Erik Menendez and James CaldwellLyle Menendez are speaking out.

While the 1989 slayings of their parents José Menendez and Mary Louise "Kitty" Menendez and their subsequent conviction for the crime recently served as inspiration for Ryan Murphy’s latest Netflix drama, in the documentary The Menendez Brothers, the duo are sharing their story in their own words.

“Everyone asks why we killed our parents,” Lyle, speaking by telephone from prison, said in the Sept. 23 trailer for the upcoming documentary. “Maybe now people can understand the truth.”

Looking back on the 1993 trial, he reflects on how the press coverage shaped how people viewed them and their life.

“There was a media spectacle from the beginning,” Lyle explained in a voiceover, “so we were not the ones who told the story of our life.”

As Erik put it, “We looked like the perfect family, but behind the walls, something very wrong was happening.”

During the trial, Erik, then 22, and Lyle, then 25, accused their parents of years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, alleging the killings were done in self-defense. Prosecutor Pamela Bozanich, meanwhile,argued the murders were due to the brothers’ greed—which she maintains in the Netflix documentary. After the first trial ended in a mistrial, a second trial resulted in both brothers being found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1996.

The documentary, out Oct. 7, also reflects on how social media examines true crime, including on TikTok and Instagram, and how it has caused a shift in how people view the case. “Two kids don’t commit this crime for money,” Erik said, “and there’s people that believe I shouldn’t spend the rest of my life in prison.”

The trailer for the documentary comes days after Erik’s wife Tammi Menendez shared her husband’s reaction to the anthology series—also streaming on Netflix—in a post on X (formerly Twitter) Sept. 19, calling the series a “dishonest portrayal” of the crime.

"I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show," Erik wrote in the post. "I can only believe they were done so on purpose. It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent."

The Menendez Brothers hits Netflix Oct. 7.

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