NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In 1989, Americans were fascinated by the shotgun murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion by their own children. Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison and lost all subsequent appeals. But today, more than thirty years later, they unexpectedly have a chance to get out.
Not because of the operation of the legal system. Because of entertainment.
After two recent documentaries and a scripted drama about the couple brought new attention to the 35-year-old case, the Los Angeles case public prosecutor has advised they are condemned.
The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment such as Netflix’s docudrama “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez” brings about real-life changes for their subjects and in society more broadly. At their best, true crime podcasts, streaming series, and social media content can help expose injustice and right wrongs.
But because many of these products prioritize entertainment and profit, they can also have serious negative consequences.
Using true crime stories to sell a product has a long history in America, from the “penny press” newspapers of the mid-19th century to television movies like 1984’s “The Burning Bed.” Today it’s podcasts, bingeable Netflix series and even true crime TikToks The fascination with the genre may be considered morbid by some, but can be partially explained by the human desire to understand the world through stories.
In the case of the Menendez brothers: Lylewho was 21 at the time, and Erik, then 18, have said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent the revelation of the father’s long-term sexual abuse of Erik. But during their trial, many of the sexual abuse allegations were not allowed to be presented to the jury, and prosecutors claimed they committed murder just to get their parents’ money.
For years, that has been the story that many people who watched the saga from a distance accepted and talked about.
The new dramas delve into the brothers’ childhoods and help audiences better understand the context of the crime and thus see the world as a less scary place, says Adam Banner, a criminal defense attorney who writes a column about pop culture and the law for the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal.
“Not only does that make us feel intrinsically better,” says Banner, “but it also objectively gives us the ability to think, ‘Now I can put this thing in a different bucket than another situation where I don’t have to explain and all I can say is, “This kid must just be bad.”
Many true crimes of the past explore particularly shocking crimes in depth, usually on the assumption that those convicted of the crime were actually guilty and deserved to be punished.
The success of the podcast “ Serial”, which casts doubt on the murder conviction of Adnan Syedhas spawned a newer genre that often assumes (and sets out to prove) the opposite. The protagonists are innocent, or – as in the case of the Menendez brothers – guilty but sympathetic, and thus do not deserve their harsh punishments.
“There’s an old tradition of journalists taking apart criminal cases and showing that people are potentially innocent,” says Maurice Chammah, a writer at The Marshall Project and author of “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.” ”
“But I think the curve is rising exponentially in the wake of ‘Serial,’ which was in 2014 and clearly changed the entire landscape of podcasts economically and culturally,” Chammah says. “And then you have ‘Making a Murderer’. a few years later and became a kind of colossal example of this in docuseries.
Around the same time period, the innocence movement gained traction, along with the Black Lives Matter movement and increased attention to deaths in police custody. And in popular culture, both fiction and non-fiction, the trend is to mine the backstory of an evil character.
“All these superheroes, supervillains, the movie ‘Joker’ — you’re just inundated with the idea that people’s bad behavior is shaped by trauma when they were younger,” Chammah said.
Banner often represents some of the least sympathetic defendants imaginable, including those accused of child sexual abuse. He says the effects of these cultural trends are real. Juries today are more likely to give his clients the benefit of the doubt and are more skeptical of police and prosecutors. But he also worries about the intense focus in current true crime on cases where things have gone wrong, which he believes are the outliers.
While the puzzle aspect of “Did they get it right?” If we allow our curiosity to feed our curiosity, he says, we risk sowing distrust in the entire criminal justice system.
‘You don’t want to take away the positive consequences that putting a cause in the spotlight can bring. But you also don’t want to give the impression that this is how our legal system works. That if we can get enough cameras and microphones for a case, we can save someone from death row, or we can overturn a life sentence.”
Chammah adds: “When you open up verdicts, second looks and criminal justice policy to pop culture – in the sense of who gets a podcast about it, who gets Kim Kardashian to talk about it – the risk of extreme arbitrariness is really high. …It feels like it’s only a matter of time before some defendant’s wealthy family actually funds a podcast that attempts to make a viral case for their 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 layer of complications, often encouraging the active participation of viewers and listeners.
“Because these are not trained detectives or people who have any actual expertise in forensics or even criminal law, there is the common outcome of the wrong people being implicated or presented as suspects,” she says. families are now part of the discourse. They can be accused of this, or the other, or at least: the murder of your loved one, the violent death, which is entertainment for millions of strangers.
This sensibility has been both chronicled and satirized in the streaming comedy-drama series ‘Only murders in the building’ which follows three unlikely collaborators living in a New York apartment building where a murder has occurred. The trio decides to create a true crime podcast and solve the case at the same time.
Nothing about true crime is fundamentally unethical, Phillips says. “It is that the social media system – the attention economy – is not calibrated for ethics. It’s calibrated for position, it’s calibrated for engagement and it’s calibrated for sensationalism.”
Many influencers are now competing for the “killer audience,” says Phillips, with social media and more traditional media feeding off each other. True crime is now creeping into lifestyle content and even makeup tutorials.
“It was kind of inevitable that you would see the collision of these two things and that these influencers would literally just put on a face with makeup and then have a very kind of narration – it’s very informal, it’s very sloppy , it is often not particularly well researched. ,” she says. “This is not investigative journalism.”