As a culture, Americans are coming to better understand the injustice that was done to Lyle and Erik Menendez. The brothers were convicted in 1996 of murdering their wealthy parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, seven years earlier in a gruesome double homicide, when Lyle was 21 and Erik just 18. Their trials unfolded amid a tabloid media frenzy that emphasized the brothers’ presumed greed and sociopathy while mocking the decades of emotional and sexual abuse they claim to have experienced at the hands of their father. Despite overwhelming witness testimony presented in their first trials that they were telling the truth about their abuse, they were each ultimately sentenced to life without parole.
Netflix’s recent Ryan Murphy docudrama, Monsters, takes a frank look at the brothers’ allegations of abuse, but it doesn’t do them any favors either, buying into the possibility that the pair made the whole thing up for sympathy and even implying an unfounded incestuous relationship between them. So it makes sense that in order to balance out those rather jarring claims, Netflix also recently launched a documentary film, simply titled The Menendez Brothers, that backs the abuse claims with an impressive number of first- and secondhand sources — including the brothers themselves, who appear via recorded phone calls from prison.
Several members of the Menendez family appear on the documentary with stories of the abuse the brothers suffered from their father, including Joan Vander Molen, Kitty Menendez’s sister, and Diane Vander Molen, a cousin of Lyle and Erik.
Diane spent most of her summers growing up with the Menendez family and has never deviated from the story she testified to at the brothers’ first trials — that Lyle had told her about their father’s sexual abuse when he was just 8 years old. Her testimony also implicated Kitty Menendez, who, she alleged, knew about Lyle’s claims and either disbelieved them or chose to ignore them. After that, the brothers have said the alleged abuse went on for years after that, with the brothers claiming that their father’s sexual abuse of Erik continued into Erik’s adulthood, with Lyle learning that his brother was still being abused just days before the murders.
Multiple Menendez family members recalled several chilling stories of abuse, but one about a trust fall gone wrong in Lyle’s childhood, the first story Diane Vander Molen relates in the documentary, seems particularly revealing as a glimpse into the lives the brothers lived.
“One time Jose put Lyle on a kitchen counter and prompted Lyle to jump off, and he was going to catch him. As Lyle did so, Jose backed off and let him fall to the ground, telling him that you can never trust anybody.”
Taken as an isolated example, we might consider this an anecdote of a cruel prank played on an innocent child. But in the context of everything we know about Jose Menendez and his children,