The Menendez brothers’ 1993 murder trial was one of the most challenging of her career for prosecutor Pamela Bozanich.
Bozanich was working as a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles County when she was tasked with prosecuting the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were accused in the shooting deaths of their wealthy parents in their Beverly Hills home in 1989.
“The day that we did opening statements, I was coming into the courthouse and people were filming me, and I just thought, what the hell have I gotten myself into?” Bozanich recalls in the new Netflix documentary, The Menendez Brothers, streaming Oct. 7.
“I went in the bathroom and threw up,” she says in the documentary. “The only time I’ve ever thrown up during a trial or before a trial or anything. Having the media, there was a nightmare. You don’t have to do that in a normal murder trial.”
The trial was turned upside down when the brothers testified that they killed their father, hard-driving music executive Jose Menendez, 45, because he’d sexually abused them for years — and further claimed they’d killed their stay-at-home mother, Kitty, 47, because they alleged she ignored the abuse.
She says the brothers were insincere when they were on the stand – and she believes they were “overacting” from the moment police arrived at their sprawling home on the night of the murders.
“They found the two brothers out in front of the house,” she recounts in the documentary. “They were hysterical. They were overacting. But the police were very nice to them. They were not treated as suspects by the investigators at the beginning.”
That first trial – which included more than 50 defense witnesses, some of whom testified about various types of abuse they allegedly witnessed Jose subjecting his sons to — ended when jurors were deadlocked over a verdict.
When they were tried again in 1996, the judge limited the number of defense witnesses that supported the brothers’ abuse allegations. Lyle opted not to testify in this trial.
That time, they were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Over the years, they tried to appeal the conviction, to no avail.
In recent years, though, members of the TikTok community rallied together calling for the convictions to be overturned.
“Millions of young people are looking back online and they’re reexamining old news stories from the 90s and 2000s particularly, and looking at them with a fresh set of eyes,” New York Times technology reporter Taylor Lorenz says in the documentary.
Speaking about the TikTok movement, Lyle, now 56, says in the documentary, “Young people have taken the time to figure out what happened, and they understand it in ways that older people don’t,” he says. “I feel more hope when society seems to be understanding sex abuse even better.”
Hazel Thornton, who was a juror in the first trial, says in the documentary, “The Menendez case preceded the #MeToo movement. Society’s understanding more about abuse makes more people believe them.
“If they were tried today, I think the most they would get is manslaughter.”
Bozanich doesn’t want to hear it.
“The only reason we’re doing this special is because of the TikTok movement to free the ‘Menendi,’” she says in the documentary.
“If that’s how we’re going to try cases now, why don’t we just like, have a poll?” she said sarcastically.
Growing more serious, she says, “Your beliefs are not facts. They’re just beliefs. And by the way, all you TikTok people, I’m armed. We got guns all over the house, so don’t mess with me.”
The Menendez Brothers airs on Netflix on Oct. 7.
The Menendez Brothers Official Podcast, a 3-part companion podcast featuring unheard audio interviews with the Menendez brothers not featured in the documentary, debuts Oct. 9 on Netflix’s ‘You Can’t Make This Up.’
If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.
