What We Learned from The Menendez Brothers Netflix Documentary

Erik and Lyle Menendez have been behind bars for killing their parents for more than three decades—but the brothers haven’t been out of the spotlight.

Their story inspired Ryan Murphy’s hit Netflix drama Monsters, which came out in September, and the streamer will follow it up on Oct. 7 with the documentary The Menendez Brothers, featuring phone interviews with the brothers in prison.

The Menendez brothers have never denied killing their parents in their Beverly Hills mansion on Aug. 20, 1989, but they have long been asking for the public to better understand their story. In their highly publicized trials, beginning in 1993 and ending in 1996 when they were sentenced to life in prison, prosecutors argued they were motivated to murder Jose and Kitty Menendez to get their hands on their parents’ roughly $14 million estate, while the defense said they acted out of self-defense after years of being sexually abused by their father, a prominent music executive.

The Menendez Brothers revisits trial footage which Erik and Lyle each took to the stand and spoke out about the abuses they say they endured. In addition to the brothers, filmmakers interview a lawyer for their defense team, jurors, expert witnesses, and journalists who covered the case in the early 1990s. The film features comments from the Menendez brothers about every milestone in the timeline of their case.

Here are some notable moments from the brothers’ interviews in The Menendez Brothers.

The night of the murders

Lyle and Erik Menendez want to make it clear that they were in no way gleeful when they killed their parents when they were 21 and 18, respectively.

The documentary kicks off with audio of Lyle calling 9-1-1 and saying that someone killed his parents. 

But the brothers weren’t arrested until seven months later, and they both say in the documentary that they were surprised they weren’t treated as suspects sooner. According to Erik, “The gunpowder residue was all over our hands…There were gun shells in my car.” And, “If they would have just pressed me, I wouldn't have been able to withstand any questioning. I was in a completely broken and shattered state of mind. I was shell-shocked.”

Lyle described the “secret” that he was responsible for the killing of his parents as “a huge weight." “There was a feeling of some relief, being arrested," he says. "Like so many of the emotions in that time of my life, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

The Menendez brothers’ reaction to the murders

Police did start to notice them when they started spending extravagantly, like buying a Porsche, three Rolex watches, and hiring a tennis coach that cost $50,000 a year. 

But they say those were efforts to distract them from their profound grief.

“The idea that I was having a good time is absurd,” Erik says. “Everything was to cover up this horrible pain of not wanting to be alive.”

Lyle says that while he may have been acting like a playboy, he wasn’t truly having fun. He describes sobbing at night and being unable to sleep. He says, “Without my father helping direct my life, I was quite lost” and that “a part of Erik and I died on that night.”

Complicated feelings about their father

Erik explains that he and his brother committed the crime because “something very, very wrong was happening in the family.” 

Throughout the documentary, trial footage shows Erik and Lyle breaking down as they explain how their father forced them to perform sexual acts on him. Lyle said he had to fondle his father’s genitals and give him blowjobs. Erik said he willingly went along with the sexual abuse because one-on-one time with his father was hard to come by. Lyle was apparently so confused by all of this intimate family time that he says he molested Erik.

And yet, the Menendez brothers want Netflix viewers to know that they were terrified about speaking out about their father. They say they didn’t want to destroy his father’s reputation. Erik explains: “telling sick secrets of the family would be like killing my parents again.”

In the documentary, Erik says, “One of the things that kept me from killing myself is that I felt like I would be a complete failure to my dad at that point.”

Where the Menendez brothers are now

Both men are at the RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, California. Lyle is 56, and Erik is 53. In the documentary, Erik describes how he has found painting to be an escape.

They are waiting to hear whether a judge will agree to consider evidence that was discovered after the trial. There is a letter that Erik Menendez wrote to his cousin Andy Cano eight months before the murder explaining how he was terrified of his father and feared for his life. The letter was only discovered in storage after Cano’s death in 2003. And there is a 2023 sworn affidavit in which Roy Rossello of the boy band Menudo claims that Jose Menendez sexually abused him.

The Menendez brothers have exhausted their state and federal appeal options, and a retrial is unlikely. As Robert Rand, who has written about the case and appears in the documentary, tells TIME, “half the witnesses are dead or they have dementia. And do the taxpayers of LA County really want to spend that money [millions of dollars] to retry Eric and Lyle Menendez?” (Rand is close to the brothers and has been visiting Lyle Menendez in prison recently.)

Between the MeToo movement starting a national conversation about sexual abuse and the case going viral on TikTok in the last few years, the brothers think the Netflix doc can reach a more sympathetic audience that didn’t exist in the early 1990s. The TikTok generation, for example, was largely born after the conviction. As Lyle puts it in the doc, “For the first time I feel like it’s a conversation where people now can understand and believe.”