The Menendez family criticizes Netflix’s Monsters series: “Fake, disgusting and anachronistic”

«A phobic, disgusting and anachronistic serial nightmare, which not only it is full of falsehoods and obvious liesbut which ignores recent exculpatory revelations.” For the Menendez family, this is the series Monsters, The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story: a «grotesque shock drama».

Ben 24 members of the brothers’ family convicted of murdering their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez, and now at the center of the true crime drama by Ryan Murphy, currently number one on Netflix, they released a joint statement, published on the social networks of Tammi Menendez, Erik’s wifeon behalf of the entire «entire extended family»: «Today We want the world to know that we support Erik and Lyle. We pray individually and collectively for their release after they have been in prison for 35 years. We know them, we love them and we want them at home with us.”

And again: «Murphy claims to have spent years researching the case, but in the end he relied on the debunked Dominick Dunne, the pro-prosecution whistleblowerto justify his slander against us, and he never spoke to us.”

Dominick Dunne was a reporter who covered the Menendez trial in the 1990s, and in Monsters He is played by Nathan Lane. Among other things, claimed that Erik and Lyle were having an incestuous relationship (a scene in the series shows the brothers showering together), but Robert Rand, a journalist who covered the trial and wrote the book The Menendez Murders in 2018, he called this insinuation “a fantasy.” Murphy defended the inclusion of this elementstating that the series “presents the views and theories of many people involved in the case.”

«We know these men. We grew up with them since they were kids. We love them and are still close to them today. We also know what happened in their home and we know the incredibly turbulent events they endured. Many of us have been eyewitnesses to many atrocities that should never be witnessed,” the statement reads. “It’s sad that Ryan Murphy, Netflix and everyone else involved in this series doesn’t have an understanding of the impact of years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Maybe, after all, Monsters It’s all about Ryan Murphy.”

Immediately after the debut of the series on Netflix, Tammi had already published a statement in which her husband Erik called Murphy’s work “naive and inaccurate” in its portrayal of the brothers. The director responded by saying a Entertainment Tonight that «it is curious that (Erik, ed.) made a statement without having seen the show»: «The thing that I find interesting, which he does not mention in his quote, is that if you watch the show, I would say that at 60-65%, in scripts and form, the film centers on the abuse and what they claim happened to them. And we do it very carefully. It’s really, really hard, if it’s your life, to see it represented on screen».