fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6279 ]

[ SECRET POST #6279 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6279 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05. [WARNING for discussion of RL war/genocide/etc]

__________________________________________________

06. [WARNING for discussion of child abuse, sexual abuse, murder]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #897.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

06. [WARNING for discussion of child abuse, sexual abuse, murder]
https://i.imgur.com/U72vKvh.png

What fandom is this?

I'd say true crime or documentary.

Not a fandom. The Menéndez brothers murdered their parents in 1989.

Not that I know much more than that. All I know is that some shows in the 90s and 2000s referenced them.

And I'm not super big on prison and condemning people for life, Secret Anon. They've probably served enough time. It was a nasty murder but if the purpose of the life imprisonment was to prevent them from being repeat offenders, they don't have any more parents to murder, so.

Even if you don't consider true crime to count as a fandom, people can be fans of an author/books.

I should probably not be laughing so hard at "they don't have any more parents to murder" but here I am in this handbasket

Dominick Dunne is a well known writer and journalist. I'm a fan of his books.

"And I'm not super big on prison and condemning people for life, Secret Anon. They've probably served enough time. It was a nasty murder but if the purpose of the life imprisonment was to prevent them from being repeat offenders, they don't have any more parents to murder, so."

True. And if they murdered their parents because they were being sexually abused, I'd agree that maybe they've served enough time. However, if they murdered their parents for a financial motive, that's quite different. People who commit crimes for monetary gain might well do so again.

True crime.

... and Dominick Dunne:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominick_Dunne

This is wild because I hadn’t heard any of this! At the time I thought they were telling the truth and in the years since then, I’ve met other CSA survivors who thought the same. I follow a lot of true crime stuff but this totally slipped under the radar. Time to dive into the rabbit hole!

Oh, it's complicated. I'm not sure what to think myself... the sexual abuse allegations might be true, but even if they were, I'm not sure that warrants the kind of murder the brothers committed. They gunned their parents down in cold blood, in such a way that definitely looks calculated, not "two young men terrified of their abusers and reacting in self defense". They had to reload the shotgun because their mother was badly wounded, but not dead - she was crawling away. Each parent was shot in the kneecap as well in the head/face. You don't shoot people in their kneecap to accomplish anything else but cripple them. And then they both tried to fake an alibi, cover their tracks and lied to the police about coming home from the movies to find their parents dead.

The financial motive also looks very strong, given their behavior after their parents' death, when they both went on crazy spending sprees of over half a million within months.

NAYRT

This does sound like a complicated situation. My sympathies go out to the brothers being a CSA-victim myself. I can understand their reasoning and motives to go through with what they did, but I believe similarly to Gypsy Rose Blanchard, they still did the wrong thing.

I believe it's motivated from trauma and a stunted idea of justice, and I think the Menendez brothers didn't get a fair trial...
However, I am aware that murdering one's parents isn't the best solution to break away from your abuser(s).

With that said - I do believe the Menendez brothers have served their time and we shouldn't celebrate them as heroes or anything like that but I do believe they deserve to be given a chance to live quiet, private lives. If that's not what they want...then IDK.

This is why we often have to ask ourselves what it is that we are trying to get out of the true crime trials that captivate us. Is it entertainment or is it restorative justice? Be honest because the results of your choices have consequences. These are real cases involving real people in real communities.
I tread true crime trials really, really carefully.
After The West Memphis 3. After Lorena Bobbitt. After the OJ Simpson trial...
I can only control what I do, but I do fucking hope other people are being critical of their own biases and how they interact with true crime.

I think in Gypsy Rose Blanchard's case, she was arguably a lot more under her mother's control at the time of the murder, so I could readily believe she felt it was her only way out. In comparison, the Menendez brothers were older, not nearly as tightly controlled, and had a wider range of options, including reporting their father of sexual abuse.

That said, I'm undecided. I think there's some compelling evidence of sexual abuse taking place, but I don't think that was their only motive, or even their primary motive at the time. I think it was a combination of that (and the understandably dysfunctional parent/child relationships they had with their parents) AND financial motives. To them, murder was a win-win, if they could get away with it. That's less forgivable than an abuse victim who turns on their abuser. They might've served their time (if they'd been originally convicted of manslaughter), but I'm not thrilled about the recent trend of romanticizing them or the murders as poor misunderstood babies, either.

AYRT

I don't if you'll see this but I definitely agree with you. I haven't followed the Menendez Brothers trial closely, but from what I've heard of it, it sounds complicated and it's one of those sad stories where there are no real "pure innocents" where we can root for them to gain some sort of happy ending.
Like, it's more...this is a cautionary tale and we better be taking notes on what went wrong and what we can gain from it.
It's not some cops and robbers mystery thriller where we find out who the "true good/bad guys" are.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-03-16 21:26 (UTC) - Expand

I don't believe it yet. At least one was going to therapy, which is how they were caught, and I highly doubt the kid would be more likely to bring up murdering his parents than CSA. The defense would have brought the therapist to testify in court. I still believe they did it for the money.

I'm skeptical as well. At the very least, they were definitely not in fear of their lives at exact moment like they claimed. Their parents were unarmed and watching TV, not trying to kill them.

I highly doubt the kid would be more likely to bring up murdering his parents than CSA.
while the parents were alive the father had erik waive confidentiality so the therapist could tell him whatever erik said. i don't think this is unlikely at all. i also don't know why people think money and abuse are mutually exclusive as motivations.

Obviously he told the therapist about murdering his parents.... after murdering his parents. You think his dad had a ouija board?

So... he could have told the therapist about the csa then...before or maybe instead of telling the therapist about murdering his parents. And he didn't, so, ya know, doubt.

...why would he do that if he wanted to unburden himself about killing his parents? real talk, the desire to unburden yourself is not the same thing as the desire to justify your actions they do not automatically happen together. you seem to think that someone would obviously justify their actions when admitting to them, and that's actually less the case for abuse victims who have internalized the abuse as maximally shameful. real actual people do not think linearly when they're of average mental health, let alone if they have something that is actively traumatizing them.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-03-16 15:58 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

meadowphoenix - 2024-03-16 18:10 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-03-16 18:47 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

meadowphoenix - 2024-03-16 20:30 (UTC) - Expand

he wasn't skeptical the whole time (he found them credible when he first heard the evidence), and frankly, i don't think he was ever as skeptical as he wanted to seem considering his fascination with erik.

also, i don't think the story was shaky (but more importantly, not all abuse evidence makes it to the public part of a trial because of the prejudicial aspects of it, which DD would know first hand unfortunately). but regardless the problem dominick dunne had was that he believed he could only hold the two motivations as mutually exclusive: either they killed as victims, or they killed as greedy and privileged sociopaths, and he never considered that those things aren't mutually exclusive. i doubt he would have changed his mind.

the myth that suffering makes you incapable of malice (and therefore if something is obviously malicious it simply can't have been influenced by real suffering) is one a lot of people still believe

Right. A lot of people are horribly abused yet don't kill anyone. There has to be something wrong in someone's head for their solution to abuse to be cold, calculated murder (when not in immediate self defense).

There has to be something wrong in someone's head for their solution to abuse to be cold, calculated murder (when not in immediate self defense).
no society valorizes revenge too much for this to be true, and some people are always going to be more ready for violence than others without being psychologically unsound. but in this case even without sexual abuse i think cruel men with power can't be much surprised when their children learn to leverage power in violent ways.

When I said the story was shaky, I meant:

* their initial attempt to lie and cover up the crime, subsequent misleading comments about their dad having mafia ties to point to a possible suspect
* then saying it was because they feared for their lives - self-defense is sort of an "in the moment" kind of thing. If you think your parents are going to kill you eventually, then you have the option of running away, calling the police, etc. The fact that they left the house to retrieve shotguns and then came back to the place where they feared they'd be killed in order to mow down their unarmed parents is... shaky.
* Some people also doubt the sexual abuse allegations because they didn't come up as a defense until it seemed convenient to have that bombshell. YMMV, and I've got mixed feelings about it myself.

That said, I haven't read Dunne's full coverage of the trial by any means. It did seem to me that later comments of his seemed to imply that he doubted the veracity of the sexual abuse allegations, though. But cases like this were catnip to him, involving people of wealth and privilege. I have little doubt that he was on location, collecting as much gossip and inside info as he could, but how much of that was true... who knows. Personally, I think the Menendez brothers are good candidates for people who were both victims and killers who lacked conscience and committed their murders for financial gain. I don't know for sure, of course. But I think there's grounds for both.

right i'm separating their defense from the claims of abuse. the claims of abuse weren't shaky imo. the idea that they thought their father was going to kill them right then and there? no, there's plenty of reason to believe they had been fantasizing about murdering their parents for a while.

Whether or not the claims of abuse were shaky depends on whether or not you believe their word without much in the way of corroborating evidence of said abuse. I don't think there was much of the latter at the time, and the second trial limited what little testimony there was re: sexual abuse, which didn't help their case at all.

But that aside, I think they planned to murder their parents ahead of time, and I don't think sexual abuse was the sole reason behind it.

(no subject)

meadowphoenix - 2024-03-16 21:58 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only