Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story: The Ethics of True Crime as Entertainment

Miles Crist/ Netflix

Grab the popcorn; we’re watching the trial of the Menendez Brothers! Get into your pyjamas and maybe pop open that bottle of wine to watch the darkest corner of another's life. Frankly, these unethical behaviours reek of schadenfreude. 

Ryan Murphy’s ‘Monsters’ returns, shifting the focus from Dahmer to Erik and Lyle Menendez in exploring whether murderers are made or born. The 1989 murders were sensationalised in their time, shattering the glass bubble of white upper-class America by generating moral panic over the reality of picture-perfect families. The show highlights the struggle to understand male abuse which inadvertently reflects our legal system's same shortcomings today. Still serving life with no parole, the Menendez Brothers weigh in on their portrayal, knocking the series as ‘naive’ and crafted with ‘bad intent’.

Erik, Lyle, and their family condemn the show as a ‘grotesque shockadrama’ that is littered with blatant lies. Without consent, how are viewers meant to feel okay with watching? Don’t fret: we can continue to insert ourselves and our opinions into the personal lives and traumas of victims and perpetrators through our small snippets of television! Murphy assures us that the very family the series sets out to portray is simply experiencing ‘faux outrage’, misunderstanding the show’s point.  How comforting…

But, we should be uncomfortable. 

True Crime television commodifies the stories and traumas of real individuals, in this case, those who are still alive and facing their consequences. Yet the industry seems to think technical expertise and a temporary research team is enough - does knowing how to execute a ‘dolly zoom’, or how to use Premiere Pro, really qualify the handling of complex generational trauma and abuse cycles? 

Ultimately, True Crime Television intends to sell above all else. Consequently, they sensationalise, dramatise, and falsify through innuendos, most evidently through the sexual, incestuous relationship between the two brothers. Their anything-but-sexual relationship was far more devastating: a response to the abuse endured at the hands of Jose and Kitty Menendez. To embellish for views, for conversation, for salacious entertainment, is irresponsible and a violation of agency. 

Murphy, playing social-justice warrior, believes his show is “the best thing to happen to the Menendez brothers in 30 years”. Amidst boasting, there is a grain of truth.

The show undeniably thrusts the Menendez Brothers into public consciousness again. It has thrived where legal systems fail: empathy. Garnering widespread support, a petition demanding for a retrial has succeeded in attracting legal attention, with the Los Angeles DA reviewing the initial convictions. 

Yet, these are simply positive byproducts of an overall exploitative program. Whilst they remain promising, justice shouldn't require viral popularity, nor a Hollywood production team.

How many other innocent people have spent a lifetime in the system, with no one to save them? 

Unintentionally, 'The Lyle and Erik Menendez story' has sparked crucial moral questions about the intersections of law, media, and ethics. Despite their importance, we cannot focus on the Menendez Brothers in isolation. Modern viewings of the show exemplify the broader variability of the jury’s verdict in different social climates. 

This case demands more than retrospective justice for two brothers - it calls for a complete reconstruction of our legal system that can dismantle the ‘guilty vs innocent’ dichotomy to encompass the complexity of trauma and abuse.