How Incest Among Brothers Found Its Way Into ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’

Of the clever and controversial storytelling devices and tactics that were introduced in Ryan Murphy’s hit series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, one storyline remained a puzzler, particularly after it launched a press war between the hit-making producer and the family of the still-incarcerated brothers.

One of the most watched TV series last year came under fire for the bad-taste inclusion of the incest storyline. Why did a series rooted in facts, while playing with shifts in perspectives, intermittently portray the brothers as having an incestuous relationship? This insinuation, which comes early in the series, leaving its suggestion in the air for the remainder, has no basis in fact and sticks out in a series rooted in actual events. Yet, it was a small piece of the brothers’ story that played out behind the closed doors of a jury room. 

Netflix’s limited series portrays the double murder of José and Kitty Menendez and the years-long trials that spring from the tragedy. It was one of the streamer’s biggest hits of 2024, aided by a wave of interest in the movement to release the brothers. It can even be credited in the coming month with kick-starting California’s legal system into gear, as new moves toward freeing the brothers from prison after they were handed two life sentences in 1996 play out in court, starting on March 20.

Yet there’s a bittersweet tinge for the brothers and their family, both of whom shot out statements condemning the show upon its release; in an open letter, Erik Menendez seethed that writing the incest implication into the story of their lives constitutes “vile and appalling character portrayals” and “disheartening slander.” Murphy demurred. 

“The Menendez brothers should be sending me flowers,” Murphy said, as the movement to free the brothers picked up steam after his series released. “They haven’t had so much attention in 30 years. And it’s gotten the attention of not only this country but all over the world. There’s sort of an outpouring of interest in their lives and in the case. I know for a fact that many people have offered to help them because of the interest of my show and what we did … There is no world that we live in where the Menendez brothers or their wives or lawyers would say, ‘You know what, that was a wonderful, accurate depiction of our clients.’ That was never going to happen, and I wasn’t interested in that happening.”

Murphy has called the writing on his show a Rashomon-style round-robin of perspectives. Anyone introduced to the Menendez tragedy via his show, however, could make the assumption that something intimate was going on between Erik and Lyle. Case in point: the hotel party scene in the second episode when one brother cuts in to dance with another and kisses him as guests look on confused and disgusted. The implication was meant to reflect the perspective of writer Dominick Dunne (Nathan Lane), but he’s not introduced until later in the show, his presence serving to place wild theories on the brothers and their possible motivates in the pages of Vanity Fair.

The implied incest moments — that scene at the Beverly Hills Hotel and another where Kitty Menendez catches her boys in an intimate moment while showering together (or is it all in her head?) — are dropped in the middle of an episode that isn’t from her perspective. There are also no other indicators that she thought this about her sons, in the series or trial evidence. The confusing moments turned the Menendez family and their supporters against Murphy and the show.

Yet when looking back at some of the source material used to create the show, some light is shed on including such a potentially slanderous claim in the massive hit series. To understand why the brothers could be seen as incestuous, one has to dig back to the first trial of Erik Menendez and take in the book written by a juror who sat for that trial — which ended in a deadlock and ushered the brothers toward their evidence-restricted second joint trial, which concluded with the two taken to prison to serve two life sentence with no possibility of parole. 

Hazel Thornton worked at Pacific Bell in Pasadena when, on June 28, 1993, she drove to Van Nuys to report for jury duty. Over the next seven months, she heard every detail of the case that shocked the nation and captivated true-crime fans. The trial ended in a split-hung jury after the six men and six women had deadlocked; the women wanted to see Erik sentenced for manslaughter and given a lighter sentence. Tellingly she shared that, in many ways, the jury was split on gender lines. 

Though the outcome was disappointing for Thornton, she came out of the arduous but ultimately fruitless juror experience having been one of 12 deciders on a case that had become the talk of the nation. And she had notebooks of raw material no one else had: the thorough journals and notations she had jotted down during protracted deliberations in the jury room, which became a battle of the sexes with women jurors banding together to get the men to understand the psychology of physical and mental abuse. 

“It was a diary,” Thornton tells The Hollywood Reporter by phone. “I was keeping a journal because we weren’t allowed to speak to anybody during the trial. The judge admonished us daily to not discuss any of the details of the trial with anybody. And so that was my way of dealing with the stress of the trial. It was not intended for anybody to ever see.” 

But after some arm-twisting from a publisher, her journals were soon released as a book. Thornton says that she had to push back at the suggestion that gory crime details be added into her material.

“It’s like an academic thing,” she said of the book she released. “You either want the journal the way it is, or you don’t.”

Hung Jury: The Diary of a Menendez Juror chronicles the lengthy deliberations the jury in Erik’s trial underwent in 1993. A month of these deliberations, Thornton recalls, was squared on the subject of the defendant’s sexuality. This is because Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Lester Kuriyama suggested in his closing argument that Erik Menendez was a closeted homosexual and that it was his sexual orientation and not years of molestation by his father that was the taboo topic around their Beverly Hills home that caused tension to blow up into rounds of bullets directed at the parents.

For those too young to recall, being gay was not nearly as accepted in 1993. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was soon to be a military policy for gay men and women; the AIDS epidemic was getting under control, yet gay men were stigmatized; and DACA’s strike down by the Supreme Court was nearly three decades away — all of which contextualizes why Erik testified that Kitty Menendez “made it sound worse than death to be gay,” and even ordered him to find a girlfriend, giving him a deadline of a few months, which he did.

Erik’s sexuality, according to Thornton’s book/records of the deliberations, was such a massive topic that all records of testimony using the word “gay” were requested as the jury pondered, setting off a frenzy of speculation when the request was made. But the discussions, Thornton tells THR, centered only on claims he was gay by the prosecution — not on whether he was gay and having a sexual relationship with Lyle. Even with testimony about Lyle’s incident of sexually abusing Erik when they were boys (a common occurrence for victims), this was the case with the gender-split deliberations where ultimately neither side would budge.  

Thornton’s notes do, however, contain one single sentence that would seemingly become the catalyst for Murphy’s salacious take on the Menendez brothers and their would-be relationship behind closed doors. Thornton’s triple exclamation points at the end of the note seem to indicate the ridiculousness of the suggestion.

“They think Erik is gay and that is how he is able to describe homosexual acts. Phil thinks what Kitty ‘knew all along’ is that Erik is gay. More than one of the men thinks that Erik and Lyle were ‘doing’ each other!!!” Thornton wrote from the jury room.

A throwaway note from a juror regarding a wild assumption made by men already fixated on a defendant’s sexuality may seem like a tiny thread for Murphy and Ian Brennan to pull on in the vivid Menendez tapestry. But the incest theory these male jurors concocted was amplified by none other than Robert Rand, author of The Menendez Murders and producer of Menendez and Menudo: Boys Beytrayed. Thornton’s report of this theory from men on the Erik Menendez jury was repeated in what has become the definitive account of the Menendez story. It tracks that Murphy and Brennan clocked this and wove it into their script’s multiple perspectives on the crime — but neglected to mention the nature of the source.

An email request sent by THR to Murphy seeking comment was not immediately returned on Tuesday.

The rift this element and its confused presentation caused between the Menendez brothers, the family along with their newfound fans and Team Murphy is still palpable; no apologies have been given or are likely to be received. The series’ impact on the brothers’ legal hopes for release will be partially answered as they head to court on March 10. As for Thornton, she says she never watched Murphy’s series and she doesn’t plan to.

“It’s a horrible story to include every single true detail,” she explains. “You just don’t need to add something like that to it, to make it salacious. At a time when their case is being re-examined, and a lot of people are being introduced to it for the first time, I think that was a horrible thing to have done.”