The Menendez Brothers: How True Crime Is Re-Examining Old Cases

A thriving genre built on podcasts and documentaries, coupled with younger generations’ more skeptical worldview, helped revitalize interest in this case and others like it.

There’s a montage during the new Netflix documentary “The Menendez Brothers” in which comedians, late-night hosts and other pop culture figures of the 1990s mock Lyle and Erik Menendez. The brothers had recently delivered testimony at their first murder trial, detailing their accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, Jose Menendez, whom they had gunned down and killed in 1989, alongside their mother, Kitty.

There was a 1993 “Saturday Night Live” skit that had John Malkovich and Rob Schneider mimicking the brothers in the courtroom, weeping dramatically and sarcastically. On the “Late Show,” the comedian Sandra Bernhard told David Letterman, “These two arrogant brothers are gonna fry,” to whoops and laughter from the audience.

“I called Jay Leno’s show once, to protest them making fun of them,” Joan Vander Molen, Kitty Menendez’s sister, says in the documentary. “That’s all they did. They just made fun of them.”

Some 30 years later, Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were 21 and 18 when the murders were committed, have gone from pariahs and punchlines to something approaching sympathetic figures in the eyes of a growing number of people.

They’ve also gone from the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison to having a chance at freedom after George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, announced on Thursday that he would recommend a resentencing that would make the brothers eligible for immediate parole.

Gascón cited the work the brothers have done to improve the lives of their fellow inmates. “I believe they have paid their debt to society,” Gascón said.

He also mentioned the Netflix documentary, and others, as a reason for growing interest in their case.

There could be many reasons behind Gascón’s decision, which came during his re-election campaign and amid growing societal reconsideration about how the criminal justice system should operate. But one major factor in keeping the Menendez brothers top of mind is the cultural impact of true crime entertainment, an exploding industry of podcasts, documentaries, docuseries and dramatized television shows that have become a major part of a new pop culture ecosystem.

The decision on Thursday comes on the heels of the Netflix documentary that sought to reframe the case — focusing on how their claims of assault as a reason for their actions were discounted and how their case was mishandled amid the spectacle surrounding it. The documentary came just a couple of weeks after another Netflix release, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” Ryan Murphy’s dramatization of the saga filtered through his signature glossy, salacious lens. It was far and away the streamer’s most-watched show upon its debut.

The show and documentary are emblematic of a growing trend within true crime: recasting old cases in a new light and, in turn, introducing these stories with more complexity and nuance to younger generations that may be more skeptical of the judicial system.

“We’re less willing to write people off as monsters,” Phoebe Judge, the host and co-creator of the popular long-running podcast “Criminal,” told The New York Times this week about the shift. “We seem to have more curiosity about motives, individual backgrounds, and not just the most disturbing details of what happened on the day of the crime.”

When “Criminal” started in 2014, Judge wanted to push against traditional narratives. “It felt to us then that crime reporting was limited to ‘if it bleeds, it leads,’ brief sound bites on the local news,” she said.

This boom of the past decade comes at a time when media companies are looking to grow their libraries, particularly with lower-cost content that has a built-in familiarity. Streaming platforms are flooded with true crime shows and films; there are at least a dozen options available to stream on the Menendez case alone, not to mention numerous podcasts.

The brothers were found guilty of first-degree murder in 1996 after a second trial and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Three years earlier, their first trial had ended with two juries, one for each brother, deadlocked and unable to reach a verdict.

The trial in 1993 was among the first to be televised on Court TV, catapulting the network and blurring the line between reality and reality show. (Reality TV as we know it today entered the lexicon in 1992, with the first season of MTV’s “The Real World.”)

“The 1990s in the U.S. was the decade for infotainment, from more normative news coverage to Jerry Springer,” Sharon Ross, a professor of media studies at Columbia College Chicago who studies television and fan behavior, told The Times in 2021. Ross was speaking about the Menendez case specifically, but she also cited the stories of O.J. Simpson, Tonya Harding and Lorena Bobbitt, each of which generated a media circus in the immediate wake of the first Menendez trial.

Those cases, and the wall-to-wall coverage they inspired, became the foundation for today’s true crime industry, but with one main difference: It was mostly a matter of rubbernecking and gawking.

Today, Gen Z and millennial true crime fans interact with stories differently than previous generations did, often feeling like participants instead of just observers. In addition, their confidence in law enforcement, prosecutors and courts has been eroded — in part by the many instances of police brutality captured by ubiquitous video cameras, and by DNA technology that has led to the exonerations of hundreds of people convicted of violent crimes.

Across TikTok and Instagram in particular, there are hundreds of accounts, many run by people who weren’t even alive when the Menendez case was unfolding, that have become invested. They often push for the brothers’ release, especially as new evidence appears to support their abuse claims.

Two often cited examples of how public support can bring widespread attention to criminal cases, and inspire reconsideration, are those of the Central Park Five and the West Memphis Three. But the phenomenon took a different form in 2014, when the first season of the investigative journalism podcast “Serial” — which scrutinized the conviction of Adnan Syed — was downloaded more than 100 million times in its first year. (In 2020, The New York Times Company bought Serial Productions, the company behind the podcast.)

The season was called podcasting’s first breakout hit by David Carr, a critic at The Times; prompted an HBO docuseries; and inspired scores of amateur sleuths and activists to involve themselves in the case as well as learn more about the criminal justice system — all factors that helped turn Syed into a cause célèbre.

Syed had been serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of his high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. In 2015, a Maryland court agreed to hear an appeal from Syed, and later that year, a judge granted him a new hearing that would allow the introduction of new evidence. Since then, it has been topsy-turvy ordeal for Syed that has included his conviction being overturned and then reinstated. In August, the Maryland Supreme Court ordered a redo of the hearing that freed him.

The most recent example that mirrors the case of the Menendez brothers is that of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who has been the subject of true crime fascination since she was found guilty of helping to kill her mother in 2015 and was freed from prison after serving seven years of her 10-year sentence. Her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, had abused and controlled her daughter, mentally and physically, for decades in what is believed by many to be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

The case is a prime example of what an evolving true crime industry is capable of: allowing audiences to examine a case from multiple angles in real time as it evolves. In 2017, her story was told in the HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest.” And in 2019, it received the scripted treatment with “The Act,” a limited series on Hulu for which Patricia Arquette won an Emmy. This year, Gypsy Rose Blanchard joined social media almost immediately after her release and was able to craft her own version of events in the Lifetime docuseries “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.”