Peacock
Lyle and Erik Menendez claimed that they killed their parents in 1989 because they feared for their safety following a lifetime of sexual abuse perpetrated by their father, José, an RCA Records executive, and condoned by their mother, Kitty. That defense earned them separate mistrials in 1993 but didn’t succeed in their subsequent 1996 retrial, which concluded with convictions and life sentences without the possibility of parole. In the ensuing 30 years, they’ve maintained their victimization story, and now, a new Peacock docuseries purports to have evidence that might corroborate their allegations against José—and it comes from the unlikeliest of sources.
Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed (May 2) boasts a bombshell in store for viewers who may have (naturally) assumed that the Menendez saga was over. Roy Rosselló, a key member of the Puerto Rican boy band sensation Menudo, asserts that, throughout the course of his 1983-86 tenure in the group, he was habitually abused by its creator and manager, Edgardo Diaz. Moreover, he contends that he was raped by José Menendez, who signed Menudo to its RCA contract and who was a close associate of Diaz, whom he entertained (along with the band members) at his Beverly Hills home. During one of those visits, Roy says he saw Erik and Lyle, after which he was drugged and assaulted—and he implies that this crime took place as an implicit means of sealing Menudo’s RCA deal.
“Their father was a child molester. He was a sexual predator,” Roy says about José at the outset of Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed, thereby supporting Lyle and Erik’s story about the cruelty they suffered at their dad’s hands. This comes as explosive news to journalist and author Robert Rand and his colleague Nery Ynclan, who have spent years working to exonerate the Menendez brothers because they’re convinced that the siblings were wrongly convicted of first-degree murder rather than manslaughter, which would have saddled them with a lighter prison sentence. Peacock’s docuseries basically assumes that same viewpoint, sometimes to a fault, skimming past discussions of the prosecution’s case against Lyle and Erik (other than to say that they were portrayed by the district attorney as greedy rich kids) in order to avoid addressing any complicating (i.e., less flattering) details, and to guarantee that they come across as railroaded innocents.