Family

True Crime: The Menendez Brothers-Monsters or Martyrs?

Examining the mental health of the two most famous sibling killers in history

Recently, television and documentaries have put the Menendez brothers on everyone's radar again, as they continue to fight for their freedom.

The question we all were asking in 1989 during the high profile trial is back in the forefront: are the Menedez brothers who killed their parents cold-blooded and entitled killers or victims of horrific child abuse, as they claim?

The answer is YES.

Yes to both.

Lyle and Erik Menendez are both sociopaths — people who have co-occuring Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, and their disorder came from golden child abuse.

The answers to understand them and their behavior are not black and white: abusers become the way they are not from being “born bad,” but from generational trauma.

Not all children of abuse become abusers: the scapegoat children and invisible children of narcissists do not inherit NPD and ASPD. This only happens to golden children.

Aside from their behaviors of murder without remorse and lies to cover up their crimes, you can tell that both Lyle and Erik Menendez were golden children to their father, because they’re named after him.

Their father’s name was Jose Enrique Menendez.

Lyle’s name is Joseph Lyle Menendez.

Joseph is the English version of Jose.

(It’s also very common that sociopaths choose to NOT go by their parent’s name in adulthood, opting for initials, their middle name, or another name altogether: that’s how hurt and betrayed they feel by their narcissist parent).

Eric is Eric Galen Menendez.

Eric mirrors Enrique, and both names have the same meaning: they mean “ruler.”

(When narcissists don’t give their children the same name or mirroring names, they’ll give them names with the same MEANING. An example is recently indicted sex trafficker P. Diddy, who was golden to his mother — Sean and Janice both mean “God is gracious.” Notice how often he changed his name throughout life to escape the name his mother gave him…)

Narcissists like to give their golden child the same name as them because a narcissist thinks only one person in the world is PERFECT and WITHOUT FLAW: themselves, of course.

Pretty narcissistic, no?

For the longest time, I found the instinct to name a child after yourself to be bewildering. But I was regularly reminded I wasn’t a part of it (scapegoat child). I was named after a person who died tragically.

While the nature of death for my namesake is unsettling (beheading — my sociopathic mother had a fascination with beheading lifelong. She even had her own swords and fantasized about beheading people), I appreciated that at least I was able to be MY OWN PERSON.

The instinct to name a child after yourself practically SCREAMS: “I DO NOT WANT THIS PERSON TO BE THEIR OWN PERSON.”

“I WANT A MINI-ME.”

This also SCREAMS: “I have an empathy impairment.”

Because that’s what happens: the golden child is viewed as an extension of the narcissist’s self.

They not only name the child after themselves; they dress them like them; they make them have the same hobbies; they train them to HATE.

They indoctrinate them to hate the same things they do: racism, sexism, homophobia, a certain political party, different religions — whatever their flavors of hatred are.

They train them to abuse the family scapegoats, whether that’s a sibling or a pet. (Narcissists will golden child and scapegoat animals too, because it still provides supply).

At the same time, they’ll SPOIL THE GOLDEN CHILD ROTTEN.

Literally ROTTEN.

They’ll shower them in a ridiculous amount of early childhood lovebombing. They tell the child that they, the narcissist parent, are the most important person in the world who deserves all the power in the world and are always right, and that as their golden spawn, they are the most important child in the world.

And then…

….they introduce the child to the same method that corrupted THEM: SHAME.

Extreme, shocking, disorienting, shame and abuse.

The golden child is blindsided when their parent turns predator and beats them, tries to kill them, or rapes them.

It actually MURDERS their soul and stunts their growth. They become cursed to walk the earth as THE LIVING DEAD.

All ASPDs are bisexual (but most are closeted and/or homophobic. Homophobia and transphobia are major red flags): they aren’t motivated by sexual attraction, but by the power and pleasure of sex only.

So, they can have sex with any gender, any age, any appearance.

They can, and do, have sex with anyTHING.

They emotionally FEEL at the level of children, so they become CHILD PREDATORS.

Their best supply, or drug high, comes from harming children.

This is why narcissists — despite being lazy, selfish, and unable to emotionally connect — have children to begin with.

LIVE-IN SUPPLY.

It is 18 years of the best supply they can find: CHILDREN.

Children are innocent and loving, and narcissists get MORE supply from harming innocence and love. (It’s why they’re so fond of things like school shootings and why they target empathetic people).

In order to create a sociopathic child, the narcissist parents use EXTREME cognitive dissonance.

They force the child to mirror them, they instill their own identity in them, they make them think they are spoiled and entitled, and then they regularly shame, belittle, and abuse them.

This is why many people with ASPD have little to no memory of childhood.

Some of them will even tell you their parents were saints. (Split thinking — all good or all bad. Some of them need to believe their parents were all good to survive, like Ted Bundy, who was named after his mother — Theodore/Eleanor — and targeted women who looked like her).

Other sociopaths will tell you their parents were the devil incarnate — like Eric and Lyle do.

However, another complicating factor of narcissism is the inability to deal with shame; therefore, they often CANNOT SPEAK about the traumas they endured — such as child molestation — because it’s so severely humiliating and shameful.

They’ll only tell you about their childhood horrors in three instances:

1) They really, really (and I mean, really) trust you. You’re a DEEPLY empathetic and loving person. (In this case, they’re also likely to attack, abandon, or hurt you later).

2) They’ve been caught for something and are facing consequences.

3) They’re experiencing a narcissistic collapse of their false self.

Just like with Casey Marie Anthony, named after her mother — Cindy Marie Anthony — who murdered her golden child — Caylee Marie Anthony — all of these things are true simultaneously:

The sociopath is guilty
The sociopath has no remorse or empathy and is cold-blooded and a pathological liar
The sociopath is a product of EXTREME abuse
The sociopath, and the rest of their family, are products of severe, unhealed generational trauma

Sociopaths are our consequence for ignoring a very obvious public mental health crisis and not investing in childhood mental health care or addressing our cultural problems of rampant child abuse and sexual assault.

They are the products of our cultural DENIAL.

As the scapegoat child of sociopaths, I cried many tears when I listened to Lyle and Eric’s testimony. Their pain was REAL, and I could feel how deep it went.

It went as deep as the pain I always felt in my sociopathic family members and those I trauma bonded to.

At the same time, their entitled swagger, smirks, and their guilt-free spending spree didn’t surprise me AT ALL.

I was raised in a home with people who celebrated trauma and never exhibited a hint of guilt — yet they KNEW their guilts, because they knew how to COVER THEM UP.

I was always blamed for my own abuse and I was told my empathy and love were weaknesses, that I was “crazy” and “a bad person who deserved abuse.” I was the family’s target for their projections.

Many people conclude that people with ASPD deserve the worst things to happen to them, but I’d counter that this is both ignorant and lacking in empathy, showcasing the possibility of narcissism and projection in the person asserting this claim.

Because…

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Antisocials already had the worst things happen to them — it happened when they were kids. I lived it with my sibling: you don’t get worse than your parent orphaning you or breaking your own heart.
Unlike their scapegoat and invisible siblings, narcissists can’t grieve or process shame, so for every bad thing that happens to them, they must PROJECT them. Therefore, the more you abuse a sociopath, the more you create more victims.
This is why our prisons are places of rapes and murder and why our recidivism is so high in comparison to the rest of the world.
In refusing to develop humane treatment for sociopaths, we seal our own fates of getting murdered, robbed, raped, and other horrors: I have been one of their targets all my life. I resent how easily people will put those with empathy in danger by perpetuating this problem and refusing to understand how it happens or develop treatments, awareness, or cultural change.
Antisocials, no matter how much you abuse them, never, ever develop guilt or empathy. They have frontal lobe brain damage. You won’t “make them sorry.” In fact, the more they suffer, the more they maintain a sense of supreme victimhood and helplessness.
Antisocials don’t stop abusing when they are in prison. They find the innocent and/or empathetic adults or children in prison and they abuse them. Often, antisocials enjoy becoming police, military, or prison guards because they can abuse prisoners without any consequences. It’s why so many female prisoners report sexual abuse in prison, even getting impregnated sometimes (and forced to have their rape babies, of course).

It. Makes. NO. SENSE. to use a sociopath’s logic to deal with sociopaths.

I say that WITH MY CHEST.

Sociopaths are NOT MENTALLY WELL.

When will we learn that TRUE logic and problem solving takes empathy as well as reason?

Sociopaths and narcissists lack both, but they gaslight that they’re the BEST at making decisions, because they’re “not emotional.”

But it’s one of their pathological LIES: sociopaths ARE emotional — they’re controlled by their emotions of rage and envy.

They’re as emotional as babies who are content one minute and having a fit the next. They just tell themselves they aren’t emotional because that’s their fantasy self: they also cannot name emotions.

As a part of their disorder, they tend to not be able to speak of emotions or name them. They ESPECIALLY cannot speak of emotions that evoke shame — emotions like envy or rage, their primary emotions.

The emotion they’re phobic of is love, which they perceive as a weakness. The person they loved in childhood turned predator on them, and they don’t want to ever experience that vulnerability again, so they become predators themselves.

They often seem glib, cold, or numb, but there’s an ICEBERG of rage inside of them.

So, it would really behoove us to stop believing in the narcissistic split thinking of the black and white world or deluding ourselves that vengeance is justice.

We need to face reality and understand nuance, because narcissists — in both their thinking and their behavior — are the embodiment of contradiction, hypocrisy, and MADNESS.

This would mean we’d need to do a few reasonable things: 1) Educate ourselves and spread awareness 2) Invest in childhood mental health care and early intervention in schools 3) Invest in criminal rehabilitation programs 4) STOP. GIVING. SOCIOPATHS. POWER.

Sociopaths are in every social class, but they pursue power, and therefore they dominate rich and wealthy spaces, and they’re especially toxic and dangerous with power, just like the flagrant privilege of the Menendez brothers illustrated.

When given political power, they commit genocide and war in their projection of self hatred. They create all kinds of oppressions.

And the spreading of narcissism without addressing our need for mental health healing and cultural healing will lead to the extinction of the species.

Empathy is a species survival trait: it ensures we don’t harm each other because humans are a social species and we need each other to survive.

The instinct for people to perpetually refuse nuance and to categorize criminals as either “born bad” or “victims” is a sign of a problem with split-thinking, and it’s very likely a way for people to excuse and look past their own guilts, because they can see themselves as “different” from those “monster people.”

But that’s not how the human mind works…

Under the right conditions, any of us could’ve ended up with Eric and Lyle’s horrific fates.

They’re just as human as the rest of us, and the pain they spread is a reflection of the pain they felt since childhood, and that’s the uncomfortable truth we need to face to heal.

My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

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A.M. Champion is the author of Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.