“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” creator Ryan Murphy has reacted to the Menendez family’s latest statement, in which his series was described as “a phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episodic nightmare.”
On Thursday, Murphy told Variety’s Marc Malkin, “The family’s response is predictable at best.”
“I find it interesting because I would like specifics about what they think is shocking or not shocking. It’s not like we’re making any of this stuff up. It’s all been presented before. What we’re doing is we’re the first to present it in one contained ecosystem. What’s grotesque about it?” Murphy questioned. “Tammi [and] the family, they have always done this and they did this recently — they say, ‘lies after lies’ — but then they don’t say what the lies are. They don’t back up anything.”
The extended family of Lyle and Erik Menendez released a lengthy statement Wednesday night in response to the Netflix series.
“We are virtually the entire extended family of Erik and Lyle Menendez. We are 24 strong and today we want the world to know we support Erik and Lyle. We individually and collectively pray for their release after being imprisoned for 35 years. We know them, love them, and want them home with us,” the family wrote on X.
“Ryan Murphy’s ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’ is a phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episodic nightmare that is not only riddled with mistruths and outright falsehoods, but ignores the most recent exculpatory revelations. Our family has been victimized by this grotesque shockudrama. Murphy 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,” their statement continued. “The character assassination of Erik and Lyle, who are our nephews and cousins, under the guise of a ‘storytelling narrative’ is repulsive. We know these men. We grew up with them since they were boys. We love them and to this very day we are close to them. We also know what went on in their home and the unimaginably turbulent lives they have endured. Several of us were eyewitnesses to many atrocities one should never have to bear witness to.”
“It is sad that Ryan Murphy, Netflix and all the others involved in this series do not have an understanding of the impact of years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse,” they concluded. “Perhaps, after all, ‘Monsters’ is all about Ryan Murphy.”
Erik previously offered his own condemnation of the series, saying, “I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show. I can only believe they were done so on purpose. It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent.”
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