Viewers as well as the real life Erik Menendez are not very happy with Ryan Murphy's latest true-crime anthology series 'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.'
via: OUT
The new series from Murphy tells the story of the real-life Menendez brothers, Erik and Lyle, who were convicted of murdering their parents in 1989. The show portrays their lives as exciting, sexy, campy, titillating, and more than a little incestuous.
But the truth was much darker, as the brothers were reportedly sexually abused by their father for years with their mother's knowledge, which is what they claim as the reasoning behind why they killed their parents.
And now, viewers are growing tired of Murphy's obsession with making true crime more salacious than real life...
But it's not only viewers who are mad. One of the subjects of the show, Erik Menendez, has seemingly responded from prison.
According to a statement, Menendez called the show "vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander."
A TikTok account appearing to be from Tammi Menendez, who married Erik Menendez while he was in prison, has now released a statement "in Erik's words."
"I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show," he said. "I can only believe they were done so on purpose. It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent."
"It is sad for me to know that Netflix's dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surround our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward – back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women."
"How demoralizing to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma," the statement continues. "Violence is never an answer, never a solution, and is always tragic. As such, I hope it is never forgotten that violence against a child creates a hundred horrendous and silent crime scenes darkly shadowed behind glitter and glamor and rarely exposed until tragedy penetrates everyone involved."
I get it as an elder in the entertainment industry that you may want to hunch your hot male actors off camera. However it is quite pathetic for you to create sexual fanfiction when the focus of the series should be that the boys killed their parents because they were tired of being abused by their father, while their drunken mother sad idly by and refused to protect them.
Don't get me wrong -- as an openly gay man I love seeing hot, scantily-clad men on my screen, whether big or small. However that shouldn't be the main focus of the story you're trying to tell, and as usual Ryan takes a real life story and ends up bastardizing it.
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