If you’re familiar with Lyle and Erik Menendez, you’re probably wrong about them. That’s what Kim Kardashian is saying in a personal essay she published on NBC’s website yesterday, arguing that the brothers, who were convicted for the 1989 murder of their parents and sentenced to life without parole, should be released. Kim opens with an appeal to empathy: “we are all products of our experiences.
They shape who we were, who we are, and who we will be. Physiologically and psychologically, time changes us, and I doubt anyone would claim to be the same person they were at 18.” Lyle and Eric Menendez were 21 and 18 years old respectively in 1989, when they murdered their parents in their Beverly Hills living room as the couple was watching TV, shooting them multiple times with Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns.
“As is often the case, this story is much more complex than it appears on the surface,” writes Kardashian. She goes on to detail the years of sexual abuse that both men allegedly suffered at the hands of their father, Jose Enrique. A then-8-year-old Lyle told his cousin Diane about the abuse, and when she related his claims to his mother, Mary Louise, she got nowhere: “I could tell that she was not believing any of this,” she told ABC News in 2021.
“Following years of abuse and a real fear for their lives,” Kardashian continues, “Erik and Lyle chose what they thought at the time was their only way out — an unimaginable way to escape their living nightm.
