Kim Kardashian is backing the Menendez brothers in a personal essay shared Thursday with NBC News, writing that “I have spent time with Lyle and Erik; they are not monsters.”
Kardashian, the reality TV star and entrepreneur who has used her celebrity platform to advocate for inmates on criminal justice issues, believes Lyle and Erik Menendez were treated unfairly by prosecutors and in the media. The brothers, who were convicted of murdering their parents, Jose and Kitty, in their Beverly Hills, California, home, “were condemned before the trial even began,” she writes.
On Thursday, the Los Angeles County district attorney said that his office would review possible evidence to determine whether the brothers should be resentenced and possibly released, officials said Thursday.
Erik Menendez was 18 and Lyle Menendez was 21 when their parents were fatally shot in 1989.
“My hope is that Erik and Lyle Menendez’s life sentences are reconsidered,” Kardashian says.
“We owe it to those little boys who lost their childhoods, who never had a chance to be heard, helped, or saved,” she adds.
On Thursday, the Los Angeles County district attorney said that his office had an obligation to review evidence to determine whether the brothers should be resentenced and possibly released, officials said Thursday.
The brothers’ case has drawn renewed interest with Netflix’s biopic series “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” and their lives are the subject of a forthcoming documentary on Netflix, “The Menendez Brothers.”
Last month, Kardashian met the brothers when she spoke about prison reform with inmates in a California prison near San Diego. Actor Cooper Koch, who plays Erik Menendez in the Netflix series, joined her.
Erik Menendez, now 53, had earlier slammed the Netflix series’ dramatized portrayal of his and his brothers’ lives as “blatant lies” and accused the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, of purposefully creating a caricature of Lyle Menendez, now 56.
At their first trial in 1993, which was televised, the brothers said that their father, a record company executive, sexually abused them for years and that they acted in self-defense out of fear and prolonged trauma. Prosecutors, however, said they murdered their parents to inherit money and went on a spending spree.
The first trial ended in hung juries. When the brothers were retried together starting in 1995, most of their abuse allegations were deemed inadmissible in court. They were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Kardashian acknowledged in her essay that the brothers’ crimes “are not excusable” and that neither was their behavior after the murders.
But, she argues, there were also limited resources for victims of sexual abuse, particularly boys, at the time.
“I don’t believe that spending their entire natural lives incarcerated was the right punishment for this complex case. Had this crime been committed and tried today, I believe the outcome would have been dramatically different,” she writes.
Attorneys for the brothers are seeking to challenge their imprisonment based on evidence that wasn’t known at trial.
Kardashian has been a vocal advocate for justice reform. In April, she joined Vice President Kamala Harris for a roundtable at the White House with four people President Joe Biden had pardoned earlier in the week for nonviolent drug offenses.
Kardashian also visited the White House during former President Donald Trump’s administration multiple times, including in 2018, when she lobbied for the release of Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug crime. Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence just days after the meeting.
In 2019, Kardashian said she was studying to obtain her law degree.
