all felt the heavy lean towards Jose and Kitty’s sides, then a clear pattern can be seen, proving the bias that this show contains.
While one can never be sure what actually happened that night, new evidence has been discovered, causing the case to be reviewed with the possibility of resentencing the brothers. The latest evidence includes Erik Menendez's letter to his cousin, Andy Canto. This letter, written eight months before the murder of their parents, details the abuse that the brothers dealt with. The second and most intriguing piece of evidence is a confession from Roy Roselló that he was sexually assaulted by Jose in the Menendez home. With all of this new evidence, the truth may finally come out. Or will it?