The limited TV series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story that came out last fall on @netflix was always problematic.
Creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan claimed they had spent “years researching the Menendez case” and admitted they’d used the three decade old “Vanity Fair” magazine articles written by Dominick Dunne – stories which are full of BS and made-up anecdotes – as their primary source material.
The most egregious storyline in “Monsters” claimed brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez were involved in an incestuous relationship. It simply wasn’t true.
If there was any evidence to support that, I guarantee you it would have been introduced in the final weeks of the first Menendez trial when prosecutors were throwing out an assortment of nonsensical theories hoping something would stick. None of them did or were allowed before the juries.
If Nick Dunne – who never heard a rumor he didn’t embrace and rush to print – had never said anything to any of the friends he was close to, it probably didn’t happen. As one journalist said, “It was a very gossipy trial.” One of Dunne’s closest friends was TMZ boss Harvey Levin who reported many Menendez stories when he was a local TV news reporter at CBS 2 in L.A.
When I appeared on TMZ Live last September – just after the premiere of “Monsters” – Levin said he’d never heard the incest rumor before and said “if somebody is floating that, it’s pretty rough.”
I sat next to Dunne for six months in court and had lunch with him frequently. So where did Ryan Murphy come up with the information that “the biggest Menendez family secret” was that Erik and Lyle were having a sexual relationship with each other?
Several weeks ago, I re-read my book – the Updated Edition of “The Menendez Murders.” In my chapter titled “Mistrials,” there was one sentence about the Erik Menendez jury deliberations during the first trial that caught my attention:
“One of the men suggested that ‘Jose and Kitty discovered that Lyle and Erik were having a homosexual affair, that’s why they had to kill them.'”
I interviewed everybody from the two juries in 1994 after the trial – including Hazel Thornton from Erik’s jury, who wrote the book “Hung Jury: Diary of a Menendez Juror.” Hazel’s book includes the sentences: “Phil thinks what Kitty ‘knew all along’ is that Erik was gay. More than one of the men thinks that Erik and Lyle were ‘doing’ each other!!!'”
The only time Hazel and I remember hearing anything about incest was during her jury deliberations or my interviews with jurors after the first trial. Jurors were instructed by Menendez trial Judge Stanley Weisberg that information discussed in jury deliberations is NOT evidence by itself. Jury members were told that they should base their decision only on evidence and testimony they’d heard in court.
So how about it Mr. Murphy, Mr. Brennan, and @netflix?
Did you base your false theory about the #MenendezBrothers having an incestuous relationship on the few sentences from the books Hazel and I wrote? If you had consulted with us, we could have told you the facts.
But why let the truth get in the way of a salacious TV show and a prurient storyline that was included to hype ratings?
SMH.