The Menendez Brothers Docs Feel Like an Apology for Ryan Murphy's 'Monster'

In keeping with the recent you-can’t-have-just-one true-crime trend, two dueling documentaries —one on Netflix and one on Max— are now out about the infamous Menendez brothers’ murder case. The brothers are currently serving life in prison with no possibility for parole for the 1989 double murder of their parents — a sensationalized shotgun killing of a wealthy and respected Beverly Hills couple by their own children. Cue the televised trial.

Over the course of multiple trials and grueling testimony, the brothers revealed years of horrific abuse, including sexual abuse, inflicted by their father. But this was the ’90s, and the “abuse excuse” was ridiculed and dismissed. The brothers—now in their fifties—have begun giving interviews advocating that their case can serve as an opportunity to talk about the issue of and stigma around male sexual abuse. At the same time, the true crime community online, especially on TikTok, has burgeoned with support for the brothers to be retried.

The Netflix documentary, simply titled The Menendez Brothers, rolls chronologically through crime, investigation, trial, and then pivots to the larger point of societal change: the #MeToo movement. The brothers give expansive interviews. It’s thorough and precise and generally the better of the two.

The Max documentary, Menendez: Monsters or Misjudged?, frames its narrative from the first in the TikTok movement toward exonerating or at least retrying the brothers. It also leans more heavily on the lead police investigator, whose testimony, even so many decades later, reveals a lack of insight that I found both stunning and incredible. The Max doc also casually leaves out of the narrative that the break in the case came not because the boys’ therapist reported the in-session confession, but because said therapist kidnapped and held his own girlfriend hostage, and that girlfriend then went to the police with the incidental additional information, gained from her non-HIPAA-compliant and very violent partner, that his clients had confessed to murder.

Both docs coincide around a final moralistic focus point: the shift in public perception around sexual abuse. The boys’ first trial included such dated legalistic claims that men “can’t be raped” and the conclusion that since the defendants were not women, battered women’s syndrome could not be applied to their case. This, among the general ’90s public certainty that wealthy and successful businessmen just did not sexually abuse their sons.

The documentaries invite the audiences of 2024 to pat themselves on the back and consider themselves triumphantly evolved from the closed-minded perception of thirty years ago. Generally, yes, we’ve come leaps and bounds in our discussion of how we treat and listen to sexual abuse survivors, largely thanks to the #MeToo movement.

But it’s also true that both of these documentaries came out in close proximity to Ryan Murphy’s shock-value Netflix series Monster: The Menendez Brothers, which, in addition to being Ryan Murphy’s usual tritely over-sensational and over-sexualized trash, leans into all the worst and distorted portrayals of this subject that we’ve supposedly become so “evolved” about. Murphy, in his continual clumsy attempts to turn everything up to eleven, implies the brothers themselves had a sexual relationship. Murphy, speaking from very far up his own ass, claimed that the brothers should be “sending me flowers” because his show was the “only reason” that anybody was taking an interest in their plight. Uh huh.

Ignoring the fact that Murphy is apparently willfully unaware of the massive years-long online movement that far preceded his show, Netflix’s own documentary shows legal experts stating explicitly, multiple times, that the “only reason” anyone is now talking about this again is because of the TikTok campaign.

These dual documentaries feel like some kind of warped recompense for the extravagant and insulting Murphy project, while Netflix continues to profit from both. I can’t imagine why anybody would think at this stage in his career that Murphy has any interest in faithfully portraying the lives and struggles of the real people whose stories he co-opts. I mean, he turned his Truman Capote Feud season into weird Capote/Baldwin fanfiction, while melding it into recreations of actual events. But evidently, the man just can’t stop himself from making claims on the tragedies and traumas of real people, where he could simply stick to the fiction he so clearly wants to be telling.

While Murphy sets himself up as a champion for the brothers ahead of their upcoming rehearing, Erik Menendez actually gets it right: Murphy is profiting off skewed and irresponsible portrayals of male sexual abuse, just like all the talk-show hosts and SNL skits mocking the brothers back in the ’90s. So much for “evolved.”