For the benefit of the brothers’ aunt Joan VanderMolen and the rest of their extended family, Erik Menendez’s wife Tammi has issued a critical critique of Netflix’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” “A phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episodic nightmare that is not only riddled with mistruths and outright falsehoods but ignores the most recent exculpatory revelations,” the family statement denounces.
“We are virtually the entire extended family of Erik and Lyle Menéndez,” the declaration stated. “We are 24 strong and today we want the world to know we support Erik and Lyle. We individually and collectively pray for their release after being imprisoned for 35 years. We know them, love them, and want them home with us.”
“Murphy claims he spent years researching the case but in the end relied on debunked Dominick Dunne, the pro-prosecution hack, to justify his slander against us and never spoke to us,” the Menendez brothers’ family statement reads. The Menendez brothers’ family members have “been victimized by this grotesque shockadrama.”
In the 1990s, Dominick Dunne chronicled the Menendez trial as a journalist for Vanity Fair. “Monsters,” which illustrates the 1989 killings of Jose and Kitty Menendez by their sons Lyle and Erik, and the ensuing trials that resulted in their conviction in 1996, stars Nathan Lane as him. “Monsters” depicts one of Dunne’s most contentious theories, which holds that Erik and Lyle were incestuous. The brothers are shown taking a shower together in one scene from the series.
The family’s declaration says, “The character assassination of Erik and Lyle, who are our nephews and cousins, under the guise of ‘storytelling narrative’ is repulsive. We know these men. We grew up with them since they were boys. We love them and to this very day we are close to them. We also know what went on in their home and the unimaginably turbulent lives they have endured. Several of us were eyewitnesses to many atrocities one should never have to bear witness to.”
“It is sad that Ryan Murphy, Netflix, and all others involved in this series, do not have an understanding of the impact of years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse,” The statement ends. “Perhaps, after all, ‘Monsters’ is all about Ryan Murphy.”
Not long after “Monsters” debuted on Netflix, Tammi shared a statement from Erik Menendez criticising the show and claiming that Murphy’s depiction of the brothers was “naive and inaccurate.” “It’s interesting that he’s issued a statement without having seen the show,” Murphy retorted to Entertainment Tonight. “The thing that I find interesting that he doesn’t mention in his quote, is if you watch the show, I would say 60 to 65 percent of our show in the scripts and in the film form center around the abuse and what they claim happened to them,” Murphy said. “And we do it very carefully and we give them their day in court and they talk openly about it.”
Following the actual Erik’s criticism of the Netflix series, Cooper Koch, who plays Erik in the show, paid the Menendez brothers a visit when they were incarcerated. According to Koch, he told Eric that “it makes sense that you would feel this way” in a conversation with Variety. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to have the worst part of your life, such a traumatic and tragic thing, be televised for millions of people to see in a dramatised Hollywood TV way,” Koch said. “I just said, ‘I understand, I get it, and I stand with you.’”