An Update on the Menendez Brothers

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I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

On this show, we bring you a story that's complete from start to finish, but sometimes the final chapters haven't been written yet.

Since we aired our debut series about the Menendez brothers, a lot has happened, and not just with the legal case, but with the attention given to the story and the media.

Because of so many new developments, we wanted to go over pretty much everything that's happened in the last year.

Now, I'm here with our executive producer and the writer of the Menendez series, Joel Callan.

Joel, thanks for joining us.

Please, everybody, take note that we are recording this episode on March 13th, 2025, and there is every chance in the world that things could develop more between today and when this episode hits your feed, so bear that in mind.

Okay, Joel, it's good to have you.

Let's start off here with a reminder of where we left things at the end of the series on the brothers.

Well, hey, Jeremy.

Yeah, so it's been a while since we heard about the Menendez story.

So we left them when they were in prison.

They had finally been reunited.

They spent a couple of decades apart in different prisons, but they were reunited.

They're living on the same cell block, which was great news for these two brothers who'd been through this traumatic thing.

During their life in prison, they've both been really active in rehabilitation programs, as well as programs to care for disabled inmates and improve life for prisoners and staff at the prisons.

In particular, Erik has provided hospice care to elderly and dying inmates.

Lyle recently completed his bachelor's degree in sociology in 2024.

And both the brothers have been active counselors to other inmates and advocates for people who are survivors of sexual abuse.

As we mentioned in our initial series, the brothers have exhausted all of their legal appeals, you know, their attempts to sort of have their convictions overturned.

Those have sort of gone as high as they can and were all rejected.

But in 2023, the lawyers submitted a petition to the courts to ask them to reconsider new evidence.

We'll get to that later.

But that's sort of where we left them.

We'd had that petition submitted and we were waiting for the district attorney's office to respond to that.

About a year ago, a group of the brothers' family members sent a letter to the DA formally asking if they can please re-sentence the brothers.

That's where we're at in terms of all of the various legal things that were going on at the end of the series when we aired it.

One of the things that we talked about a little bit in the series, and I want to ask you about now, society has changed.

What we think about sexual abuse, how we look at it, the lens that we view it through, all that has really shifted over the past several decades.

So what's different now than it was when the brothers were sentenced?

Yeah, well, it's really interesting.

Like you said, we did cover this a little bit in the series, but it's been 30 years since the brothers were sentenced, and 35, 36 years since the crime happened.

That's taking us back into the 80s and 90s, and the prevailing attitude back then for a lot of people was, if you were a survivor of sexual abuse, particularly childhood sexual abuse, the idea was pretty much forgive and forget, you know, put it behind you.

So as a result, a lot of people just didn't bother coming forward.

So people weren't necessarily aware of how big of a problem it could be, not necessarily in terms of how widespread it could be, but also in terms of how much it can affect people, lives moving forward.

But you know, in the 30 years since then, attitudes have shifted a lot when it comes to the perception of allegations of sexual abuse and of people coming forward to talk about abuse they experienced when they were children.

There are a number of reasons for this, but some of the more prominent ones that people will hopefully be aware of are things like the various Catholic Church scandals, as well as really recently the Me Too movement.

So these sorts of things have helped shift the perception of not only the people who are survivors of this abuse, but of the people who perpetrate this kind of abuse.

We talked about how wealthy and powerful Jose Menendez was when he was alive.

In the 80s and 90s, a man like that would have been beyond reproach.

There was nothing you could say that people would believe that was negative about him, or if it was negative, it was just kind of saying, that's how he got to be so successful.

But now we sort of maybe view those things a little bit differently.

So in September last year, Netflix released a television series about the Menendez family.

So what can you tell me about that?

Right.

So this was the series Monsters, the Lyle and Erik Menendez story.

It was created by Ryan Murphy.

And in its first few weeks, it had tens of millions of views on Netflix, which Netflix tends to release viewership in minutes and hours viewed.

So it had billions of hours viewed in its first few weeks.

So it was really popular, but it was also controversial because it was a fictionalized account of the story.

So it was dealing with some facts, but it was also dealing with a lot of speculation and a lot of fictionalization of what did happen, what may have happened, what probably didn't happen.

And Erik Menendez in particular spoke out to express his frustration that the series portrayal of him and his brother Lyle will maybe have undone decades of work that has helped reshape society's views of male survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

Ryan Murphy himself sort of, I don't know if he was responding directly to Erik, but he said that he thought this show was, and I quote, the best thing that's happened to them in 30 years.

What he meant by that was that it sparked renewed interest in the case.

It sort of gave a jolt to this story that a lot of people had sort of not necessarily forgotten about, but it sort of had put away, put out of their minds.

You mentioned that the brothers, they have exhausted all of their legal appeals.

There's been a lot of talk about them being released lately though.

Now what's going on with that?

Yeah, there's been a lot of talk lately and that's sort of the main reason we wanted to come on here and give this update is because there are so many different things going on that it gets a little confusing about what's happening and where we're progressing in the different things.

So the easiest way to sort of explain it is there are three avenues to the brothers' release that are currently trucking along.

So in early October, so the month after the Netflix series about the brothers dropped, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office announced that it was going to take a fresh look at the case.

And then a couple of weeks later, the District Attorney George Escon recommended officially that Lyle and Erik Menendez be re-sentenced.

So what would re-sentencing mean as opposed to getting released?

I mean, I know getting released is getting released, but re-sentencing, what is that exactly?

They've already served so much time, what would happen to them now?

Right, so the brothers' sentence was life without the possibility of parole.

And the DA's recommendation was that they instead be sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

And what's so different about that is because the brothers were under the age of 26 when they committed their crimes, that would mean that if they get this new sentence that offers the possibility of parole, they would immediately be eligible for parole.

That's a big difference because it could mean that, you know, if the re-sentencing goes through, they could go to the parole board straight away.

Right, and get released right away.

Yeah, and in Gascon's recommendation, he specifically referenced society's deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding sexual violence, you know, acknowledging some of those things that we talked about before, instead of talking about how widespread the issue is and how many people it impacts of all different genders.

That was Gascon's sort of argument for why he believed and his office believed that the brothers should be re-sentenced.

So we've made it all these years, the DA makes this recommendation, so what is the next step?

Right, so the next step in that would be an evidence where there would be testimony presented for the court's consideration.

And the judge can also consider things like the science of young boys and young men being sexually assaulted, so how they might respond and react to that abuse, not necessarily just physically, but how they would react mentally.

And then how that information about those reactions might not have readily been available at the time the brothers were sentenced in the 1990s.

So, once the judge takes all of that into consideration, if the judge does decide to re-sentence the brothers, the case will then go directly to the parole board, who will look at everything and they will then make a call.

So, they would then hear from the brothers and their relatives, and a parole board will usually also hear from relatives of the victims.

In this case, there's nothing but overlap between those two things.

You know, the brothers are the victims and the criminals are the same.

And almost all of Lyle and Erik's relatives are supportive of them being released.

There's a couple of outliers in the family, though, right, that also sent a letter saying basically they need to stay in prison.

Yes.

Yeah, their uncle, who is Kitty's brother, has been very vocal in his opposition.

He does not want to see them released.

He has always said he doesn't believe their claims of abuse and self-defense.

But he's pretty much the only one in the family, correct?

As far as I'm aware, yes.

And if he's not the only one, he's the only one who is making noise about it.

Right, right.

So they have the possibility of getting paroled right away.

If that re-sentencing goes through and they can go to the parole board and they get paroled, I don't want to make light of it.

But what are their chances?

How is that looking for them?

What do you think?

Towards the end of last year, it was looking promising.

Resentencing seemed to be a stronger case than some of the other avenues.

But the DA, George Gascon, made this announcement just weeks before the election, and it was seen by some people as a ploy to get him more votes because the Brothers story had been so popular in the recent weeks, and he was currently trailing to a more conservative opponent.

And if that was his plan, it didn't work.

So Gascon actually lost the election, and Los Angeles voted in a new district attorney.

And so that meant that everything kind of paused because Gascon's office had been looking at the case for over a year, but it then turns to his successor to decide whether or not to sort of continue.

Things sort of, you know, are trucking along and they can't really be stopped, but it meant that the new DA was going to have to take the time to examine the case for himself and decide what resources to put into it.

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So this new DA, this guy, what is his story?

What should we know about him?

Right, so this new DA is Nathan Hockman, and he called Gascon's interest in the case suspicious.

And Hockman sort of came at the thing, and he met with the brothers' relatives at the beginning of this year, in January, and he sort of had this meeting to sort of hear their concerns and I guess tell them where he was coming from.

And there wasn't a lot said about that meeting, but he afterwards he did say he wasn't going to say whether or not he supported the Bid for Freedom just yet, he wanted to take the time to go through the records and the transcripts and speak to the prosecutors from the original trial as well as the defense attorneys.

So that was happening.

And while Hockman was setting up his office, two employees of the district attorney's office lodged a lawsuit against him, claiming that they had been retaliated against because they were the ones who wrote the recommendation that the brothers be re-sentenced.

So there were allegations that Hockman really didn't like the fact that his office was having to deal with this case.

And in February, that seemed to be confirmed when Hockman announced that he would be opposing the brothers bid for a new trial, which we'll get to that later, but that's what that petition is about that was lodged in 2023, that we mentioned in our first series.

He said the brothers had a history of lies and deception, and that was his reason for opposing the petition.

And so he filed an informal response to the petition, asking the court to deny it.

So from pretty early on, it seemed that Hockman was not at all interested in the brothers bid for freedom.

So is the bid for re-sentencing, is this over now?

Where does this leave us?

I'm not a legal expert, so I can't say for sure, but-

Wait a second.

But my understanding is that Hockman can't stop the process now that it's underway.

At least, he can't just sort of say, no, that's it, my office is not going to go through with this anymore.

He's made his recommendation and it's in the hands of the courts.

That said, just early this week on March the 10th, Hockman made a formal request that the court actually withdraw the previous DA's motion since his office doesn't support it anymore.

He wrote that the request to withdraw the re-sentencing motion was based on the current state of the record and the Menendez brothers' current and continual failure to show full insight and accept full responsibility for their murders.

So he basically has said that if they came forward and unequivocally and sincerely admit that they murdered their parents in cold blood and then lied about it for years and perjured themselves in court, then that would show that they were actually rehabilitated.

It definitely seems to confirm, my personal belief at least, that Hockman does not have any interest in believing the brothers' claims of self-defense or that they endured sexual abuse at the hands of their father for many years.

All right, so there's a roadblock there, but there are other things going on, are there not?

What else is out there that they can possibly grab a hold of as a lifeline?

So we've got the habeas petition, which is the one that I've mentioned a couple of times now that was lodged in 2023.

So it was basically, it's a request that the court renew new evidence that was not presented at trial.

The first one of these was that letter that Erik wrote to his cousin, Andy Kano, in 1988 that specifically referenced the abuse.

So this was before the murders, before this story had come out that they were abused.

Erik wrote a letter to his cousin talking about the abuse and saying something to the effect of, I don't know how much more of this I can take.

And then there were also claims by Roy Rossello, who was in the boy band Menudo, who said that he was raped by Jose Menendez when he was in the band, which Jose signed to RCA Records in the 1980s and was very involved in their promotion in America.

So the petition is asking for the courts to look at this evidence and then use it to vacate the convictions of the brothers, or to at least permit discovery and an evidentiary hearing so that the brothers' attorneys can provide proof of their claims, you know, that were not really allowed at the first trials.

So like you said, we touched on that a little bit in the series, but that was a while ago.

So has anything happened of import since we aired that with this petition?

You know, it seems like this isn't popular with anyone in the DA's office, no matter who is in power.

So the former DA, George Cascon, didn't agree with it.

He is someone who is on the record in saying that he believes the brothers deserved a second chance with his request that they be resentenced.

But he didn't agree with the petition.

He didn't think that there was any merit to it.

But as I've said, I don't think Hockman is a fan of this one either, given that he has dismissed their request for resentencing and has called them liars.

I don't think that anyone in the DA's office is going to support this.

So this one's probably going to be a harder sell.

But as of yet, there's no date schedule that I'm aware of.

So it's only going to go forward if the other options don't pan out.

So we'll keep that one on the shelf.

There is one other option, correct?

What can you tell us about that?

Right.

So at the end of October, right before the election, right around the time that the DA first submitted their request for re-sentencing, the Brothers Legal Team decided to take another shot at an option, and they submitted a request for clemency to California's Governor Gavin Newsom.

So a couple of days later, George Cascon, the former district attorney, announced that his office had sent letters of support of this to Newsom's office.

So basically saying that his office supported the brothers' bid for clemency.

And just a quick word about what that means.

California's Constitution gives the governor the power to grant clemency, which can include commutations of sentences and pardons.

And at the time, the governor's office said that they were going to treat the petition like any other.

So no one was going to get any special treatment, you know, no matter how popular the TV show about them was, they were just going to treat this like all the rest.

So what's important to know about that is that Governor Newsom is not required to review the petition at all if he chooses not to.

He can just sort of say, no, I'm not going to consider that.

But if he did review it and decided to grant clemency, then the case will still go to the parole board before they're released.

So if the governor decides, yes, the brothers deserve clemency, he would sort of sign that paper, and then the brothers would still go before the parole board like they would if they were being resentenced.

Then things took a turn.

As we know, Gascon lost his election, and so Los Angeles County was going to get a new district attorney.

So Governor Newsom put out a statement saying that he was going to sort of put a hold on the process until the new DA had a chance to review the case.

He said he was doing this sort of out of respect, not just for the new DA, but for the people of Los Angeles who had elected him.

To sort of say, okay, maybe the people of LA kicked the old guy out because they didn't like that the DA was trying to get the brothers out of prison.

So the governor wanted to respect that decision.

So that was where we were at sort of coming into 2025.

Then Hockman sort of started making these announcements that he didn't seem inclined to give the brothers any avenues to release.

That was when Governor Newsom announced that he was ordering California's parole board to launch a comprehensive risk assessment into whether the brothers pose an unreasonable risk to the public if released.

This is something his office does dozens and dozens of times a year for potential clemency bids and it doesn't mean there's any guarantee of an outcome one way or another.

But the governor wrote a letter to the brothers' lawyers saying that when they're evaluating these applications for clemency, they have to consider people's public safety.

That includes the applicant's current risk level, the impact of what a commutation of a sentence might be on the victims as well as the survivors, the development and conduct of the applicants since they were sentenced, and whether the applicants have made use of rehabilitation programs and assessed any treatments that they might need, and what other mitigating risk factors might be involved that contribute to them reoffending.

So the board is going to take all of these different things into account, and their risk assessment will be made available to the district attorney and to the California justice system.

Well, as you said before, you were very forthcoming about not being a legal expert, but I will ask you your opinion.

Where do you think Avon Newsom is going to land on this?

It's really difficult to say.

I think this particular avenue is the one we should be expecting to hear about next.

The re-sentencing hearings were initially scheduled for November and then were pushed back after the election and were pushed back from January to February to March because of the fires we had here in Los Angeles.

And now the district attorney's office has pushed them back again indefinitely.

I'm assuming because we're waiting for the governor's office to make his decision.

Now they have scheduled the brothers to appear before the parole board on June 13, so a few months from now.

My guess is that we're not going to hear anything about this particular bid until then, and that the other two avenues will sort of be in limbo until we get an answer on this one.

Because this one sort of seems like the most straightforward, you know, the least effort involved for everyone, the least money to taxpayers in terms of scheduling hearings and all that kind of stuff.

So, my guess is that we've just got a waiting game for the next three months until Newsom makes his decision.

Joel, we don't get to talk enough, and it's always really fun to get to talk to you.

I don't know if anybody has noticed this, but Joel is from Ohio.

You can tell from his accent.

Anyway, Joel, buddy, thank you very much for sitting down with me today here on the show.

Yeah, thanks so much, Jeremy, this was fun.

We'll be sure to keep you posted.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsey Graham.

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