Ryan Murphy says the Menéndez brothers should be 'sending me flowers'

Ryan Murphy, the co-creator of Monsters: The Lyle & Erik Menendez Story, believes the imprisoned siblings should be thanking him for the publicity his show has stirred up.

The new Netflix series is a dramatized retelling of the story of the two real-life Menéndez brothers who went to prison for murdering their parents in Beverly Hills in 1989. Its depiction of the brother's familial relationships, incestuous storylines, the sensationalizing of real murders, and concern over differentiating fact from fiction immediately kicked up a hailstorm of controversy. Earlier this week, Murphy said he wasn't interested in reaching out to the brothers to include their points of view. "What would I ask them?" he said. "I know what their perspective is."

As the controversy rages on, Murphy had some fresh thoughts about the siblings.

"I’ll tell you my thoughts about the Menéndez brothers,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “The Menéndez brothers should be sending me flowers. They haven’t had so much attention in 30 years. And it’s gotten the attention of not only this country, but all over the world."

He went on to say that there's is "an outpouring of interest in their lives and in the case. I know for a fact that many people have offered to help them because of the interest of my show and what we did."

Reaching out to the Menéndez brothers seemed unnecessary to Murphy. "There is no world that we live in where the Menéndez brothers or their wives or lawyers would say, 'You know what, that was a wonderful, accurate depiction of our clients.' That was never going to happen, and I wasn’t interested in that happening."

Following the show's release, Tammi Menéndez, the woman who married Erik Menéndez while he was in prison, released a statement "in Erik's words."

"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. I can only believe they were done so on purpose," the statement read. "It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naïve 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."

Menéndez concluded: "How demoralizing to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma. 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."

Monsters: The Lyle & Erik Menendez Storyis currently Netflix's most streamed television series.