Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story - Netflix

[Rollergirl11]

Anyone watching? It’s really quite bizarre; it’s almost played for laughs.

Is that Milli Vanilli they’re playing?! 🤪😂

I have been thinking the same, are most murder trials presented with why did you murder so and so? Or just an are you guilty or not guilty regardless of the why?
I'd bet money that most criminals currently serving time have a backstory of bad childhood that led them to them taking a criminal path.. Where does the line of accountability end?
That being said I'd still like to see them free, I believe they were abused and they've served a long enough sentence now. Keeping them locked up until they die is unnecessary. I highly doubt they would reoffend and being so high profile they could hopefully highlight and advocate for sexual violence victims.

I’d say where there’s no question of whodunnit then mitigation is often given in trials. Look for example at cases of women who have been victims of domestic abuse go on to kill their partner - the abuse has been a mitigating factor (in England at least - US law is another world entirely)

I've just finished this and am now fascinated by this. I don't think they really believed their lives were at risk but i think the abuse is absolutely relevant to why they did it and the moral right or wrong of it all. Being an abuse victim doesn't mean you can open gun fire on a crowd or randomly stab a stranger, of course it can never justify that kind of behaviour, but to murder your abuser is very different. They absolutely needed prison time to make a point but life without parole seems extremely harsh.

One point I didn't see mentioned towards the end is the alleged abuse of Erik by Lyle. I can't imagine people who fabricated a story about abuse would also make up this element. They both admitted it was true. This for me is perhaps the difference between things in 1995 and 2025, that act may at the time helped portray Lyle as a bad character or sick minded person, but today it would be an immediate red flag for CSA of the perpetrator. Same with the suggestion of something incestuous between the boys, surely we can't be surprised that a kid who has been abused within the home will display other sexually inappropriate behaviour within the family. This is what their norm was, courtesy of their father this should have been a major red flag too.

The actors are just amazing. Erik in particular in that difficult episode that was done in one take was so good. I really hope they both do well out of this.

If you have the time, I’d encourage you to watch the real brothers’ testimonies - both direct- and cross-examination are available on YouTube. I got fascinated by this case in September and have spent time researching it nearly every day since.

FWIW, their take on “Monsters” is that the portrayal of Erik is largely accurate, but the character of Lyle bears little resemblance to the real Lyle when it comes to personality.

They're now eligible for parole:

https://deadline.com/2025/05/menendez-brothers-murder-sentence-reduced-eligible-for-parole-1236396429/

I watched the C4 documentary “The Menendez Brothers: Eric Tells All” and Lyle’s behaviour was just as idiotic in real life as it was in “Monsters”. He is literally the reason they got convicted the second time around because of his idiotic statements in prison and that book that he dictated about how they managed to con the jury

I’ve just seen a judge has resentenced Eric and Lyle meaning they are both now eligible for parole. It’s reading to me that they will be released.

Martha Shelton later admitted she never heard Lyle say anything about fooling the jury.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MenendezBrothers/comments/1fo9ps0/dominickdunnepaidawomantolieabouthaving/

“That book he dictated about how he managed to fool the jury” was Norma Novelli secretly taping their phone calls and releasing the transcripts as a book. (You’re confusing the Shelton calls and the Novelli calls.) There’s nothing there about fooling the jury. You can read it for yourself if you want. However, Lyle chose not to testify in the second trial because after talking to Norma Novelli for hours and hours over months and months, he had no idea what he might have said that the prosecution could make look bad out of context.

”Monsters” depicts him as loud and aggressive in his day-to-day life; while he could be pretty arrogant when he was younger, he didn’t have an ostentatious, attention-seeking personality (and also wasn’t a drug user).

Do you know him personally? Because the documentary I watched depicted Lyle pretty close to how “Monsters” depicted him and it came out years before the dramatisation.

In the documentary it was said that the reason he couldn’t testify in the second trial was because of the series of incriminating statements he made whilst in prison after the first trial about how they managed to fool the jury once and could do it again.

In any event, whether people believe their accounts or not, one thing that was never in doubt was that the night they killed their parents they were not in fear for their lives. It was planned premeditated murder, not self-defence.

“Erik Tells All” was a good documentary in many respects, but it was incorrect there. If Lyle was actually on tape talking about fooling the jury, don’t you think that audio would have emerged by now? Martha Shelton literally admits that she lied about this. (And before anyone says, “Maybe they paid her to take it back,” they were broke by the end of the first trial.)

I don’t know anyone in this case personally, but I’ve spent around 300 hours researching it, and people who know Lyle have agreed that his personality was very different from his representation in “Monsters.” Not that he couldn’t be arrogant and reckless, but he wasn’t someone who went out of his way to be obnoxious.

I do believe they were in fear for their lives, because I’ve listened to their entire testimonies from the first trial, both direct and cross, and it made sense to me, especially once you add the testimonies of expert witnesses who examined them and talked about hypervigilence in abuse survivors. If you’re afraid of specific people and you buy a gun to protect yourself, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re planning to murder them. Their argument in the first trial, which the judge wouldn’t allow them to use in the second trial, was that they acted in “imperfect self-defense” - the incorrect but authentic fear that their parents were going to kill them.

I don’t mind debating this case with people who disagree with me, but I don’t have time to detail all the evidence with people who have cursory knowledge of a very complicated case.