How TikTok and Instagram Inspired ‘The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story’

Hitmaking television mastermind Ryan Murphy’s latest reimagining of a sensational murder from the 1990s is the second entry in his Monster series, which goes plural as it takes a Rashomon-style approach in recreating the brutal 1989 murders of José and Kitty Menendez.

The series presents the before-and-after of the night the couple was gunned down in their Brentwood home by their two sons. After the world premiere of the pilot episode in New York last week, Murphy, along with the show’s co-creator Ian Brennan, revealed that the project was sparked by TikTok and Instagram creators who have championed the case for releasing the brothers from prison for years .

Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Storyout on Thursday on Netflix with all episodes available, is unique in tone and its approach to the narrative that many Americans who watched the trial on Court TV in the early ’90s felt was an open-and-shut case of greedy sons committing parricide to live a luxury lifestyle. Instead, the show presents the abuse the sons said at their defense trials that they suffered for years as fact: Their father, RCA executive José Menendez, emotionally and sexually abused them for years as their mother did nothing.

A belief in this once-scuttled notion of prolonged abuse — which was not even admissible at their second, joint trial that ended with both sons being found guilty and handed life sentences with no possibility of parole — is central to the TikTok movement that inspired the series. The reexamination of the Menendez boys’ defense spread via several TikTok videos and then gained momentum after a former member of the boy band Menudo claimed in 2023 that he was sexually assaulted by José Menendez as a child.

“There are thousands of TikToks from young people, specifically young women, talking about the Lyle and Erik case,” Murphy said at the event in New York on Sept. 12. “I was blown away because it seemed so current to them.”

Brennan, who has worked with Murphy since Gleesaid that as a culture, there’s finally a vernacular to contemplate and then discuss sex abuse and mental health, and it wasn’t something that existed in the ’90s as the trial unfolded on cable TV.

“I was a kid when the case happened, and we didn’t have cable, so I wouldn’t like watching it on Court TV. All that I knew from Saturday Night Livewhich the (premise of the) sketch is that they cried on the stand,” he recalled. “That was the level of people wrapping their heads around this: ‘Oh, look at those guys. Look at those men crying on the stand, not really a thought as to why they might be crying.’”

He added, “It was just not a sophisticated way of looking at trauma, which I think we understand better now. And I think that feels really electric and alive for a certain age group, who look back at their parents’ generations, like, ‘What were you doing? You didn’t know how to see the world.’”

Jordan Wynn launched a Menendez Supporter Instagram account, which has the handle @revisiting_menendez, after watching the entire trial on YouTube. He told Tea New York Times back in 2021 that he is “disgusted with the way the media at the time and in subsequent years downplayed the brothers’ abuse.” He also mentioned attorney Alan Dershowitz’s 1994 book, The Abuse Excuseis certainly an example of how any belief around the impact of trauma was kicked away in favor of accusing victims of falsely claiming abuse as a shield to avoid punishment.

For Whynn and other TikTok and Instagram creators, the peak infotainment of the Menendez trial in the ’90s is their fodder for seeking truth, justice and equity. The series, incidentally, coincides with the brothers’ third time seeking a habeas hearing, a first step in having their sentence reduced to time served.

Whether Monsters — which strikes a unique tone of horror and humor and has a pilot episode that displays one of the most violent, shocking murder scenes filmed for basic cable — is going to help their case remains to be seen. But if Netflix can influence some rethinking of their motives for the brutal killings that now define them as much as TikTok and Instagram have already, their freedom may be within reach. It already seems interest has been piqued: Google Trends is now showing searches for their name quadrupling this week.