

Initially the two were not suspected, as they convincingly played griving sons. He had a bright future, accepted to UCLA, and his brother Lyle wasa Princeton student when they shot and killed their parents Jose and Kitty inside their Beverly Hills mansion on Aug. You know, I always hoped and believed that one day the truth about my dad would come out, but I never wished for it to come out like this.Latest Hollywood Celebrity & Entertainment News Primary Menu Menu Close MenuĮrik Menendez seen prior to the murders of his parents.

“It’s sad to know there was another victim of my father. “To be honest, I feel horrible,” Erik says. In the docuseries clip, Erik Menendez says the new developments add sadness to the already complex family tragedy. The judge must then grant a new trial, which the defense team would need to win. Criminal defense attorney Alan Jackson told Today the brothers must first file a petition to be reviewed by a superior court judge.

The brothers, now age 55 and 52, have already exhausted their appeals, but Rosselló’s allegations offer faint hope they may one day be freed. “I know that they would never, ever have done what they did unless they felt they had no choice,” she said. In 2017, a cousin named Diane Vander Molen told ABC News she believed Lyle and Erik-who were 21 and 18, respectively, at the time of the murders-were abused by both of their parents. Lyle Menendez bluntly states in a clip from the docuseries that these new claims from Rosselló would have made an “enormous” difference in their legal proceedings. Defense testimony about sexual assault was then limited for the brothers’ second trial, which began in 1995 and ultimately led to their convictions. However, two hung juries resulted in mistrials. What Does This Mean for the Brothers?Įrik and Lyle Menendez were tried separately in 1993. He wrote the 2018 book The Menendez Brothers: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings that Stunned the Nationabout the case.
#Menendez brothers now trial#
Rand was a reporter at the brothers’ trial and has spent about three decades interviewing key witnesses and sources. He doesn’t name the boy nor discuss what happened after. Speaking on the phone with journalist Robert Rand, he says he remembers an instance when his father, who was in charge of selecting new members for Menudo, led a boy to an upper floor of their house so that they could talk alone. In another segment, Erik Menendez seems to corroborate that Rosselló and José were alone together. In another scene, he points to Menendez in a photograph and says, “That’s the man, here, that raped me. “I know what he did to me in his house,” Rosselló says in a clip from the docuseries. There, he alleges, Menendez drugged and raped him. Díaz has refused to comment when asked about the allegations.īut according to Rosselló, Díaz also organized a visit to José Menendez’s home in New Jersey when the singer was only 14. Rosselló, who performed in Menudo from age 13 through 16 according to NBC’s Today, previously claimed in 2014 that band founder and manager Edgardo Díaz sexually abused him. Roy Rosselló, seen in a portrait for Menudo in 1985, claims José Menendez sexually assaulted him when he was 14. Their legal team argued they acted in self-defense out of fear their parents would kill them if they made their abuse public. The brothers, who admitted to the killings on tape, claimed their father had sexually abused them since childhood and that their mother enabled it. Roy Rosselló, 51, says in the upcoming docuseries Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed that José Menendez molested him while he was a teenage member of the group in the mid-1980s.Īfter the juries deadlocked in their first trials, Lyle and Erik Menendez were found guilty of first-degree murder in 1996 for the gruesome shooting deaths of José and their mother, Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, inside their Beverly Hills home on August 20, 1989. A former member of the boy band Menudo alleges José Menendez, the boy’s father, also targeted him. Now, they aren’t the only ones making such accusations. Convicted killers Lyle and Erik Menendez claimed they murdered their parents in self-defense after suffering years of emotional abuse and sexual assault at the hands of their father.
