Erik and Lyle Menendez ‘Optimistic’ New Evidence Could Set Them Free: ‘Times Have Changed’

Thirty-five years after Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their parents, Jose and Kitty, with 16 shotgun blasts as the couple watched TV in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion, the brothers are back in the headlines.

The Netflix series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story scored big ratings, followed by the streamer’s documentary The Menendez Brothers. Based on 20 hours of phone interviews, it paints a sympathetic portrait of the pair, who were convicted of murder in 1996 and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Alongside a TikTok campaign to reconsider the brothers’ two trials — the first ended with a hung jury; the second excluded extensive testimony about childhood sexual abuse — there is striking new evidence in the case of Lyle and Erik, now 56 and 53, respectively.

Los Angeles D.A. George Gascón has announced his office is taking it seriously, saying, “We have a moral and ethical obligation to review what is being presented to us.”

The evidence is stark. Roy Rosselló, a member of the Latin boy band Menudo during its 1980s heyday, has come forward saying he was raped as a teen by Jose, then an executive at RCA Records. In addition, a 1988 letter from Erik to his cousin Andy Cano referencing the ongoing abuse by his father was recently unearthed. The brothers’ attorneys have filed petitions to review the new information with an eye to reconsider their sentences in light of both the new evidence and a shift in society’s view of childhood sexual abuse against boys.

“Times have changed, attitudes have changed,” an insider exclusively tells In Touch. “People are more aware that boys, and not just girls, are victims of abuse and the devastating effect this can have.”

In the doc, Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor for the brothers’ first trial, admitted having trouble finding anyone to vouch for Jose — a Cuban émigré who rose from nothing to become a multimillionaire. “Only his secretary would say something nice,” she said.

During the trial, Lyle and Erik went into graphic detail about his sadistic abuse of them from an early age — and how their fear led them to murder. (A juror later said the testimony swayed the women of the jury but turned off the men, leading to a deadlock.)

Pamela remains unmoved, insisting to the filmmakers, “That whole defense was fabricated.”

Roy’s allegations and Erik’s letter lend heft to the defense dubbed dismissively “the abuse excuse.” In a documentary about Menudo, Roy came forward to say he was sexually abused and raped twice by Jose when he was 13 or 14 years old.

“There’s the man here that raped me. That’s the pedophile,” he says in the doc, pointing to a photo of Jose, adding, “It’s time for the world to know the truth.”

Similarly, Erik’s letter to his cousin bolsters the brothers’ claim that their father’s abuse left them in fear for their lives. “Every night I stay up thinking he might come in… I’m afraid,” the teen wrote in 1988, adding, “He’s crazy! He’s warned me a hundred times about telling anyone especially Lyle.”

What precipitated the shooting, the brothers testified, was Erik confiding to Lyle that Jose was continuing to abuse him and that their father had quashed his plans to go away for college, insisting he live at home and attend UCLA.

After the first trial ended with a hung jury in 1994, the brothers headed to court again in 1995. This time, judge Stanley Weisberg limited testimony about the sexual abuse claims from experts and witnesses, including family members who had described Jose’s domineering ways. Even Lyle did not testify.

“It was just me, cold, on the stand,” Erik says in the new doc. He argues that, at the time, the attitude was that the “battered woman” defense — that a victim could be excused for killing her abuser — did not apply to men or boys, lamenting, “So all of [our] trauma is not relevant.”

The brothers had not helped their case by their behavior in the weeks following the killings, when they splashed out their late parents’ money on designer clothes, fancy cars and expensive watches. But the doc points out that the L.A. D.A.’s office was determined to convict after another notorious killer, O.J. Simpson, had been found not guilty shortly before the Menendez trial began.

Now, the brothers are “cautiously optimistic,” their attorney Mark Geragos told one news outlet, adding that changing attitudes about abuse might help their case. “Twenty years, 30 years, the culture moves, and I think more enlightened or evolved, and people start to realize that maybe there was a feeding frenzy at the time, and on a more sober reflection, that they didn’t get a fair trial.”