Ryan Murphy now says he doesn’t actually believe Lyle and Erik Menendez had an incestuous relationship, despite his portrayal of the brothers in Netflix’s monsters, he told Vanity Fair.
“There’s a lot of controversy about the incest,” Murphy said, “I don’t think that the Menendez brothers had incest, personally, but there are people who say they did.” Murphy told the magazine it was worth including because “Dominick Dunne and other journalists and people…this was presented as evidence in court as a theory as to why these crimes might’ve happened.”
Murphy has been defending the series, which follows the lives of the brothers leading up to their conviction for murdering their parents in 1989, since it premiered on Netflix. The brothers slammed the series from prison, where they are still serving life sentences. Erik wrote in a message posted to Lyle’s Facebook page, “How demoralizing to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma,” and added, “Is the truth not enough?”
He also called the show “ruinous,” as the brothers had been working to rehabilitate their image from murderers to victims who suffered abuse from their parents. However, he did not address the incest portrayal in his criticism of the series. The brothers’ extended family also released a statement, calling the show a “character assassination,” and slamming Murphy, who they say “claims he spent years researching the case but in the end relied on debunked Dominick Dunne, the pro-prosecution hack, to justify his slander against us and never spoke to us.”
In response, Murphy has said the brothers are “playing the victim card right now—’poor, pitiful us’—which I find reprehensible and disgusting,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview from Tuesday. Instead of criticizing him, Murphy said, “The Menendez brothers should be sending me flowers” since “they haven’t had so much attention in 30 years.”
“There is no world that we live in where the Menendez 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,” he also told THR.
Regardless of he and his writers’ “obligation” to tell multiple “points of view” of the story—including the incest—the show did what he’d hoped it would do. “I know for a fact that many people have offered to help them because of the interest of my show and what we did,” he told the site. “There’s room for all points of view.”
