Ryan Murphy’s True Crime Track Record: Unpacking “Monsters”

Ryan Murphy at Comic Con in 2010. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

In the year 2024, the general public might finally be fed up with two things — Ryan Murphy and the way male abuse survivors are treated. 

Murphy, the man who gave us “Glee,” “American Horror Story,” “Ratched,” “Pose” and “Monster,” has never shied away from “taboo” themes and topics in his productions. He’s always created storylines including gay, trans and otherwise marginalized people as main characters, instead of as one-off sidekicks or people to be killed off two episodes later. “Monster,” the polar opposite of the campy high school drama “Glee,” is now part of the collective consciousness because of how it handles the portrayal of another arguably marginalized group — male victims of sexual abuse. 

The nine-episode “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” run was released on Sept. 19 and immediately garnered attention from news outlets and casual Netflix browsers alike. It focuses on the case of the Menendez brothers, who murdered their parents in 1989 by shooting them at their Beverly Hills mansion as they watched TV. 

Both men, who were only 18 and 21 years old at the time, claimed lifelong sexual, emotional and physical abuse at the hands of their parents as their motive. The trials that ensued, which concluded in 1996, were full of shocking revelations from both the brothers and other family members who testified in their defense. Both Lyle and Erik recounted the sexual abuse forced upon them by their father, Jose, and the disbelief they faced at the hands of their mother, Mary Louise (“Kitty”).

The show is full of ‘creative liberties,’ to put it kindly. There is an incest innuendo that runs throughout the entire production, insinuating that the brothers had a sexual relationship. Both of the men deny this vehemently and always have. In the second episode, the brothers kiss; in the sixth, they’re shown showering together. What makes it even weirder and more uncomfortable is the specific type of actor that Murphy tends to choose for his productions. 

In the very first season of “American Horror Story,” titled “Murder House,” a blonde Evan Peters plays Tate, a school shooter who begins a relationship with the teenage girl who recently moved into the house he haunts. Tate is widely considered attractive and even a type of ‘ideal boyfriend’ if you peer a centimeter deep into the cesspool that is Tumblr. He has a boyish charm, and his obsession with his girlfriend is seen as endearing and sweet, even though there is an entire episode dedicated to showing the shooting spree he went on in graphic detail. Similarly, Peters also played Jeffery Dahmer in the first season of “Monster," which prompted many people to question why we as a society need any more grisly retellings of brutal true crime cases.

Both men that play the Menendez brothers are currently going viral for their looks and how they’re pushed as eye candy throughout the show. Some clips are edited together on TikTok to ‘sexy-ish’ music, often of the boys shirtless, which is a bit unsettling when remembering what the show is supposed to be about. 

This has also bled into Menendez “fan accounts,” where people post edits and clips of the real brothers, often of them in the courtroom talking about their sexual abuse. When did media about killers, and in this case, possibly also victims, become so sexualized and trivialized? Why does Murphy continually choose attractive people to play the parts of convicted murderers, seemingly leaning into their well-perceived physical appearances and how audiences react to them? Why on Earth are these two men, who have allegedly suffered years and years of incestual sexual abuse, being shown through a sexual lens as two tanned, muscular California boys who can’t keep their hands off each other? 

In a broader sense, the series begs the question: Why are male sexual abuse survivors so often ignored, disbelieved and humiliated? During one of the trials, prosecutor Pam Bozanich stated that “men could not be raped, because they lack the necessary equipment to be raped.” Both men have faced decades of public skepticism and, from some, outright denial of their experiences. Both men have stood firmly on their testimonies, despite being convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. 

The brothers have become celebrated figures within the movement to have male victims believed and respected. Erik released a statement through his wife, stating: “It is sad for me to know that Netflix’s dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surround [sic] 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.” 
In a world that likes to think it’s moving toward an open dialogue about sexual abuse, no matter the gender of the victim or the perpetrator, the sensationalist mask that this show flaunts has people thinking twice about the media they consume.