Menendez brothers' attorney Mark Geragos alleges new facts in interview with Judge Jeanine Pirro
Post-conviction attorney, Mark Geragos, sat down with Judge Jeanine Pirro in Fox Nation's new special, 'Menendez Brothers: Monsters or Misunderstood?'
The Menendez brothers' killings of their parents dominated headlines in the early '90s — but did the media get the story wrong?
As new evidence comes to light, attorney Mark Geragos believes so.
"Everything you think you know about the Menendez case, you really don't," Geragos said in the new Fox Nation special, "Menendez Brothers: Victims or Villains."
The four-part docuseries, brought to you by the production company behind Fox Nation's "Jussie Smollett: Anatomy of a Hoax," re-examines the twisted tale of brothers, Lyle and Erik Menendez, who have been behind bars for more than three decades after they were convicted of killing their parents, Jose and Kitty, in August of 1989.
The brothers were convicted in 1993 after CourtTV broadcast their trial, during which other media mentions – like Saturday Night Live mocking the brothers for crying as they recounted the sexual abuse they allegedly suffered at the hands of their father – painted the pair as "greedy rich kids" and, more pointedly, callous killers.
In re-examining the influence of various institutions, "Victims or Villains" includes testimony from prosecutor Pam Bozanich, juror Hazel Thornton, sexual abuse survivors and actors Rosie O'Donnell and Corey Feldman, post-conviction attorney Cliff Gardner, Geragos and more.
Geragos spoke with Fox News Digital, explaining his role in the case as the pair's post-conviction attorney and why he believes the media is one of the institutions that didn't do the story justice.
Lyle, left, and Erik, right, are pictured in recent mugshots from 2023. After years apart, they were moved into the same housing unit at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego in 2018, according to the New York Daily News. (California Department of Corrections)
"If they [the brothers] were ‘the sisters,’ they wouldn't have done that," Geragos said of the media's mockery, pointing to the famed SNL skit that the attorney called "cringe-inducing." In delineating between the media in the ‘90s from present, Geragos said "they would never do that today."
"What about evidence of abuse?" Gardner, another of the brothers' attorneys, posits in the Fox Nation special. "People have strong opinions, and yet they're not based on the actual facts. They're based on their recollections of the press, and the narrative that was run, which was ‘rich Beverly Hills kids kill their parents for money.’"
"It's ludicrous," Geragos echoed, in speaking with Fox News Digital. "They were already living in the lap of luxury. It wasn't like luxury or wealth was aspirational, because they were already wealthy. You don't get wealthier than Beverly Hills."
Both attorneys believe the brothers should have been convicted of manslaughter rather than first-degree murder in light of their alleged abuse, which would have carried lighter sentences that the brothers would have finished years ago.
To date, the brothers have served over 30 years and counting in prison, which is three times the maximum sentence that a voluntary manslaughter charge would have carried.
In their initial 1993 trial, which became a national sensation, the brothers claimed that their father threatened to kill them if they spoke out about the abuse they were experiencing. Two relatives, including the brothers' cousin, Andy Cano, claimed that Erik confided in them about the abuse long before Jose and Kitty were killed on Aug. 20, 1989.
The brothers were initially tried separately; prosecutor Pam Bozanich, who appears in the Fox Nation special, had, at the time, argued that "men could not be raped because they lack the necessary equipment to be raped," according to Yahoo News. Geragos corroborated this, explaining that, in the second trial, the prosecution "mocked" the brothers and said "the abuse didn't happen."
"I think people are going to be shocked."
But Geragos believes abuse at the hands of Jose Menendez did, in fact, happen, and that his wife, Kitty, was "an enabler."
"Kitty had a rule that if Jose was with one of the boys in the bedroom, you couldn't go down the hall," the attorney revealed, painting a far different picture than the media had at the time.
Menendez brothers, Erik, left, and Lyle on the steps of their Beverly Hills home in November, 1989. (Ronald L. Soble / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Immediately after the killings, the brothers told police that an intruder had killed their parents. In the following months, prosecutors said they began to spend extravagantly on travel, businesses and luxury items.
Erik confessed the killings to his psychologist, Jerome Oziel, who told his then-mistress Judalon Smyth. When Oziel ended the relationship, Smyth told police about the brothers' involvement in the murders, the Los Angeles Times reported. The brothers were arrested in 1990.
Both brothers' trials ended in mistrial when neither jury could decide whether the men were guilty of manslaughter or murder.
In their second trial, Judge Stanley Weisberg limited testimony about the sexual abuse claims and did not allow jurors to vote on manslaughter charges instead of murder charges.
But a letter that Gardner said was written by Erik Menendez to his cousin, Cano, about eight months before the crime in 1988, which was recently unearthed from a storage unit by Cano's mother, supports the men's abuse claims.
"I've been trying to avoid dad. It's still happening, Andy, but it's worse for me now," reads the letter, in part. "Every night I stay up thinking he might come in. … I'm afraid… He's crazy. He's warned me a hundred times about telling anyone, especially Lyle."
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Roy Rossello, a former member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, has made claims that also support the brothers' story. Rossello, now 54, said Jose Menendez, an executive at RCA records at the time, abused him when he was between 14 and 15 years old.
Pictured is a letter allegedly written by Erik Menendez and sent to his cousin Andy Cano 8 months before the killings of Jose and Kitty Menendez. ( SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES COUNTY)
In a sworn affidavit filed in 2023, he said that he went to the Menendez home in the fall of 1983 or 1984. He felt like he had "no control" over his body after drinking a "glass of wine." Then, Rossello claims, the elder Menendez took him to a room and raped him. The former performer said that the elder Menendez abused him two other times, before and after a performance at Radio City Music Hall.
Gardner, who, alongside Geragos, filed a writ of habeas corpus petition in May 2023, cited both the letter and the affidavit in asserting that the brothers' convictions should be vacated.
Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon has until April 11 to respond to the petition.
If the brothers' convictions are vacated, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office will need to decide whether to retry their cases.
Geragos said he is confident Gascon's office will respond by the April 11 deadline. He told Fox News Digital that he is, additionally, exploring filing a re-sentencing petition to "time served" for the brothers.
"It's entirely possible that you see a request [for re-sentencing] prior to April," Geragos said.
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But the attorney's efforts aren't just motivated by wanting to correct a compromised criminal justice system; it's as much as about spotlighting other failing institutions, like politics and what Geragos calls the "media muck."
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"The media was mocking the jurors who actually heard the arguments in the first trial, who overwhelmingly voted for manslaughter. Not murder," Geragos said.
The new Fox Nation series hears directly from one of those jurors.
"For a long time, I didn't do any interviews. I didn't talk about the case for 20 years," Hazel Thornton, a juror in the Menendez brothers' trial, told Fox Nation. "The people putting together documentaries were, by and large, either prosecution-biased or they were dredging their information up from the internet. I felt like I was on the defensive all the time because of what I experienced in the '90s from the media."
When asked if the case had challenged her faith in the American criminal justice system, Thornton answered, "In hindsight, I have my doubts about the justice system, but I have even more doubts about the media in certain circumstances."
Thornton pointed to the prevailing narrative – what she calls a "common misperception" – surrounding what Jose and Kitty were doing in their final moments. Several sources have promoted and perpetuated the story that the Menendezes were sitting in front of the television eating strawberries and ice cream when their sons burst in and, unprovoked, shot them to death.
Yet, as the Fox Nation special explores, a detective testified at trial that the parents were not eating anything at the time of their deaths, and that no food had been found in the room.
As "Villains and Victims" explores across its four episodes, it might just be one misconception of many.
"I think people are going to be shocked [watching]," Geragos told Fox News Digital.
To learn more about the case that swept the country and its lasting impact on our culture, stream "Menendez Brothers: Villains or Victims" on Fox Nation today.
To hear more from Mark Geragos, Fox Nation subscribers can also stream "The Menendez Brothers: Monsters or Misunderstood?," a two-part special consisting of Geragos, Fox News' Judge Jeanine Pirro, and more.
Fox Nation programs are viewable on-demand and from your mobile device app, but only for Fox Nation subscribers. Go to Fox Nation to start a free trial and watch the extensive library from your favorite Fox Nation personalities.
Fox News' Christina Coulter contributed to this report.
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