Prolific show creator Ryan Murphy has admitted the second season of his true-crime Netflix series Monster was partly inspired by social media sleuths who have argued its subjects, brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, were wrongly convicted of murdering their parents more than 30 years ago. “There are thousands of TikToks from young people, specifically young women, talking about the Lyle and Erik case,” Murphy said at the New York launch of the series. “I was blown away because it seemed so current to them.
” Nicholas Chavez, Chloë Sevigny, Javier Bardem and Cooper Koch as the Menendez family in Monsters. Credit: Netflix During their two trials – the first of which was broadcast on Court TV but resulted in a hung jury – the brothers argued they had killed their parents, record company executive Jose Menendez and former journalist Kitty (played in the series by Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny), in their Beverly Hills mansion in August 1989 as an act of self-defence. The brothers claimed they feared for their lives because they threatened to reveal the sustained abuse, including sexual, to which they had been subjected by their father, while their mother knew of it and had done nothing to protect them.
That argument was deemed inadmissible in the second trial and was largely dismissed in media coverage at the time as a thin veneer for the real motive, financial gain. In 1998, they were found guilty of murder and sentenced to life without parole. However, the view of .