The story of Lyle and Erik Menéndez

We have seen, time and time again, the deleterious effects of the public’s confusion between fiction and reality. Too often, the broadcaster or creator maintains this artistic vagueness on purpose, only to feign astonishment when the tide begins to turn and fans begin to take their story as gospel.

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A little reminder is in order, therefore: Ryan Murphy is a fiction screenwriter, an overworked producer, and an ogre when it comes to the darkest news stories. The time when he showed the harmless Glee is far behind him. After being criticized for his cavalier treatment of the Jeffrey Dahmer affair, he persisted and signed with Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menéndezabout two society brothers from Beverly Hills who murdered their parents.

Lyle and Erik, now 56 and 53 years old respectively, continue to serve their sentences after being sentenced to life in prison. But they and those close to them did not view very favorably the story of the affair revisited through the eyes of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, his writing partner. Erik mentioned “horrible and blatant lies”.

Ryan Murphy’s response was not long in coming: “Our vision and intention was to present you with all the facts and push you to do two things: make up your own mind about who is innocent, who is guilty, who is the monster, and spark a conversation about something we don’t know about. sexual abuse of male victims is never talked about in our culture.”

But, considering that Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menéndez is not a documentary – Netflix has just released one, very opportunely – but a fiction inspired by real events, where is the truth and where does invention begin for purely creative reasons?

Twice, the series insinuates that Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Erik (Cooper Koch) had an incestuous relationship: in episode 2, when Lyle kisses his brother, and in episode 6, when Kitty discovers them under the shower. The poster itself, on which the two actors pose naked and against each other, has an undeniable homoerotic connotation… and extremely disturbing.

During their trial, both brothers denied having had sexual relations. Lyle, on the other hand, admitted to having once sexually assaulted his little brother when he was 8 years old, in the woods. For Robert Rand, the author of the book The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings that Stunned the Nationthis was a reproduction of the trauma that his own father had inflicted on him on multiple occasions.

Again in the series, journalist Dominick Dunne, played by Nathan Lane, who covered the trial for Vanity Fair at the time, claimed during a dinner that the two brothers had an incestuous relationship. In fact, he never insinuated anything of the sort. On the other hand, he cast doubt on the brothers’ testimony about the sexual abuse they said they had suffered from their father, and claimed that they were acting on the stand.

In the series, during a session with the psychologist, Lyle threatens to kill the therapist. For the next appointment, fearing for his life, Dr. L. Jerome Oziel (played by Dallas Roberts) then asks his mistress (and patient) Judalon Smyth (Leslie Grossman) to listen discreetly behind the door just in case , and it is there that she hears the confession of the two brothers.

We are then in October 1989. The therapist, who recorded the sessions (and therefore the confession that Lyle and Erik killed their parents), places the tapes in a safe, gives the key to Judalon Smyth, and asks him to return them to the police if anything happened to him.

And this is indeed what happened in reality. Judalon Smyth, however, waited until March 1990 to turn over the evidence to authorities, leading to the brothers’ arrest. She later accused Dr. Oziel of drugging and sexually assaulting her. During the Menéndez trial in 1993, after long debates on the admissibility or otherwise of the recordings, she also declared on the stand that the psychologist had told her “brainwashed” : he would have manipulated her memories, making her think that she remembered more details than in reality. She then admitted to having only heard snatches of the confession.

In the series, the brothers, who premeditated everything, are looking for an alibi. So they rush to the nearest cinema to buy two tickets for a film that would place them somewhere other than home at the time of the murder. A film that they will obviously never see. They also wanted to appear in a crowded restaurant.

In reality, if they actually initially pleaded that they had gone to the cinema that evening, they would later confess to having never left the family home. Erik would later tell ABC, in a 1996 interview: “Twelve gunshots in the middle of Beverly Hills on a Sunday night, and no one calls the police. We were waiting at home, and no one showed up. I still can’t believe it. We didn’t have an alibi, we just said we were at the cinema.”

In the series, Donovan Goodreau (Anthony Turpel), Lyle’s roommate and friend at Princeton, opens up about the sexual assaults he suffered when he was younger. He will later tell the brothers’ lawyer that the latter in return told him what his father was doing to him. In reality, Donovan will say that Lyle didn’t tell him anything. But during the trial, the defense will cast doubt on his version by presenting a recorded interview in which he claims that Lyle Menéndez told him how their father abused him and his brother.

Many gray areas still persist today in the Menéndez affair. It is precisely in these interstices that Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan were able to slip their share of authorial fantasies, with the aim, above all, of entertainment (rightly or wrongly). If the series made it possible to shed light on this sordid news story that is relatively little known in France, we must keep in mind that the intention of the creators is not to leave a documentary mark. For this, there are journalists who have made their research work and hearing reports available to the public.