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Law school graduate and criminal justice advocate Kim Kardashian has called on California authorities to reconsider the life sentences handed to Erik and Lyle Menendez, the two brothers convicted in 1996 of murdering their parents seven years earlier.
“They are kind, intelligent and honest men,” Kardashian wrote in a personal essay submitted to NBC. The reality star and Skims founder said the brothers’ actions were “not excusable” but that their life sentences without the possibility for parole are questionable.
“We should not deny who they are today in their 50s,” Kardashian wrote in her essay. “Physiologically and psychologically, time changes us, and I doubt anyone would claim to be the same person they were at 18. I know I’m not!
Kardashian’s appeal comes amid renewed interest in the Menendez case. Netflix recently began streaming a Ryan Murphy true-crime drama titled Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. The streamer is also releasing its own documentary on the subject next week.
“There should have been a police response and we would have been arrested,” Erik says in the documentary, according to People magazine. “We had no alibi. The gunpowder residue was all over our hands. Under normal circumstances, they give you a gunpowder residue test and we would have been arrested immediately.”
The brothers have maintained that they killed their parents out of self-defense after enduring a lifetime of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Attorneys for the men argue that under today’s understanding of sexual abuse, they would not have been convicted of first-degree murder.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles announced on Friday that they are reviewing new evidence in the case.
The Los Angeles county district attorney, George Gascón, said during a news conference that the guilt of Erik Menendez, 53, and his 56-year-old brother, Lyle Menendez, was not in question, and his office was reviewing the case with a view to resentencing.
The new evidence, Gascón said, includes a letter written by Erik Menendez that his attorneys say corroborates the allegations that he was sexually abused by his father.
The brothers’ attorney Mark Geragos has said the family always believed they should have been charged with manslaughter rather than murder. But after jury trials – the brothers were tried separately – ended in deadlock, jurors in a third trial were not offered a manslaughter option.
The brothers, 21 and 18 at the time of the murders, admitted they fatally shot their entertainment executive father, Jose Menendez, and their mother, Kitty Menendez, in 1989. They said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent the disclosure of the father’s long-term sexual molestation of Erik.
Prosecutors claimed the murders were motivated by greed and committed because they feared they would be cut out of their parents’ will. They had gone on a luxury spending spree after the murders and before they were arrested, including spending half a million dollars on clothes, Rolex watches and cars, a pattern of behavior richly detailed in the recent Netflix drama.
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In a statement on X posted by his wife, Erik Menendez called the show a “dishonest portrayal” of what happened that has taken them back to a time when prosecutors “built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experience rape trauma differently from women”.
Kardashian wrote in her letter that the “media turned the brothers into monsters and sensationalized eye candy – two arrogant, rich kids from Beverly Hills who killed their parents out of greed. There was no room for empathy, let alone sympathy.”
Their conviction came soon after OJ Simpson’s acquittal, with Kardashian implying, as others have, that Los Angeles prosecutors at the time had no stomach for a controversial trial outcome. Kardashian’s father, Robert Kardashian, was part of Simpson’s defense team, and she has spoken of him as her inspiration to study law.
Kardashian’s commitment to criminal justice reform has helped secure the commutation of several prisoners’ sentences. She was involved in petitioning Donald Trump to sign the 2018 bipartisan First Step Act, designed to reduce excessive sentences in the federal prison system and promote rehabilitation.
The brothers, she wrote, were “robbed of their childhoods by their parents, then robbed of any chance of freedom by a criminal justice system eager to punish them without considering the context or understanding the ‘why’, and without caring about whether the punishment fit the crime, Erik and Lyle were condemned before the trial even began”.
“I have spent time with Lyle and Erik; they are not monsters,” she added. “They are kind, intelligent and honest men.”
