Originally appeared on E! Online
Erik Menendez is speaking out against Ryan Murphy‘s series about him and his brother Lyle Menendez, who are serving life sentences for murdering their parents in 1989.
Erik’s shared his thoughts about “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” in a message his wife Tammi Menendez shared on X, formerly Twitter, Sept. 19, the day the show premiered on Netflix.
“I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show,” Erik Menendez said. “I can only believe they were done so on purpose. 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 do this without bad intent.”
E! News has reached out to Murphy and Netflix for comment on the 53-year-old’s remarks and has not heard back.
In “Monsters,” the second season of a biographical crime drama anthology series that the “Glee” and “American Horror Story” co-created with Ian Brennan, Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch play Lyle and Erik Menendez, respectively, while Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny portray the brothers’ parents, José Menendez and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez.
In 1996, following two trials, Erik and Lyle Menendez were convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder for the 1989 shotgun killings of their father and mother in their Beverly Hills home. The brothers were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Prosecutors had said Erik and Lyle Menendez’s motivation for the murders stemmed from their desire to inherit the family fortune. The siblings had alleged their parents had physically, emotionally and sexually abused them for years and their legal team argued they killed their mother and father in self-defense.
“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,” Erik Menendez said in his statement, “back though 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.”
Netflix is getting ready to premiere their new series, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” on Sept. 19. The show is the latest true crime case being tackled by Ryan Murphy, and just like “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” it’s getting a lot of buzz. It’s inspired by the infamous Menendez brothers, who are currently serving life sentences without parole for the murder of their parents. Access Hollywood is breaking down the first teaser trailer for the series and looking back on the original case.
He continued, “Those awful lies have been disrupted and exposed by countless brave victims over the last two decades who have broken through their personal shame and bravely spoken out. So now Murphy shapes his horrible narrative through vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander.”
Erik Menendez added that “violence is never an answer, never a solution, and is always tragic.”
“As such,” he continued, “I hope it is never forgotten that violence against a child creates a hundred horrendous and silent crime scenes darkly shadowed behind glitter and glamor and rarely exposed until tragedy penetrates everyone involved.”