‘The Menendez Brothers’: 4 Takeaways From the Netflix Documentary

The true crime drama “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” has been one of the most viewed series on Netflix since its Sept. 19 debut, driving enormous interest once again in the Menendez brothers, who in 1989 murdered their parents with shotguns inside the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.

On Monday, the same streaming platform released “The Menendez Brothers,” a feature-length documentary by Alejandro Hartmann, which draws from 20 hours of new phone interviews with the brothers from prison. It also includes on-camera interviews with surviving family members, journalists, the first prosecuting attorney and several jurors from the two criminal trials of the 1990s.

After a sensational trial that ended in hung juries in 1994 (the brothers had separate juries), Lyle and Erik were retried and convicted in 1996, sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. For the second trial, the judge barred the defense from using most of the testimony supporting its argument that the brothers had killed their parents out of fear following years of sexual, emotional and physical abuse.

The case has become something of a cause célèbre in recent years, with celebrities and young social media users advocating the brothers’ release, particularly as new evidence appears to support the abuse claims.

At the same time, a flurry of books, documentaries and scripted series have taken a more sympathetic view toward the brothers than they originally received; this latest documentary comes days after George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, announced that his office was revisiting the case, saying, “We have a moral and ethical obligation to review what is being presented to us.”