Erik Menendez is opening up about his regrets.
In Netflix’s Menendez Brothers, a documentary that details Erik and his brother Lyle Menendez’s 1989 murder of their parents José Menendez and Mary Louise Menendez, the 53-year-old expressed remorse for committing the violent acts and guilt over the loss of his mother.
“One of the misconceptions is that I did not love my father or love my mother,” he explained in the documentary series. “That is the farthest thing from the truth. I miss my mother tremendously. I wish that I could go back and talk to her and give her a hug and tell her I love her and I wanted her to love me and be happy with me and be happy that I was her son and feel that joy and that connection. And I just want that.”
Erik—who alleges along with brother Lyle, 56, that the murders’ motive was fueled by being sexually abused by José—harbors more complicated emotions for his late father.
“It’s more difficult with my father,” Erik admitted. “To me as a boy, he was more than just a man. He was like the modern version of an ancient Greek god. He was different than any man I had ever met. And I simply idolized him. I wanted to be like him. But he was rarely a dad.”
The current Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility inmate noted that he felt his father’s love was conditional.
“He loved us,” Erik recalled of his and Lyle’s relationship with José. “But he believed that love needed to be earned. So, to be loved by him we had to be worthy of that love and often that meant going through pain.”
In 1989, Erik and Lyle, then 18 and 21 respectively, shot and killed their parents in their Beverly Hills home. Immediately after, the killers called 911 and reported their parents’ deaths to the police, initially saying they had come home to discover the bodies.
After two trials and seven years, the brothers—who later testified they committed the murders out of fear and self-defense—were convicted each of two counts of first-degree murder and subsequently sentenced to life in prison in 1996.
However, in the months following the murders’ 35th anniversary, the Menendez brothers’ case has gained more attention with the Netflix documentary and Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story being released in the last month.
And while Ryan believes the Menendez brothers should be sending him “flowers,” for all the attention his show has brought them, Erik had previously spoken out against the fictitious depiction of his and his brother’s story.
“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," Erik said in a message shared by his wife Tammi Menendez to X, formerly Twitter, Sept. 19. “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.”