At the press conference, the D.A. said that while there was “no excuse for murder,” he believed “that the brothers were subjected to a tremendous amount of dysfunction in the home and molestation.”
“I think that often for cultural reasons, we don’t believe victims of sexual assault, whether they’re women or whether they’re men,” he added. “It’s salient to understand that our own implicit and sometimes explicit bias around sexual abuse and sexual assaults often leads us to severe injustice in our community.”
If a judge follows Gascón’s resentencing recommendation, Lyle, 56, and Erik, 53, would be eligible for parole immediately because they were under 26 at the time of their parents’ killings.
In September, Kim met the Menendez brothers at their San Diego prison—where she was joined by Monsters star Cooper Koch, who played Erik—and subsequently wrote in an op-ed that she hoped their life sentences be reconsidered.
“We owe it to those little boys who lost their childhoods,” she wrote in the NBC News essay, “who never had a chance to be heard, helped or saved.”
(E! and NBC News are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)
