NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In 1989, Americans were fascinated by the shotgun murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez by their own children in their Beverly Hills mansion. Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison and all subsequent appeals were dismissed. But today, 30 years later, they unexpectedly get a chance to escape.
It’s not because of the workings of the legal system. Because of entertainment.
After two recent documentaries and a scripted drama about the pair brought new attention to the 35-year-old case, the Los Angeles district attorney recommended they be resentenced.
The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment, such as Netflix’s docudrama “Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story,” is having a broader impact on real-life changes in its subjects and society. At their best, true crime podcasts, streaming series, and social media content can help expose injustice and right wrongs.
However, because many of these products prioritize entertainment and profit, they can also have serious negative consequences.
Using true crime stories to sell products has a long history in the United States, from tabloid “penny press” newspapers in the mid-1800s to TV movies like 1984’s “The Burning Bed.” These days there are podcasts, bingeable Netflix series, and while some people may find the fascination with this genre pathological, it can be partly explained by the human desire to make sense of the world through stories.
In the case of the Menendez brothers, Lyle, then 21, and Erik, then 18, said they feared their parents would try to kill them to prevent public knowledge that their father had molested Erik for years. But at trial, many of the sex abuse allegations were not allowed to be presented to the jury, with prosecutors claiming the men committed the murders simply to get their parents’ money.
That’s the story that many people who have followed the saga from afar have accepted and talked about for years.
Adam Banner, a criminal defense attorney who writes columns about pop culture and the law, says the new drama explores the brothers’ childhoods, allowing the public to better understand the context of crime and see the world as a less scary place. ABA Journal of the American Bar Association.
Banner says: “Not only does it inherently make us feel better, but it also gives us the ability to think objectively, ‘Well, now I can put this event in a different bucket than other acceptable situations.’” I explained, and I said, “All I can say is, ‘This kid must be a really bad kid.’”
Many true crimes of the past take a particularly shocking crime and explore it in depth, usually with the assumption that the people convicted of the crime were actually guilty and deserved punishment.
The success of “Serial,” the podcast that questioned Adnan Syed’s murder conviction, has spawned a new genre that often assumes (and seeks to prove) the opposite. The protagonist is innocent. In other words, as in the case of the Menendez brothers, although they are guilty, they are sympathetic and therefore do not deserve harsh punishment.
“There is a long tradition of reporters breaking down criminal cases and showing that people are potentially innocent,” said Maurice Chammah, staff writer for The Marshall Project and author of Let the Lord Sort: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty. “There is this.” .”
“But I think the curve goes up exponentially in 2014 after ‘Serial,’ which completely changed the entire landscape of podcasting, economically and culturally, and then along came ‘Making a Murderer,’” says Chammah. A few years later, it became kind of a huge case in the docuseries.”
During roughly the same period, the innocence movement gained traction alongside the Black Lives Matter movement and greater attention to police custody deaths. And in popular culture, both fiction and non-fiction, there is a trend to delve into the backstories of villainous characters.
“All these superheroes, supervillains, the ‘Joker’ movies, etc., we’re all wrapped up in this idea that people’s bad behavior is shaped by childhood trauma,” Chammah said.
Banner often represents the least sympathetic defendants imaginable, including those accused of child sexual abuse. He says the impact of these cultural trends is real. Jurors today are more likely to give his client the benefit of the doubt and are more skeptical of police and prosecutors. But he also worries about the current focus on real crime on cases where things go wrong.
While there’s an aspect of the puzzle of “did they get it right?” he says, it can also pique our curiosity and risk sowing distrust in the entire criminal justice system.
“You don’t want to take away the positive outcomes that putting the spotlight on an incident can have. But you also don’t want to give the impression that this is how our judicial system works. “If we can get enough cameras and microphones on a case, we could get someone off death row or overturn a life sentence.”
Chammah added: “If you open up sentencing decisions and retrials and criminal justice policy to popular culture (who gets to podcast about it and Kim Kardashian talks about it, etc.), the risk of extreme arbitrariness is really high. … Some defendants. “It seems like it’s only a matter of time before ’s wealthy family essentially funds a podcast aimed at proving his innocence.”
Whitney Phillips, who teaches true crime and media ethics at the University of Oregon, says the genre’s popularity on social media adds another problem, often encouraging active participation from viewers and listeners.
“These are not trained detectives or people with real subject matter expertise in forensics or even criminal law, so very often this results in the wrong people being implicated or emerging as suspects,” she says. “Also, for victims, their families are now part of the discourse as well. They may be blamed for this, that, the other, or at least the murder, violent death of someone you love, entertainment for millions of strangers.”
These sensibilities are chronicled and satirized in the streaming comedy-drama series “Killers in the Building,” which follows three unlikely collaborators living in a New York apartment building where a murder has occurred. The three decide to create a true crime podcast while solving the case.
Anything about true crime is fundamentally unethical, Phillips says. “The social media system, the attention economy, is not geared towards ethics. “It’s geared for opinion, it’s geared for engagement, it’s geared for sensationalism.”
Many influencers are now competing for “killer audiences” as social and traditional media influence each other, Phillips says. True crime is now seeping into lifestyle content and makeup tutorials as well.
“It was kind of inevitable that we would see these two clash. It’s very informal, very messy, and often not particularly well-researched to have influencers literally put on makeup and then say things like: “She says, “This is not investigative journalism.”
