Amid the tide of Trump-related chaos, the current media cycle has also experienced a perfect storm of sensational court cases. Many occupy the true-crime space, with the Menendez brothers back in the news alongside trials of famous figures Sean “Diddy” Combs and Harvey Weinstein, coupled with the social media fascination around Luigi Mangione. The Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni suit, meanwhile, has generated a different kind of celebrity buzz.
There’s nothing new about the public and media getting drawn into real-life legal drama. What’s different, certainly since the Menendez and O.J. Simpson cases absorbed audiences in the 1990s, is both the sheer volume of true-crime television, making everyone feel like a bit of an expert; and the advent and proliferation of social media, creating avenues for real-time commentary — not just from authoritative experts and analysts — reacting to each day’s twists, turns and testimony.
“We sit in the jury box now,” Henry Schleiff, the former CEO of the Court TV Network and more recently the cable channel Investigation Discovery, told TheWrap. “The internet has made us active viewers as opposed to passive, and that is a huge change.”
Schleiff is particularly well positioned to recognize those trends, having overseen Court TV during its post-O.J. heyday, from 1998 to 2006, and built ID into a true-crime powerhouse before leaving in 2021 for independent production. He currently serves on the board of various nonprofit groups, including the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation and the Museum of the Moving Image.
As Schleiff noted, the popularity of true crime remains an audience-driven phenomenon, but the proliferation of platforms feeding that appetite has been fueled by an explosion of options. Previously the bread and butter of broadcast newsmagazines like “Dateline” and “48 Hours” and a few cable channels, you can now find a crowded lineup of the latter — including ID, Oxygen and Lifetime — to go with premium entries like Netflix and HBO.
In addition, the sheer volume can be traced to a shift in programming strategy. Tales that once might have been turned into one-hour episodes or documentaries now increasingly get blown up and out into multi-part docuseries and dramatic limited series, with Netflix’s Ryan Murphy-produced “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” helping renew interest in that case even as the brothers seek parole 29 years after being convicted for murdering their parents.
One advantage of such narratively driven productions for the legions of true-crime aficionados is that they eliminate the messy and occasionally tedious aspects of an actual trial, which seldom unfold in the brisk and straightforward fashion of “Law & Order.”
For that reason, Schleiff noted, during his tenure ID generally sought to limit its productions to fully adjudicated cases, allowing the producers to neatly digest and shape those stories into a more palatable package — presenting, as he put it, “an otherwise complex, convoluted and somewhat tiresome system in 54 minutes.”
Competitive pressures being what they are, that’s no longer a guideline even ID follows, having produced “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” in February — a documentary, complete with actor reenactments, which prompted a rebuke from Mangione’s lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo.
More than anything, the current onslaught of court coverage underscores how enticing such real-life stories are, providing a more easily digestible form of news than the broader issues and outrages associated with the Trump administration.
It’s also no accident that these salacious, high-profile cases are informed and for many colored by the #MeToo movement and powerful men behaving in terrible ways. That includes the lurid details regarding Combs’ “freak-off” parties and alleged sex trafficking, and the drama of ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura testifying against him; and fresh revelations from new Weinstein accusers who maintain he raped or assaulted them.
Even the back-and-forth volleys in the Lively-Baldoni lawsuits, with their window into Hollywood and how power gets exercised, has turned into an unlikely spectator sport. As journalist Taylor Lorenz pointed out, that has included an odd breed of influencers and media figures who have felt compelled to choose sides, like Megyn Kelly, who spoke about people being “obsessed” with the case at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) gathering, proceeding to label Lively a “diva bully brat.”
Part of that reaction reflects a conservative backlash to #MeToo. Some of that almost surely stems from Trump’s legal woes involving E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued him civilly for liability for sexual abuse and defamation, winning a $5 million verdict in 2023.
While the Weinstein revelations kicked off a wave of revelations in 2017, in the wake of Trump’s reelection there’s been considerable debate about an anti-feminist backlash, and politically speaking, the extent to which that might have driven young men toward the right, not just in the U.S. but around the world.
On the fringes, meanwhile, sits the odd celebration of Mangione, who caused a stir with the “hot shooter” memes circulating even before his arrest for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, leading to his portrayal as a kind of vigilante folk hero highlighting inequities in the system.
To Schleiff, all of this speaks to a participatory element that has oozed into modern trial coverage, with social media creating the equivalent of a digital town square in which people can sound off — finding like-minded souls to reinforce their views — as well as those who have a profit incentive to make their voices rise above the din.
“You’re witnessing the birth of a whole new occupation called influencer,” he said. “These influencers are not only selling fashion, they’re also making the point that such-and-such a person is clearly guilty, or clearly misunderstood.”
The celebrity trial has always hinged on a variety of factors, including fame, money and pulling back the curtain on their private lives. Although that has yielded plenty of examples, nothing rivaled the Simpson trial with its mix of fame, murder, marital discord and race, which merited its “trial of the century” designation and set the bar, for better and mostly worse, for much of what has ensued, right down to its early Kardashian connection.
Court TV and the idea of televising trials in their entirety were relatively novel concepts at the time, as opposed to the ubiquity of courtroom content today. Such outlets exploited sensational cases then, while more people and outlets have found ways to do so today.
“Let’s not lose sight of the fact the coverage of the trials was not meant merely as a public service but as a business,” Schleiff said.
From that perspective, business appears to be booming. And in that respect, from the Menendez brothers convicted in their 20s to the middle-aged versions trying to get out now, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
