In 1989, Americans were riveted by the shotgun murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion by their own children. Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison and lost appeals. More than three decades later, they unexpectedly have a chance of getting out. Not because of the workings of the legal system. but because of entertainment. After two documentaries and a scripted drama on the pair brought new attention to the 35-year-old case, the Los Angeles County prosecutor recommended that they be resentenced. The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment like Netflix’s docudrama “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is effecting real life changes for their subjects and in society broadly. At their best, true crime podcasts, streaming series and social media content can help expose injustices and right wrongs. Because many of these products prioritize entertainment and profit, they also can have serious negative consequences, reports the Associated Press. The use of true crime stories to sell a product has a long history, from the tabloid “penny press” papers of the mid-1800s to television movies like 1984’s “The Burning Bed.” These days it’s podcasts, Netflix series and even true crime TikToks. The fascination with the genre may be considered morbid by some, but it can be partially explained by the human desire to make sense of the world through stories.
In the Menendez case, the new dramas delve into the brothers’ childhood, helping the public better understand the context of the crime and thus see the world as a less frightening place, says Adam Banner, a criminal defense attorney who writes a column on pop culture and the law for the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal. “Not only does that make us feel better intrinsically,” Banner says, “but it also objectively gives us the ability to think, ‘Well, now I can take this case and put it in a different bucket than another situation where I have no explanation and the only thing I can say is, ‘This child just must be evil.’” Lyle, who was then 21, and Erik, then 18, said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent the disclosure of the father’s long-term sexual molestation of Erik. Many of the sex abuse allegations were not allowed to be presented to the jury; prosecutors contended they committed murder simply to get their parents’ money. Much true crime of the past takes shocking crimes and explores them in depth, generally with the assumption that those convicted were actually guilty and deserved to be punished. The success of the podcast "Serial," which cast doubt on the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, has given birth to a newer genre that often assumes (and intends to prove) the opposite. The protagonists are innocent, or — as in the case of the Menendez brothers — guilty but sympathetic, and thus not deserving of their harsh sentences. “There is an old tradition of journalists picking apart criminal cases and showing that people are potentially innocent,” says Maurice Chammah of The Marshall Project. Banner worries about the intense focus in current true crime on cases where things went wrong, which he says are the outliers. While the puzzle aspect of “Did they get it right?” might feed our curiosity, he says, we run the risk of sowing distrust in the entire criminal justice system.