The Menendez brothers are back, but very little has changed

Thirty-five years after they killed their parents in their Beverly Hills home, Lyle and Erik Menendez are once again objects of enormous public interest. So are details of their first, highly publicized trial, which set the stage for the O.J. Simpson case and put Court TV — a fledgling operation at the time — on the map. There’s a perfectly respectable reason for that: The brothers, who are serving consecutive life sentences after they were convicted in 1996 for the first-degree murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez, might go free. Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced Thursday that his office was reviewing two new pieces of evidence that could provide sufficient basis for a resentencing, or even a new trial. Both appear to corroborate the brothers’ claim — which many found implausible back then — that their father, a brutally demanding steward of their tennis careers, was also sexually abusive. A hearing scheduled for Nov. 26 could conceivably overturn the controversial verdict.

The brothers’ supporters are understandably ecstatic about this legal development. If it secures the pair’s freedom, it would correct an outcome that they see as an egregious miscarriage of justice borne of a historical moment (the ’90s) when the public knew less about sexual abuse and tended to revictimize rather than support survivors. Their release would also reframe the exploitative rubbernecking in which we engage while consuming (and producing) true crime as something a little more grand; something closer to moral action. You aren’t gawking at dead bodies or relishing the lurid details of someone’s life-breaking trauma, you’re participating in a crusade.

The sleazier (but related) reason that the brothers’ case is back in the news is that Ryan Murphy, true crime TV’s most lurid and prolific bard, made a show about it. His latest Netflix series, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” premiered Sept. 19. The semi-fictionalized, campily irresponsible, sometimes moving production has generated fresh outrage over and interest in the case. Erik Menendez issued a statement condemning the crime drama, but the show’s mounting popularity despite or because of all the controversy it has generated suggests that our contemporary relationship to true crime TV isn’t quite as sophisticated, or as distinct from those long-ago days when people gawped at Simpson’s white Bronco, as we’d like to think.

The series reintroduces audiences to the gory crime scene, the brothers’ shopping spree after their parents’ deaths and their extremely distressing testimony about how their father, a powerful media executive, sexually victimized them. A believer in “teaching the controversy,” Murphy portrays how skeptically that testimony was received while, at various points, replicating that skepticism. The series comprises several conflicting perspectives, including those of Kitty and Jose (Chloë Sevigny and Javier Bardem), defense counsel Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor) and Dominick Dunne (Nathan Lane), the gossipy Vanity Fair journalist who was later accused of paying a source to lie that she had overheard Lyle Menendez say, “We’ve snowed half the country. Now we have to snow the other half.” (That allegedly fabricated quote made it into Dunne’s story not once but twice. The episode does not, however, make it into the show.)