Today is the day the Menendez brothers thought might never come. Erik Menendez will go before California’s Parole board and Friday, Lyle Menendez will follow. The hearings mark a pivotal point for the brothers, who were convicted in 1996 of murdering their parents, José and Kitty Menendez, eight years prior.

The brothers have been in prison for 34 years — Erik was only 18 years old at the time of the crime, and Lyle, 21. But Ryan Murphy’s 2024 Netflix anthology series “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” changed everything.

The case of affluent boys in Beverly Hills shooting their parents dead before going on a lavish spending spree with their inheritance quickly became an infamous piece of Los Angeles true crime history. But it wasn’t until Murphy’s series that the public began questioning the ethics of their life sentences. Despite the show’s title — “Monsters” — it popularized the idea that, perhaps they weren’t monsters after all.

The series was written in the dramatized perspective of each brother, reliving the murder, the trial and the potential motives as they unfolded in court — including the defense’s claim of self-defense following years of sexual abuse by their father.

And in a moment of cultural reckoning, decades after the trial was said and done, those who had watched the series revisited the case: the defense presented photographs taken of young Erik and Lyle naked, childhood medical records, their cousins’ testimonies, the uncovered letter Erik wrote to his friend, the letter Lyle wrote to Erik two months after their arrests and so much more.

The public’s previous and popular opinion wavered, shifting from “Did these boys kill their parents?” to “Do I blame these them for doing it?”

And then an unlikely figure joined the debate — Kim Kardashian — through a guest essay for NBC News titled, “Kim Kardashian says it’s time for the Menendez brothers to be freed.”

In it, she echoes an argument that the court of public opinion had been debating: that the boys’ trial was too public to be fair and the time period lacked resources and empathy for (male) sexual abuse victims.

“Can anyone honestly deny that the justice system would have treated the Menendez sisters more leniently?” Kardashian asked.

Despite this awakening inspired by Murphy’s “Monsters” series, he was facing increasing scrutiny for the show — even from the Menendez brothers themselves. Erik released a statement on X via his wife, Tammi.

“I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show.” Tammi shared in the words of Erik. “It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent.”

The lies he alluded to regard the show depicting a theory suggested during their real-life trial — that Lyle had been sexually abusing Erik.

Murphy, asked about the brothers’ disapproval, responded at the premiere of his show Grotesquerie: “It’s really, really hard, if it’s your life, to see your life up onscreen.”

Whether the board grants parole remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: what began as one of Los Angeles’s most notorious true crime stories has been reshaped, decades later, by television, celebrity advocacy and a changing public conversation surrounding abuse, justice and the perfect victim.