It was a gripping case, one of the first to draw a daily national audience to a televised criminal trial. Two wealthy young men were accused three decades ago of murdering their parents by marching into the den of their Beverly Hills mansion with shotguns and firing more than a dozen shots at their mother and father while they sat on the couch.
Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted in 1996 of the murders of their mother, Mary Louise, a former beauty queen who went by Kitty, and their father, Jose, a music executive, despite defense arguments that the brothers had been sexually molested by their father for years, and had killed out of fear.
Now Roy Rosselló, a former member of Menudo, the 1980s boy band that became a worldwide sensation, is alleging he was sexually abused by Jose Menendez as a teenager.
The allegation aired on Tuesday in a segment of the Today show that outlined some of the findings of a three-part documentary set to air May 2 on NBCUniversal’s streaming service, Peacock. The Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed series, based on reports by journalists Robert Rand and Nery Ynclan, focuses largely on Mr. Rosselló. He describes an encounter with Mr. Menendez, but also recounts various incidents of sexual abuse, which he says were inflicted on him by one of Menudo’s former managers while he was singing as part of the group.
“I know what he did to me in his house,” Mr. Rosselló says of Mr. Menendez in the clip from the docuseries aired on Today.
It is unclear what impact, if any, Mr Rosselló’s account will have on defense attorneys’ efforts to secure a new trial for the brothers, whose previous appeals were denied.
The credibility of the brothers’ account and the legitimacy of the defense arguments pointing to sexual abuse as a mitigating factor in the case was central to the criminal proceedings that took place after the murders were discovered in 1989. The first indictment, which began in 1993, ended in two hung juries and trials. When the brothers were tried again two years later, they were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, where they remain.
The Los Angeles County Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the cases through the 1990s, did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Tuesday morning.
The Today report featured interviews with Mr. Rosselló, in which he allegedly described a visit to the Menendez home in New Jersey when he was 14 – a visit during which he said Jose Menendez drugged and raped him.
“This is the man here who raped me,” he says in a clip from the docuseries and shows a photo of Mr. Menendez. “That’s the pedophile.”
He can also be heard saying, “It’s time for the world to know the truth.”
Mr. Menendez was linked to Menudo because he signed the group as executive director of RCA Records.
Mr Rosselló has previously described being sexually abused as part of Menudo. Others have also said they were verbally, physically, emotionally and sexually abused while part of the band in the four-part HBO Max docuseries Menudo: Forever Young. No one has ever been criminally charged in connection with the allegations.
One of Kitty Menendez’s brothers, Milton Andersen, 88, used an expletive to call Mr Rosselló’s claim flatly false and said the Menendez brothers should not be released.
Mr Andersen said his brother-in-law was not a sex offender and contradicted the idea that the new allegation could in any way lead to Lyle and Erik re-examining their case.
“They don’t deserve to live on this earth after killing my sister and brother-in-law,” he said.
The Menendez murders drew a great deal of public attention, in part because the brothers were wealthy children. Lyle was attending Princeton at the time of the murders. Erik pursued a career in professional tennis. Prosecutors portrayed them as cold-blooded killers interested in gaining unfettered access to their parents’ $14 million estate.
José Menendez was shot five times, once in the back of the head. According to the brothers themselves, after they fired several rounds, Lyle went to his car, reloaded his 12-gauge shotgun, pressed the muzzle of his gun to his mother’s cheek, and shot her again.
Police initially believed the killings to be Mafia-related. But investigators turned their attention to Lyle, who was 22 at the time of his arrest, and Erik, 19, after the brothers bought Rolex watches, condos, sports cars and other items in the months following the murders.
Although they initially denied any role in the murders, they became prime suspects after the discovery of tapes of the brothers’ conversations with their psychologist, in which the brothers explained what prompted them to kill their parents.
As the first trial drew near, the brothers’ defense attorneys put forward their own explanation for the crimes: that Lyle had confronted his father about the family’s sexual abuse secrets, that his father had grown angry and threatening, and that the brothers had killed off worry about her life.
The defense argued that the murder charge should be reduced to manslaughter because the defendants honestly, if wrongly, believed their lives were in imminent danger.
The trials, played out on court television, heralded a new era in televised court drama. At least some jurors in the early trials believed the brothers, who testified movingly about the abuse they had suffered. The testimony left the jury split between manslaughter and murder verdicts and contributed to the impasse that led to the trials.
By the time another jury convened to decide the brothers’ fates, circumstances had changed. The judge banned cameras in court and severely restricted testimonies and evidence related to Jose Menendez’s parenthood. Prosecutors, who had left the brothers’ allegations of molestation unchallenged in the early trials, approached Erik Menendez directly when he took the witness stand, casting doubt on whether the abuse had even taken place.
“Can you give us the name of an eyewitness to one of the sexual assaults that took place in this home,” lead prosecutor David Conn repeatedly asked Erik Menendez while going through the locations where the brothers had lived.
According to transcripts of the testimony, Mr. Menendez repeated the same answer over and over again: “No.”
The defense also did not try anyone other than the brothers, who accused Mr. Menendez of being a sexual predator.
As the trial drew to a close, Judge Stanley M. Weisberg ruled that the “abuse apology” argument could not be used at all. The verdict essentially forced the jury to decide whether to dismiss the brothers outright or convict them of murder.
They did the latter.
“We thought there was some level of psychological abuse. I think most of us believed that,” one judge, Lesley Hillings, later told the Los Angeles Times. “Sexual abuse? I don’t think we’ll ever know if that’s true or not.”
Legal experts said that even with Mr Rosselló’s new allegation, the lawyers defending the Menendez brothers would face an uphill battle if they sought a re-examination of the case.
Laurie L. Levenson, a criminal law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who provided a legal analysis of the Menendez case in the 1990s, said Mr. Rosselló’s information could come “too little, too late.”
“In the end, in the second trial, the jury just didn’t believe them,” Professor Levenson said of the brothers and their allegations of sexual abuse.
Mr Rosselló’s report “could be something that you could file with the court and claim that it was newly discovered evidence and that it would have made a difference in the case,” she added. “But they will have the burden of showing that.”
In the segment aired by Today, Alan Jackson, a criminal defense attorney, agreed the brothers had “a big mountain to climb.” Still, he said the allegation made by Mr Rosselló gave the brothers a “glimmer of hope”.
Kirsten Noyes and Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.