‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story’ Episode 7 Recap: Observe and Report

Dominick Dunne has a theory. He doesn’t believe that Lyle and Erik Menéndez were sexually abused by the parents they killed. Maybe there was some physical abuse, sure, but Dunne’s own father beat him so badly — and for the same reason José beat Erik, for being a sissy — that he lost hearing in one ear. “But I didn’t kill him,” he points out to his dinner guests. He got away the old-fashioned way: by moving out and starting a life of his own.

At any rate, a “crummy” upbringing is never an excuse for murder; such an upbringing is what allowed his daughter’s killer to skate. Dunne, who returns to the length of time it took the killer to strangle her (“Five minutes!”) like an idée fixe, says the suffering of the murder victims is what matters.

His theory is something “deeper and darker” than being repeatedly beaten and raped by your father and beaten and molested by your mother over the course of years: The two brothers were fooling around consensually . It was Kitty’s discovery of this horror that drove them to kill her and José both. His evidence? Erik’s been fooling around with other inmates and took some modeling photographs. The sexual abuse story is just that, a story, as Dunne feels it has been in past Leslie Abramson cases too. “It’s the theory of transference,” he says: It’s easier for the brothers to project the guilt onto their parents than to admit what’s really happening.

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The entire time he’s spinning this wildly homophobic counter-narrative, Dunne himself is secretly gay. After bonding with a cater waiter after the dinner party who subsequently offers to stay the night, Dunne instead says he has an early day ahead of himself and bids him goodbye. Then he cries, all alone. Is it about his daughter, actor Dominique Dunne, whose murder and the miscarriage of justice that resulted he described to the young man in painful detail? Or is it about his inability to accept that offer? The man who said abuse victims can just move out can’t bring himself to move out of his own closet.

For most of the episode, whatever sympathy we have for Dunne’s situation is mitigated by the fact that we’ve just sat through three absolutely horrifying episodes detailing life in the Menéndez family prior to the murders…and suddenly we have a tweedy gasbag played by versatile but still primarily comic actor Nathan Lane rejecting all as hogwash. We’re supposed to find this irritating and infuriating and even laughable, just as surely as you’re supposed to boo the heel wrestler when he low-blows the babyface with the ref’s back turned.

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It’s only when he hears Lyle’s litany of the torment he endured as the trial begins that Dunne is quite literally staggered, by both the enormity of the parents’ crimes and how wrong he’s been about the brothers. At least, that’s his initial read on it. When he walks to Leslie’s house to apologize later that night, he still can’t shake the suspicion that there’s a chance she simply coaxed the performance of a lifetime out of Lyle, as homophobic prosecutor Pam Bozanich (Milana Vayntrub) has suggested to him. “Either way,” he shrugs, “congratulations, I guess.” Leslie has the good graces not to let this conversation end in that way, offering another heartfelt expression of condolence for his loss. He leaves with his daughter’s final words to him — “I love you, Daddy” — playing in his head, as they often do.

The discourse around sexual abuse and the believability of victims has changed since then, though not enough of course; usually when people suggest someone’s making up a story about it, that person (defendant or prosecutor) has something to hide, and in general people are more aware of this than they used to be. I’m not sure just getting up there in the courtroom after the brothers’ testimony and saying “nuh-uh!” would cut it anymore.

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That said, there are reasons to be suspicious. Lyle in particular is so broken by his parents that he can’t help but treat the whole thing as a performance, since he’s not used to showing actual emotion in public. Even if the pain he shows on the stand is real, he’s being recorded on the phone bragging about getting an Oscar and shit. But he’d be far from the first person to turn their pain on and off at need; that can be a survival mechanism. Similarly, if Lyle and Erik were scared for their lives, they’d misremember or gloss over things like (say) extra people on the boat that afternoon. And Kitty and José making plans for later that night or later that week is really irrelevant; we’ve seen how mercurial those two can be. José decided to move, bought a house, and started packing to move in a single afternoon once!

But the real thing Dunne can’t wrap his mind around though is why they never told before, and why they lied after. There’s a simple reason for that, I think: Having not been sexually abused, he doesn’t understand the rancid cocktail of guilt, shame, doubt, and self-incrimination that results. He doesn’t get that people would rather lie to their friends, their therapist, and the cops than provide the excuse that could save them from the gas chamber until it was absolutely necessary to do so.

In much the same way that all four Menéndezes became the people they became due to parental abuse, Dunne became the person he became because of the murder of his daughter. (“He gave you a career, and a fucking point of view,” Abramson snarls at him at one point.) His mind is just as trapped in a prison of violence as they are. For a time, at least, it’s easier for him to project the nightmare of his daughter’s case onto the brothers than it is for him to face their nightmare instead.

Sean T. Collins ( @theseantcollins ) writes about TV for Rolling Stone , Vulture , The New York Times , and anyplace that will have him , really. He and his family live on Long Island.

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