Ryan Murphy has called the Menéndez brothers “disgusting” and “reprehensible” for their reaction to Monsters.
On 19 September, the second season of the crime-drama anthology series, sub-titled The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story, hit Netflix.
Based on the 1989 murders of José (Javier Bardem) and Kitty Menéndez (Chloë Sevigny), the series respectively stars Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch as Lyle and Erik.
Although the series was met with widespread critical acclaim for the performances, particularly Coch’s in episode five, it was criticised for depicting a somewhat incestuous relationship between the brothers.
Following the release of the series, Erik’s wife Tammi shared a statement on his behalf, in which he slammed 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,” he said. “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.”
Lyle and Erik’s relatives also described it as a “phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episodic nightmare”: “Our family has been victimized by this grotesque shockadrama. […] Perhaps, after all, Monsters is all about Ryan Murphy.”
In a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Murphy said he and co-creator Ian Brennan “set out to do exactly what we wanted to do”.
He continued to say that 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. There’s sort of 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. 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.”
Murphy added: “We were telling the story of Dominick Dunne, of Leslie Abramson. We were also telling the story of the parents, who they blew their heads off; we were also telling their story.
“We had an obligation to so many people, not just to Erik and Lyle. But that’s what I find so fascinating; that they’re playing the victim card right now – ‘poor, pitiful us’ – which I find reprehensible and disgusting.
“I also think that two things can be true at the same time. I think they could have killed their parents, and also had been abused. They could have been of ambiguous moral character as young people, and be rehabilitated now. So I think that story is complicated.”
On 7 October, Netflix will release a documentary on the case, which Lyle and Erik have directly been involved with. A press release says it will “offer new insight and a fresh perspective on a case that people only think they know”.
Murphy said he won’t watch the film because he’s “not interested in anything else about the Menéndez brothers”.
“I don’t want to watch the documentary. I have no interest in meeting them. I have no interest in talking to their lawyers or their wives. I’ve just sort of done it, because I was telling a bigger story, a cultural story. I wasn’t doing a biography of them. I was telling a story about a certain place and time,” he explained.
“The story has always fascinated people, including myself, because we’ll never really know what happened. It is an unknowable mystery. There were four people involved in that story and two of them were shot in the face. So I think that the public’s fascination is limitless, because there’s no answer.
“We will never know if they told the truth, we will never know if they were sexually abused for sure. We will never know if the parents were the monsters.”
Despite the controversy, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story has become a massive hit for Netflix, securing the number-one spot in countless countries around the world.
A third season is also set to make its way to the platform, with the American Horror Story creator recently announcing that Charlie Hunnam will be playing serial killer and bodysnatcher Ed Gein.
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