The reviews are in for Ryan Murphy‘s latest true crime outing, and one critic is certainly not pleased.
After Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story debuted Thursday on Netflix, Erik Menéndez called out the series’ “naive and inaccurate” depiction of his and brother Lyle’s 1989 murder of their parents José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menéndez.
“I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant likes rampant in the show,” said Erik in a statement shared on Lyle’s Facebook page. “I can only believe they were done so on purpose. 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.
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“It is sad for me to know that Netflix’s dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding 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. Those awful lies have been disrupted and exposed by countless brave victims over the last two decades who have broken through their personal shame and bravely spoken out,” he continued. “So now Murphy shapes his horrible narrative through vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander.”
Erik added in part, “Is the truth not enough?”
After José was shot six times and Kitty 10 times on August 20, 1989, police initially investigated several mob leads. The brothers were arrested in March 1990 after Erik confessed to his psychologist, and they alleged in trial that they killed their parents out of fear for their lives after a lifetime of abuse, including sexual abuse from their father.
Although Erik and Lyle were convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, their attorney Mark Geragos told People he’s “cautiously optimistic” that new family testimonies will help get the case reduced to voluntary manslaughter.
According to the show’s official Netflix logline, Monsters “dives into the historic case that took the world by storm, paved the way for audiences’ modern-day fascination with true crime, and in return asks those audiences: Who are the real monsters?”
Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch star as Lyle and Erik Menéndez, with Javier Bardem as José, Chloë Sevigny as Kitty, Nathan Lane as Dominick Dunne and Ari Graynor as Leslie Abramson.