Ryan Murphy is heavily involved with the Netflix series Monster, most recently titled Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story for its latest season, having both created the show and written several of its episodes. Now Ryan Murphy is stepping forward to defend Monsters – especially now that Erik Menendez has stepped forward to call the show out for “blatant lies.”
This leads to one of the biggest controversies regarding the series currently circling on social media. As you can see below, some viewers have taken to X to complain about the series and how they turned real-life stories of childhood sexual abuse into an incestuous relationship between two consenting adults.
He’s going to hell, creating incest fanfiction of real life brothers is INSANE. https://t.co/7Fn4sxG94v
— ً (@marenyearly) September 19, 2024
taking a story about two brothers who suffered from sexual abuse from their dad and turning it into an incestuous fantasy is horrid https://t.co/HJe0FU7kDk
— Giselle de pointe du lac (@zenselle) September 19, 2024
As further shared on social media, Erik’s own wife Tammi Menendez took a statement from her husband. He was clearly unhappy with the series, and furthermore, he believes that “Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent.”
Erik’s response to the Netflix’s series.#NetflixMonsters #Netflix #RyanMurphy pic.twitter.com/Xz1waxA2u3
— Tammi Menendez (@TammiMenendez1) September 20, 2024
This prompted Ryan Murphy’s own response, via ET, where he had this to say:
“I think it’s interesting that he’s issued a statement without having seen the show,” Murphy said. “It’s really, really hard — if it’s your life — to see your life up on screen. The thing that I find interesting, that he doesn’t mention in his quote, is if you watch the show, I would say 60-65 percent of our show, in the scripts and in the film form, center around the abuse and what they claim happened to them. And we do it very carefully, and we give them their day in court, and they talk openly about it.“
“In this age where people can really talk about sexual abuse, talking about it and writing about it and writing about all points of view can be controversial. It’s a ‘Rashomon’ kind of approach [in Monsters], where there were four people involved in that — two of them are dead. What about the parents? We had an obligation as storytellers to also try and put in their perspective based on our research, which we did.“
He also tried to defend the addition of incestuous implications as a means to incorporate different theories regarding the Menendez brothers:
“If you watch the show, what the show is doing is presenting the points of view and theories from so many people who were involved in the case,” Murphy said. “Dominick Dunne wrote several articles talking about that theory. We are presenting his point of view, just as we present Leslie Abramson’s point of view… and we had an obligation to show all of that and we did.“
Of course, as the controversies of this series can be traced back to its first season which centered around Jeffrey Dahmer, this is nothing new for Ryan Murphy. As such we’ll have to see how the next season performs with viewers and critics – and whether or not the controversies will continue.