After spending more than 2 decades in prison and out of the spotlight, convicted murderers Lyle and Erik Menendez are a trending topic once again. With a new scripted drama series and feature documentary inspired by the case both premiering this fall, Netflix is getting the lion’s share of the credit for Menendez Mania. But if you trace the trend back to its origins, it was TikTok creators who started drawing fresh attention to the case, bringing a younger generations’ perspective to what was formerly a ‘90s tabloid fascination. Just as they did with the Britney Spears’ conservatorship controversy, Gen Z creators have found ways to use their voice and platforms to not just build audiences around their content, but genuinely kickstart public movements to right past wrongs and re-interpret or reconsider biased media narratives of the past.
The Menendez Brothers remain in prison for the 1989 shooting deaths of their parents, José and Kitty Menendez, in a brutal and tragic case that gripped the nation for several years (at least, until allegations against former football star OJ Simpson monopolized the media’s focus). They’ve been sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. But with all the renewed public attention to the case, there have also been behind-the-scenes developments which could permanently alter their fates.
On October 3, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced that the Menendez case, and the brothers’ sentence, is currently under review by his department. In late November, he’ll inform the courts whether or not he plans to request a re-sentencing for the duo, or even advise that they be released from prison for good.
Most of the big questions surrounding the case involve the brothers’ primary defense argument from their first of two trials: that they killed their parents in self-defense, following years of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. While testimony about the nature of the abuse dominated the initial proceeding, resulting in a mistrial, the second jury did not hear about the sexual abuse allegations, and quickly voted to convict Lyle and Erik for first-degree murder.
The new Netflix documentary from filmmaker Alejandro Hartmann suggests that the general public in the mid 1990s – and indeed, the male members of the first Menendez jury – were unwilling to accept that adolescent boys were the victims of sexual abuse. It was many more years before these kinds of stories and allegations were widely discussed and accepted as authentic by mainstream American society. (The film points to a landmark 2010 episode of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show which discussed the impact of child sexual abuse on boys and men, which aired more than a decade after the brothers’ trials.)
According to one female juror from the first Menendez trial, the case resulted in a hung jury specifically because none of the male jurors accepted the brothers’ story, and did not believe young men would remain in a home where they were being subjected to this kind of behavior.
Over the years, of course – particularly in the post-MeToo Era – Americans have come to a better understanding about the realities of child sexual abuse, including the obvious fact that it can happen to young boys and men in addition to girls and women. But it’s not just shifting attitudes that have changed some Americans’ minds about the Menendez Brothers and their moral responsibilities for their crime.
A 2023 docuseries that streamed on Peacock – “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed” – featured a former member of the boy band, Roy Rosselló, making allegations against José Menendez that resembles stories from his two sons. As a senior executive at RCA Records, Menendez worked closely with the band. According to Rosselló, he was actually obsessed with individual members of Menudo, and sexually abused him at 14 years old inside the Menendez family home in New Jersey.
It was these allegations that brought the case to the widespread attention among creators on TikTok and Instagram, many of whom were not born or paying attention to the news yet when the case first grabbed headlines. A few videos about the Menendez case, expressing sympathy for them and their plight, had already trended on TikTok prior to the Peacock documentary and Rosselló allegations, but these headlines led to an explosion of new interest, and passionate re-examinations of the case from every perspective.
It was those TikTok videos and trends that came to the attention of TV producers Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, creators of the popular Jeffrey Dahmer docudrama “Monster.” At a promotional event for their new series, Murphy said that it was the passion of young TikTokers about the Menendez case that inspired him to tell the Menendez story. “There are thousands of TikToks from young people, specifically young women, talking about the Lyle and Erik Case,” he told the crowd, adding “I was blown away because it seemed so current to them.”
So in a non-ambiguous way, young creators making content about Lyle and Erik Menendez directly led to a wave of renewed interest in the case, which in turn could actually result in a change to the brothers’ legal status. That’s a tremendous amount of power in the hands of social media creators, when they’re properly collectivized, and the old guard occupying conventional centers of civic power are certainly aware of, and even concerned about, the shift.
Former Menendez prosecutor Pamela Bozanich – who worked on the first Menendez trail that resulted in a hung jury – specifically voices her displeasure with the TikTok movement in the Netflix doc. According to Bozanich, “the only reason we’re doing this special is because of the TikTok movement to free the ‘Menendi.’” She dismisses the idea that public opinion should hold any sway over legal proceedings one way or the other, and the segment ends with her specifically warning “TikTok people” that she has guns stashed around her home, adding “don’t mess with me.” Bozanich may also have taken issue with her depiction in the scripted Ryan Murphy series, in which she’s coincidentally portrayed by Milana Vayntrub, who started her career as an online influencer and creator.
But even if you take a more optimistic view of the pro-Menendez TikTok movement than Bozanich, the ability of social media movements and platforms like TikTok to genuinely impact public narratives and the way we think about well-known stories does raise a few red flags. TikTok creators are not held to any kind of standards for editorial bias or fact-checking. While many of the videos expressing sympathy for Lyle and Erik Menendez are factual and straight-forward, simply revisiting the basic arguments made at trial and additional evidence that has come to light, others clearly come from individuals with little to no familiarity with the actual case, who are emotionally reacting to something they recently saw or read.
On a case-by-case basis, that’s of course completely fine and acceptable. But now that we’re allowing TikTok trends to help guide real-world outcomes… as Uncle Ben might say, with that level of power comes some measure of responsibility to fairness and the truth.
