The Menendez brothers
Cold-blooded killers or misunderstood victims? Why a gruesome Beverly Hills murder case is back in the spotlight, three decades later
The Menendez brothers – cold-blooded killers or misunderstood victims?
A gruesome Beverly Hills murder case is back in the spotlight three decades later, but this time a new generation wants them freed
By Chris Heath 27 November 2021 • 5:00am
On the evening of 20 August 1989, Jose and Kitty Menendez sat down in the living room of their Beverly Hills mansion and watched the Sunday-night movie on TV, the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. They snacked on some blueberries and whipped cream. And then, at some point that evening, they were brutally killed. Jose was hit by four shotgun blasts: to his left elbow, his right upper arm, his left thigh and what would later be described in court as 'an explosive contact wound in the back of his head'. Kitty was hit nine times: to her left breast, the right side of her face, her right hand, her right arm, her left thigh, twice in her left knee, a blast through her left shoulder into the left side of her face, and the shot to her left cheek that shattered her skull.
The alarm wasn't raised until the couple's two sons, Lyle, 21, and Erik, 18, returned just before midnight to the family home at 722 North Elm Drive from a nearby movie theatre that had been showing the new Batman film.
On the 911 call, Lyle's anguish was all too apparent, as he kept trying to convey what had happened.
'I have a hysterical person on the phone,' the first dispatcher explained to a colleague, and handed the call over.
'Who was the person who was shot?' the second dispatcher asked.
'My mom and my dad!' Lyle sobbed.
A family portrait of the brothers with their parents, Kitty and Jose Credit: AP Images
'Your mom and dad?'
'My mom,' he wailed, 'and my dad!'
Inevitably, these killings were big news. Few people are murdered in Beverly Hills, never mind with such apparent savagery. Jose Menendez was a successful executive for a home video company, and even the first Los Angeles Times article reporting the death floated a possible business connection to organised crime. Three days later, in a more extensive exploration of Jose's background – he had escaped from Cuba at the age of 16 after Castro's takeover – the newspaper wrote: 'Official silence has led to widespread speculation that the Menendezes died in an execution-style slaying that could somehow have been related to the executive's business activities.'
By the next week, a follow-up story headlined, 'Menendez Couple Reportedly Were Gunned Down Mob Style', all but confirmed it. 'Informed law enforcement sources' revealed how both the style and circumstances of the killings indicated mob involvement: 'There's no question that it's organized crime.'
A memorial service was held at the Directors Guild of America. In front of 400 people, Lyle delivered a eulogy praising his father's values, before the song Girl I'm Gonna Miss You by Milli Vanilli was played.
Afterwards, Jose's sister, Marta, told the press that her brother had been killed because he refused to deal with mobsters, a theory Lyle only slightly tempered. To quote the Los Angeles Times, '"Someone was trying to send a message," he said, but no one in the family had yet deciphered the message.'
After that, the story dropped out of the headlines, and the authorities were presumed to be following up their mob leads.
In the meantime, Robert Rand, a reporter based in Miami, had been commissioned by the Miami Herald to write a very different kind of article – telling the tale of the Menendez patriarch, a Cuban-American success story who had apparently envisioned big things for himself – as the first Cuban-born senator in the American government. Rand set out to interview Jose's friends, associates and remaining family – including the two grieving sons.
Rand arranged to meet Lyle and Erik where they were staying, at the North Elm Drive home where their parents had been killed. When Rand arrived on 20 October, two months after the killings, the brothers were out playing tennis together, a sport they both competed in to a professional level. Instead, a girlfriend offered to give Rand a tour. It was a grand house – before the Menendez family bought it for $4 million, it had reportedly been rented by a stream of notables, including Elton John, Prince and U2 guitarist The Edge – but it was strange to see it like this, for obvious reasons.
'We kept walking by the murder room,' Rand tells me, 32 years later. 'They had removed all the furniture and the rug, so it was just a room and the bookcases and the brothers' tennis trophies. And the first time we walked by, I kind of felt a chill. And the second time, I thought, "Boy, if my parents had been blown away here, I wouldn't be living in this house."'
Eventually the brothers appeared in their tennis whites, holding racquets. Initially, Lyle asked that they just chat, unrecorded, to get to know each other. Even so, Rand tells me, 'About 10 or 15 minutes into the conversation, Lyle said, "We think our father was such a great man, we're thinking about writing a book about him – would you like to work with us?" Rand sidestepped the invitation.
Menendez brothers, Erik, left, and Lyle on the steps of their Beverly Hills home in November, 1989 Credit: Ronald L. Soble / eyevine
The second day it was just Erik – Lyle had been called away overnight to Princeton, New Jersey, where he had just bought a chicken-wing restaurant. This time, Erik and Rand recorded the interview. 'Most of it,' Rand remembers, 'was him sharing fond memories that he had of his parents.' Nonetheless, Rand explained at one point that although he was writing about Erik's father's life, and not his death, it would be helpful if Erik could describe that night.
What follows are Erik's words that Rand would quote about the sight that had faced the brothers when they arrived home: 'I've never seen anything like it and never will see anything like it. It's probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do. They weren't real… wax… it looked like wax. I've never seen my dad helpless. I hope it was sudden. Possibly, if Lyle and I had been there, we could have done something. Maybe my dad would be alive. Maybe I'd be dead. I'd definitely give my life for my dad's. He was always there when I needed him.'
Looking back, with what would soon be known, it may seem incredible that Erik talked to this journalist about his father and his family for three-and-a-half hours. Even once the formal conversation was over, Erik suggested that he drive Rand across the city to see the dream house in Calabas that his parents had been remodelling. So he and Rand spent another couple of hours together. 'He was completely relaxed,' Rand reflects. 'He told several hours of these really loving anecdotes about two people that he seemed to obviously care about.'
Rand's story, published that Christmas Eve, would close with Erik explaining how he and his brother intended to honour their father's legacy. As Rand would summarise it: 'Lyle wants to become President. Erik will settle for the US Senate.'
The following March, two arrests were made, and Lyle and Erik Menendez were charged with murdering their parents.
The Menendez brothers on trial Credit: Ted Soqui/Sygma via Getty Images
The predominant story, which would be told over the next three years before the case first went to trial, was of two brothers who were greedy, spoiled, sociopathic brats. That two days before the murders, having learnt that their disappointed father was to disinherit them, they had driven down to San Diego to buy shotguns using someone else's driving licence. On that Sunday night, they gunned down their parents, then went out so that they could return home later to feign discovery of the bodies. Afterwards, confident that they had got away with it, the brothers went on a spending spree – buying cars, watches, restaurants – and in the first three months after the murders were said to have spent over a million dollars.
Meanwhile, law enforcement were asking questions, though the big break only came after Erik confessed to his therapist; complacent enough, it seemed, to feel that he could share such information without consequence. The story of how this became public was a convoluted one – it was the therapist's disgruntled former mistress who ultimately told the police – and there would be protracted legal arguments over its admissibility in court, confidentiality ultimately being waived under an exception allowed because the therapist claimed that the brothers had threatened his life. But by then, the central fact was no longer in dispute: the Menendez brothers had shot and killed their parents. The whole affair was commonly depicted as a dark parable about excess, privilege and moral vacuity.
Only in 1993, as their first trial began, was a different narrative presented – one intended to explain both the brothers' general predicament and the specific lead-up to the actions they took. Each brother described, in great detail, stories of sexual abuse.
Lyle said that his father began fondling him when he was six, and described how, over the next couple of years, this incrementally progressed to rape, before stopping. Erik recounted a similar tale, but one that had continued through his teenage years until his father's death. As summarised in court by his attorney, this 'escalated in a carefully calculated pattern of grooming the child for his father's sexual gratification'.
LYLE said that his father began fondling him when he was six
All of this history, the brothers claimed, burst into the open in the days before the killings. Five days earlier, on the Tuesday, Lyle had an incendiary argument with his mother, during which she ripped off the toupee he had worn for the previous two years, something seen by his shocked younger brother, who didn't know about Lyle's hairpiece. Erik, traumatised, proceeded to tell his brother that they both had secrets, and described the ongoing abuse. When Jose returned from a business trip on Thursday evening, Lyle confronted him. He says that his father told him to stay out of it, and suggested they forget they'd ever had the conversation.
'I interrupted him,' Lyle testified. 'I swore and told him he was a f—king sick person, and I told him "no", and that he wasn't going to touch my brother again, and I threatened him… that I would I tell everybody everything about him – that I would tell the police and I would tell the family.'
Lyle said that after he issued this threat, his father's demeanour seemed to relax.
'He said, "We all make choices in life, son. Erik made his. You've made yours." And then he just looked at me and he got up to leave… I thought, "Oh my God, he thinks I'm going to tell people regardless." And I started pleading with him before I left, "Dad, I'm only going to tell people if you don't stop touching Erik – if it doesn't stop." And he just looked at me and said, "You're going to tell everyone anyway." And he left.'
What did you think was going to happen, he was asked in court.
'I thought we were in danger. I thought he felt he had no choice.'
But to what?
'That he would kill us. That he would get rid of us in some way. Because he thought I was going to ruin him.'
Erik testified that his father confronted him later that evening, violently throwing him on to his bed, saying he'd warned him not to tell Lyle, and that Lyle would tell everyone and that, 'I'm not going to let that happen.'
After that, Erik saw his mother in the living room – the room they'd call 'the den' – and she asked why he was so upset. Erik says that when he told her she wouldn't understand, she replied, 'I understand a lot more than you think,' and, 'I know… I've always known. What do you think, I'm stupid?'
Kitty and Jose Menendez, pictured in a newspaper story shortly after the killings Credit: News feature by Robert Rand
The next day the brothers bought the guns. On Saturday night, Erik testified, he lay in his bedroom holding his shotgun as his father pounded on the door, demanding that he open it, before going away.
The next evening, after a further face-to-face confrontation with their two children, Jose and Kitty went into the den and closed the door.
'I thought they were going ahead with their plan to kill us,' testified Lyle. The brothers fetched their new guns. 'It's hard to describe how I felt,' he said. 'Like my life was sort of slipping away, and that we were going to die.'
Then Erik and Lyle entered the living room and started firing.
In the short term, this defence was partially successful. Enough of the jurors who sat through every detail of this testimony – Lyle and Erik had separate juries – found it sufficiently convincing that both juries were hung, unable to agree on whether or not the brothers were guilty of murder or manslaughter. But out in the world of 1990s America, where the Menendez brothers had long been widely condemned, many not only disbelieved them but considered their testimony to be the crowning act of their contemptibility.
Noted chronicler Dominick Dunne had been covering the trial for Vanity Fair, where he relayed stories he had heard about how the brothers had concocted, researched and rehearsed their tales of abuse, alongside a cavalcade of other second-hand anecdotes which showed them in a poor light.
As the trial ended, he didn't mince his words. 'Two juries took the word of two world-class liars, two rich, spoiled, arrogant losers who were already on the road to a criminal life when they shot their mother's face off and their father's brains out.'
The famous – and latterly controversial – lawyer Alan Dershowitz even coined a phrase in a newspaper column for what had happened here, one which would enter the language: 'the abuse excuse'.
It was, anyway, only a temporary reprieve. A second trial began in 1995. A few days earlier, OJ Simpson had been found not guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, and the shockwaves of that verdict were still resonating. At the new Menendez trial, this time, over the defence's objections, far less historical testimony about abuse and family trauma was allowed. The prosecution relentlessly focused the jury on the gruesome death scene and hammered home the point that, even in the unproven case that there had been abuse or some other kind of provocation, the jury would still need to believe that the killers truly felt that they were in imminent danger at the moment they acted.
Jerrianne Hayslett, Director of Public Information for the Superior Court, reads the guilty verdict for the Menendez re-trial, 1996 Credit: AP Images
Lyle and Erik were found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
That, in a sense, is where the story remains. After the Menendez brothers were sentenced, even their wish to be incarcerated in the same institution was refused – as they had been judged co-conspirators, it was argued that even behind bars they might conspire in future crimes. For the next 20 years they were not even allowed to speak on the telephone. Finally, in 2018, Lyle was allowed to join his younger brother at the Richard J Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, little more than a mile north of the Mexican border. All their legal appeals have long been exhausted.
Even so, there have always been some who've argued that, while the brothers' immediate responsibility for killing their parents is indisputable, their sentence, given the circumstances they allege, is disproportionately harsh. Recently, these voices have both multiplied and got louder.
In part, this might just be the swings and roundabouts of storytelling – after a time, the only interesting story remaining to be told is the one that runs counter to what has been told before. But it is surely also a reflection of how our world has changed in the last quarter of a century. Even if to claim sexual abuse is not to prove it, the way such abuse is thought about now is very different from how it was in the 1990s. It's difficult to imagine that if the same trial with the same evidence was held today, no matter what its ultimate verdict, that the brothers' accounts would be so routinely dismissed or scorned.
The brothers at a preliminary murder hearing in 1991 Credit: AP Images
In 2018 a book was published, The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Brothers, which rigorously laid out the whole story, but also made clear where its sympathies lay. Perhaps strangely, it was written by the journalist who had been there since the very beginning: Robert Rand, who, after that first Miami Herald article, had never let the story go. In the wake of the brothers' arrest, he started to visit them in jail in LA and covered both trials. Even back then, he believed their accounts, and documented first-hand the attitudes of the day that were working against them. 'I interviewed every juror after the first trial,' Rand tells me. 'All of the men told me some version of, "Well, a father would never do that to his sons."'
Nonetheless, it wasn't Rand's book that triggered the greatest recent upsurge in interest in the Menendez brothers' case. Rand himself first became aware, towards the end of last year, that something else was happening when his teenage son came to him one afternoon. 'He said, "Dad, you've got to take a look at TikTok. It's crazy – it's full of Menendez videos."'
Users of social media sites – and especially TikTok – have taken up the brothers' cause in recent times Credit: TikTok
Earlier in 2020, Court TV had posted online footage of the entire months-long first trial, and now TikTok, the social media site filled with short video clips, particularly beloved by teens and 20-somethings, was, somewhat unexpectedly, awash with Menendez brothers content.
Much of it stretched boundaries of taste and appropriateness. One early meme involved setting Menendez footage to the Britney Spears single Criminal, its chorus 'Mama I'm in love with a criminal/And this type of love isn't rational, it's physical.' That tone was widely echoed. Here's a random collage of online comments: I'm sorry, they're so cute… Lyle and Erik are hot asf… oh my god i need to stop falling in love with these brothers… the two sexiest brothers to ever exist… I have pet snails named Lyle & Erik… omg they are so attractive especially Erik… Erik is so hot…
It's hard, reading words like these, not to empathise with the following online retort: 'This is so depressing. It's a combination of "He's too hot to have killed anyone" and "He's too hot so I don't care if he killed anyone".'
Nevertheless, far from all the content was like this. There was also something much more serious going on, a chorus that has evolved to incorporate a backlash against the kind of comments above – anyone talking about how hot or cute the brothers are now gets called out pretty quickly for 'sexualising' them, and are sometimes reminded of the particular insensitivity in directing such comments towards people who identify as sexual-abuse survivors.
Instead, there are now numerous TikTok videos, Instagram accounts, podcasts and YouTube channels focusing on the specifics of the trials – the testimony and the evidence. There's a relentless whirlwind of energy on a bewildering scale: TikTok videos tagged #menendezbrothers have been watched more than 700 million times.
Rand did, however, play a part in bringing the case to wider attention. Late last year, he contacted a friend at The New York Times, and in February an article ran, kicking off further mass coverage.
As this suggests, the role Rand finds himself in these days is not a straightforward one: he is at once a journalist and an advocate for the brothers' release. He has also for the past five years been back in regular contact with Lyle, whom he speaks of as a friend and visits regularly.
Usually, Rand says, they speak of anything but the case, but right now he is also helping with what might be their next legal manoeuvres. The brothers' remaining options appear to be either filing for a pardon or commutation from California's Governor, or producing significant new evidence that wasn't considered in the previous trial and appeals – which, if successful, could theoretically lead to a new trial.
The material Rand has been unearthing potentially bolsters the brothers' insistence that they had told others about their father's sexual abuse before the killings. There had been some trial testimony to this effect: for instance a third cousin said that when he was eight Lyle had told her 'he and his dad had been touching each other down there', and their cousin Andy Cano testified that Erik had first told him when Erik was 12 and Andy 10, about his father's 'massages'.
Then there is a letter. In 2018, when Rand was going through a box at the Menendezes' aunt's house, he found the original of a handwritten letter purportedly written by Erik to Cano (who died some years ago), eight months before the killings, including the following passage [sic throughout]: 'I've been trying to avoid dad. It's still happening, Andy, but its worse for me now. I can't explain it. He so overweight that I cant stand to see him. I never know when its going to happen and its driving me crazy.
Every night I stay up thinking he might come in. I need to put it out of my mind. I know what you said before but I'm afraid. You just don't know dad like I do. He's crazy! hes warned me a hundred times about telling anyone. Especially Lyle.'
Could this make a difference? Even if evidence like this were considered significant enough to trigger a new trial, and even if a jury were fully convinced of this toxic family history, that wouldn't necessarily lead to a different verdict. But if a sufficient tide of sympathy did turn in their favour, one wonders what could happen.
In the meantime, the brothers have found their own indirect ways to communicate with the world. Each is in a long marriage to a partner who wrote to the brothers after their incarceration and who now acts as their proxy. (The prurient question's answer: no, such unions cannot be consummated.)
Erik and Lyle Menendez at their 1994 trial Credit: Kim Kulish / Ted Soqui / Sygma via Getty Images
Lyle has a Facebook page under his own name though the pinned post makes clear that he has no internet access, and that while basic information is occasionally channelled from him, the page is primarily set up to be a supportive safe place for adult survivors of abuse.
Erik has a YouTube channel which, under the rather grandiose name of Justice Watchdog, primarily consists of occasional audio recordings in which he speaks from the prison phone for a few minutes, generally either about life inside or to comment on the latest media coverage of their case, sometimes with remarkable directness.
'I can't say anything else other than I am extremely ashamed at, you know, what a screwed up teenager I was,' he said this May.
'I lost my way, I lost my path, and I ended up turning the whole world to ash around me. And I am sorry. And I can never say I am sorry enough.'
There are those, of course, who still firmly believe that these were nothing more than two self-centred, evil boys who killed their parents and then lied about everything. To believe that is, logically, also to believe that the Menendez brothers are now into the fourth decade of a truly despicable con game, and that even with the meagre resources and opportunities now available to them, they're still finding new people to harm and deceive, new damage to inflict.
Maybe. It's possible, I suppose.
Some of the best arguments, though, against them being Machiavellian homicidal masterminds are in both the circumstances of what they did and the convoluted story that they have both told with remarkable consistency ever since. For instance, there is no evidence that they made any careful preparations to cover up their crime. Once they had killed their parents – at least 13 shots fired in a quiet Beverly Hills neighbourhood – their natural assumption would have been that the police would be there in seconds.
They'd have had little opportunity to hide the most incriminating evidence: the weapons, the fingerprints, the gun residue on their hands. It was only when the police didn't come that they took some fairly rudimentary and half-baked – though, for a while, successful – steps to get away with it.
Likewise, the multi-day drama the brothers both recounted as the build-up to the killings has the messy, confusing, haphazard contours of real life, not of well-plotted and calculated motivation and justification. Perhaps crucially, it's notable what they do not say. Their argument of how they cumulatively found themselves believing that their lives were in danger is a contorted one, and it's missing what would be the most obviously legally useful component – a clear and unambiguous direct threat from both parents shortly before the brothers shot them.
If they were fabricating all this, surely they would have thought to claim such an immediate provocation? After all, the only people who might disprove them were dead.
Instead, as I listen to the brothers' account, what I hear is the sound of two people endlessly trying to explain – to a court, and to the world, but maybe also to themselves – why they did something awful, hoping to show how on one Sunday evening in 1989 there was a single moment when it somehow seemed to make some kind of sense.
The first thing you hear is an automated message: 'You have a prepaid call from "Lyle Menendez", an inmate at the RJ Donovan Correctional Facility, San Diego, California. This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded. To accept this call, say or dial five.'
On the afternoon of the last Thursday in October, Lyle calls me. Periodically, the automated voice interrupts to remind us that we are being monitored and recorded.
Each time 14 minutes has elapsed, the voice informs us that we have 60 seconds remaining, and he has to call back.
Journalist Robert Rand visiting Lyle in prison Credit: Robert Rand
Lyle is in his 32nd year behind bars. This morning he did some exercise and worked on his sociology degree. Later, he plans to work on a collaborative art project, painting a mural on a wall encircling the prison yard that is 1,100ft long and 30ft high that, when completed, will become, he says, 'the longest continuous mural in a US prison'.
He lives in a dorm with five other inmates, including the brother he was reunited with in 2018. 'Even though it's been a few years now, it's still sort of surprising every day,' he says. ' We've always been unusually close as brothers. Some brothers are, some brothers aren't. For us, just having grown up in the same chaotic bit of a terrorising childhood, we just sort of bonded early and never really let go.'
I ask Lyle what he would like people to understand about him that they may not.
'I mean, I think that my situation and circumstance is not so atypical,' he replies. 'It's not as surprising as you would think. It's shocking to me sometimes when I think that, you know, how could I have possibly ever killed my parents? I had never ever committed a violent act, before or since. So how can that possibly have happened? But it's not that surprising, if you grew up in a home with a child molester, and you grew up with a mother who accepts and enables it, and there's a lot of brutality. It's not shocking that it ends in a homicide of some kind, whether it be against the children or maybe the mother, or the mother killing the father or… It 's not surprising... You only hear about Menendez, but really there's a lot of Menendezes out there.'
LYLE: I took responsibility for what occurred, I never said that it was a
justified act
As we talk, Lyle veers, perhaps understandably, between two states. In one, he is someone who has long ago come to terms with a sentence of life without possibility of parole. He'll tell me, 'I took responsibility for what occurred, I never said that it was a justified act, and I'm at peace with myself with what happened. And I just sort of accept my circumstance now.'
Likewise, he'll observe: 'I don't live my day every day thinking about it – I live for inside, and I just sort of have a productive fulfilling day here, to bring meaning to my life here.'
On the other hand, perhaps inevitably, a conversation like this also stirs up more turbulent thoughts. Lyle explains how, for many years after the sentencing, he resolved not to talk about what had happened, but would eventually realise that this was futile. 'You have these sort of inescapable facts of your life,' he says. ' You know, being a child of rape, being a child who killed his parents, being someone who had to go through this lurid trial – you can't really escape those facts. And then you can't really escape the memories.'
And so, with only a little prompting, he has plenty to say about their predicament, repeatedly sidetracking to highlight various ways in which he believes he and his brother were treated unfairly or inappropriately, for me to bear in mind. Many of these involve very specific aspects of their trials and the legal process. Others are more general, and brutal. 'The other thing that bothers me, I will say this,' he explains, 'is the sanitisation of words like "incest" and "sex abuse", instead of "child rape". I've always thought to myself, it's just amazing that people struggle to understand. Like, how could they? I mean, really? I wish rather than 101 witnesses that we presented, I had 45 seconds of video of a child being sexually abused and raped.'
By 'a child', I clarify, he means himself or Erik?
'Correct. Correct. If there was 30 seconds of a deal like that, would there be anybody out there going, "Oh, I can't believe they killed…" They'd be like, well, that's understandable. It may not be defensible. Maybe they should be doing a lot of time in prison. But it's certainly understandable. And that's my feeling of this.
'This is a case that should not be hard to understand. If you want to say it's still murder, I understand that. If you want to say, well, they should have gone to the police, and you don't quite understand the syndrome of how that doesn't happen, I understand that too. But don't tell me it's not understandable.'
Lyle is clearly buoyed by the resurgent interest in their case and what he views as a sea change in how they are viewed.
'It used to be that if you went online and put in "Menendez" on Twitter, you would see nothing but negative comments,' he says. 'It's literally the opposite now.' And notwithstanding the mindset he described of accepting their current circumstance, when I ask how he assesses the chances of ever being free, he replies, 'Increasingly good'.
Already, he argues, their sentence is an outlier: 'Almost every week we watch somebody with a murder case that has none of the mitigating circumstances of ours whatsoever go home, while Erik and I are here.'
Not that he suggests anything is likely to happen easily, or perhaps with great speed. As much as he clearly cherishes the focus and support of the TikTok brigade, he acknowledges that they frequently indulge in a kind of magical thinking that, faced with the grim actuality of his situation, can be frustrating. 'Unfortunately, they see a miscarriage of justice and think, "Oh, it's like the show Making a Murderer – this, of course, has to be rectified easily. Somebody's going to fix this!" And they don't understand that there has to be a legal pathway, and it's just very, very difficult.'
LYLE: If you don't believe us in 2020 and beyond, I don't get it
Perhaps these next words hint at his more realistic hopes: 'TikTok, they are like the future lawyers, legislators, doctors, politicians. It's the next generation. So I take them very seriously and appreciate their nuanced understanding and their curiosity and where they're ending up on it, because 10 or 15 years from now, those are maybe the people who are in a position of power and ability to change laws, and let you go.'
In the meantime, I feel obliged to point out to him that, inevitably, there will still be some people who simply don't believe him and his brother. I ask what he would want to say to them.
'I would say,' he replies, 'that if you didn't believe us in the '90s, I get it.' He reiterates that they faced judgment in an era which largely didn't understand the sexual abuse of boys. 'So I get that,' he says. 'If you don't believe us in 2020 and beyond, I don't get it… If you care, if it's important enough to be worked up over and emotional about, then there's more than enough out there, including the entire trial, to be educated on the case…'
The automated voice cuts in once more – You have 60 seconds remaining – but prisoner K13758 in the California Dept of Corrections and Rehabilitation still has time to say what he wants to say.
'And I don't see how you can possibly not believe,' he continues. 'I don't see how that's possible.'
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