Everyone's talking about Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's latest show Monsters: The Lyle & Erik Menendez Story, but it's not necessarily because of how great it is.
The latest true crime-inspired miniseries from Murphy and Brennan follows 2022's redundantly titled Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which starred Evan Peters and Niecy Nash. That show had its share of controversies, with parents of some of Dahmer's victims complaining about how the show portrayed Dahmer's relationship with them.
The new season of Monster is courting even more controversy. Not only are viewers complaining about certain aspects of the film's depiction of the Menéndez brothers, but one of the brothers themselves did, as did a trial expert.
Here's what you need to know about all the controversy and buzz surrounding the new show.
Miles Crist/Netflix
Lyle and Erik Menéndez were two real-life brothers who killed their parents on August 20, 1989 and were later arrested and convicted of first-degree murder for the crime, being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Their father, José, was a successful Cuban-American businessman who raised his sons in a wealthy neighborhood of Princeton, New Jersey, before moving the family to Beverly Hills.
According to the brothers, as well as their family and other witnesses, they were the victims of years of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse at the hands of their parents, and especially their father.
In their trial, the brothers said that the sexual abuse was what drove them to kill their parents. Unfortunately, a judge in their second trial (the first resulted in a deadlocked jury) ruled that they were barred from using sexual abuse as a defense, and they were both found guilty of murder.
They have been in prison ever since.
Miles Crist/Netflix
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is the latest drama series from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. Murphy also produces the American Crime Story franchise, but is more directly involved in the Monster series, which focuses on the lives of "monstrous killers" like Jeffrey Dahmer in season one and, now, the Menéndez brothers in season two.
Miles Crist/Netflix
The new season of Monsters is problematic for multiple reasons. Some fans were already critical that the show compares Lyle and Erik, who killed their abusers after a lifetime of intense abuse, to Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial rapist, murderer, and cannibal.
But the biggest controversy comes from how the show has portrayed the brothers' relationship to each other.
Like other Ryan Murphy shows, Monsters has more than its fair share of homoerotic moments, and most of them happen between the two brothers.
In the show, the brothers kiss on the mouth, Lyle cuts in on Erik while he's dancing with a woman, Lyle sticks his thumb in his brother's mouth, and in a fantasy scene, their mom walks in on them showering together. However, there is no evidence the brothers' relationship was sexual at all.
Robert Rand, who covered the case as a reporter and has since written the definitive book on the trial, 2018's The Menéndez Murders, said that there is no credence to the incest rumors.
"I don't believe that Erik and Lyle Menéndez were ever lovers. I think that’s a fantasy that was in the mind of Dominick Dunne [a reporter played by Nathan Lane in the show]," Rand said to The Hollywood Reporter. "Rumors were going around the trial that maybe there was some sort of weird relationship between Erik and Lyle themselves. But I believe the only physical contact they might have had is what Lyle testified, that when Lyle was 8 years old, he took Erik out in the woods and played with him with a toothbrush — which is what [their father] José had done with him. And so I certainly wouldn’t call that a sexual relationship of any sort. It’s a response to trauma."
Many viewers are mad that the show has taken two real-life victims of traumatic and abusive incest and portrayed them as willingly entering into an incestuous relationship with each other.
Miles Crist/Netflix
One of the brothers, Erik, has put out a statement about the show from prison, through his wife.
"I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show," he said. "I can only believe they were done so on purpose. It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent."
"It is sad for me to know that Netflix's dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surround our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward – back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women."
"How demoralizing to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma," the statement continues. "Violence is never an answer, never a solution, and is always tragic. As such, I hope it is never forgotten that violence against a child creates a hundred horrendous and silent crime scenes darkly shadowed behind glitter and glamor and rarely exposed until tragedy penetrates everyone involved."
Kim Kardashian and Cooper Koch, the our actor who plays Erik, then went and visited the brothers at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, California.
Miles Crist/Netflix
Murphy was asked to respond to all of the Monsters controversy and Erik's statement by Entertainment Tonight while on the red carpet for his other new series Grotesquerie.
"I have many things to say about that. How long do you have?" the writer and producer started. "I think it's interesting that he's issued a statement without having seen the show. I know he hasn't seen the show in prison. I hope he does see the show [and] sees the work that Cooper Koch did."
"Listen, I think it's really, really hard to see your life up on screen. It's been 30 years around since that case; I think that's hard," he added.
"The thing that I find interesting that he doesn't mention in his quote — and that nobody from that side was talking about — is, if you watch the show, I'd say 60 to 65% of our show, in the scripts and in the film form, center around the abuse, and what they claim happened to them. We do it very carefully, we give them their day in court, and they talk openly about it," he said. "We present the facts from their point of view, largely. We spent three years researching it; all that is true,"
"The interesting thing that I think about [this season of] Monsters is that it's a Rashomon kind of approach," Murphy said. "There were four people involved in that, two of them are dead, and two of them are alive with [their] point of view. But what about the parents? We had an obligation [as] storytellers to also try and put in their perspective based on our research, which we did."
"I think people are confused about that, too. If you watch the show, what the show is doing, is presenting the points of view and theories from so many people who were involved in the case. Dominick Dunne [a reporter played by Nathan Lane in the show] wrote several articles talking about that theory and how he thought that theory had validity."
"What we do in the show is, he talks about that. We are presenting his point of view, just as we present [defense attorney] Leslie Abramson's point of view. The show presents over 10 points of view of different events… so when people watch that, and they see that, that is somebody in our show having a narrative statement about, 'This is what I believe really happened.' We had an obligation to show all of that, and we did."
