The Menendez brothers say they’ll spend their lives advocating for abuse victims if they’re paroled from prison — a possibility the convicted parent-killers attributed in part to the explosive 2024 Netflix show about their lives.
Lyle and Erik Menendez — who are serving life sentences for executing their parents, Jose and Kitty, in their Beverly Hills Mansion in 1989 — revealed their hopeful plans for the outside world in a jailhouse interview with TMZ.
“What it is that I want to do in terms of my day-to-day life is much of what I’m doing in here. I want to be an advocate for people that are suffering in silence,” 54-year-old Erik told the outlet from the San Diego prison where he’s been held for the last 35 years.
“Lyle and I aren’t talking about leaving prison — should we be able to get out — and not looking back. Our lives will be spent working with the prison and doing the work that we’re doing in here, out there,” he added.
The brothers will go before a California state parole board in June to learn whether they’ll walk free — a hearing where their behavior behind bars will be carefully considered to determine whether they’ve been rehabilitated, and whether they still pose a danger to society.
It’s a possibility that the brothers said might not have happened without the Netflix show “Monsters,” which told their story in graphic detail.
The duo insists they killed their parents in self-defense after years of sexual abuse from their father.
“It really did actually move a lot of people to understand the childhood trauma that Erik and I suffered, particularly the horrific stuff that Erik suffered,” Lyle, 57, said.
“I feel in the end a lot of people were educated about what can happen even in rich, affluent homes, behind walls, and behind hedges and manicured lawns. I think it opened a lot of people’s eyes, and that’s always a good thing,” he added.
Lyle and Erik expounded upon the programs they’ve participated in while serving their life sentences — which included starting an inmate hospice program, painting murals on prison yard walls, earning college degrees and helping with a suicide prevention program.
“Our best moments are the ones that are not spoken about, and we just help somebody, or we help an animal, or we make somebody smile that’s feeling down that might have gone and harmed themselves if we weren’t there,” Erik said.
Former inmate Anerae Brown, who spent 18 years with the Menendez brothers, told TMZ: “They don’t belong there.”
“My neighbor’s 17-year-old Labrador retriever is more dangerous to society than Lyle and Erik,” he said, pointing out that most of the brothers’ advocacy was undertaken during years when they had no hope of parole.
Not everybody agreed, however.
“I think they are two of the most skilled and accomplished liars I have ever met in my entire life,” said Alan Abrahamson, a former LA Times reporter who extensively covered the Menendez trials in the 1990s.
“The Menendezes are very capable of shapeshifting, and being who people who want them to be. And I think this is one of the grave dangers of this discussion that people don’t seem to pick up on,” Abrahamson said.
That’s a sentiment shared by Los Angeles district attorney Nathan Hochman, who in March opposed his predecessors’ calls to resentence the brothers and accused them of having “lied to everyone for the last 30 years.”
It was an elaborate web of lies that helped land the brothers in jail in the first place. After their first trial ended with a hung jury in 1994, they were sentenced to first-degree murder during a second trial when they were caught inventing numerous details about their lives — fabrications which cast claims about their father into doubt.
But when a member of the Latin American boyband Menudo — which Jose helped sign to RCA Records — accused the father of raping him when he was just 14, the brothers’ allegations gained attention once again and prompted Hochman’s predecessor George Gascón to recommend a resentencing.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom even intervened, asking the state parole board to make a ruling on whether the brothers still posed a danger to society and decide whether or not to let them walk.
It’s a prospect the Beverly Hills Police Department Detective assigned to investigate the murders told TMZ in no uncertain terms would be a terrifying travesty — and a danger to society.
“This is the most heinous murder case I’ve had,” former detective Tom Linehan told TMZ, calling the Menendez brothers money-motivated killers who grew up expecting to get what they wanted and doing whatever they needed to protect that.
“If somebody is challenging what they want to do, they’d take them out if they had to,” Linehan added.
The brothers, however, say they’re hopeful the parole board won’t see things that way.
“It’s a very new concept for us, this idea of a hope for freedom,” Lyle said, with both brothers adding that they were allowing themselves to be “cautiously optimistic” about walking free for the first time in decades.