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This episode contains descriptions of child sex abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

Hey, lovely listeners and welcome back to Real Crime Profile. I'm Laura Richards, Criminal Behavioral Analyst, Founder of Paladin National Stalking Advocacy Service and former New Scotland Yard and Host of the Podcast Crime Analyst. And with me today is...

I'm Jim Clemente, retired FBI Profile of Former New York City Prosecutor and writer-producer of Criminal Minds.

I am Lisa Zambetti, I'm casting director-recibuses-criminal-minds. And I'm so glad that Laura you're back here because there's so many things I wanted to ask you and have you weigh on on the case that we are continuing to cover that Jim and I started covering last week.

And that is the case of Lyall and Eric Menendez and their murder of their parents and then also connecting it to this just explosive documentary that lifts the lid off of child sexual abuse in the boy group Menudo.

And I always like to go back and see what was going on at this time, 1989. And so it's so interesting, Laura, I don't know if this case was on your radar back in 1989 or when these trials came forward in 1993 or 1996.

And you Google what was significant about 1989, things like Tiananmen Square, come up or the Exxon Valdez and things like that. And the Menendez trial also charts when you look up significant things that happen in 1989.

And I'm just wondering was this at all on your radar?

Well, I'll be totally honest as I always am and it wasn't. It's not a case that I know about. I've spent a lot of time digging into it though. And I have to say that the more you dig and the deeper you go, the more angry I've become about this being such a spectacular safeguarding failure first and foremost of two little boys.

And what a horrific miscarriage of justice. And I've been trying to think about what's different from then to now. And certainly for me, coercive control is something that hadn't been talked about within the peacock, the three part documentary, which we obviously recommend our listeners watch.

But certainly with the whole case, the spiders web of coercive control just seems to be completely misunderstood and the decisions that were taken by the court, by the DA's office and by the media. I have to say the framing of these two boys and men is such a phone narrative and it makes my blood boil quite frankly how they've been portrayed and how they've been let down.

Yeah, absolutely. I think what I mentioned to people that if you you can go watch the entire 1993 trial by going to court TV, they have the whole thing and I just hit play and I've been streaming it hours and hours of it while I'm folding laundry and while I'm cooking dinner and seeing the entire context of the trial is so different than at the time when you're just seeing the evening news little sound bites.

It makes so much more sense the testimony Eric on the stand, you can see the lead up to his emotional breakdown you can see, you know, hour after hour after hour holding up to cross examination and his story, you know, really making a lot more sense than if you see it completely out of context, which is what most people saw.

Right, but here's the big thing though that first trial ended in a mistrial and so what happened was they did it again and that was in 1996. So the first trial was 93 and the next trial was 96 after the OJ debacle, the DA's office in Los Angeles was very embarrassed by what happened in OJ and I'm sure the judicial college there decided that the day before the trial was going to be a little bit more serious.

They weren't going to let something like that happen again and they made this judge made what I think are some very, very strange restrictive findings or rulings with this second trial, they would not allow the defense to bring any evidence about sexual victimization and then at the end of the trial, the prosecutor argues, well, you didn't hear anything about sexual victimization.

No evidence came in about that. Well, they were prevented from bringing in the evidence in the first trial or there's 61 witnesses that they bought forward. Was that the right number?

I read it was 51, 51, okay. 51 witnesses that could not testify and those witnesses cross corroborated each other in a lot of ways, the disclosures that were made by the boys when there were kids, when they were young, seven, eight years old.

Nine, 10 years old, those disclosures, two family members or friends are incredibly pivotal evidence and on top of that, they literally wrote it down in letters, dated back that at that time.

So this current cross corroboration should have come into the trial, it should have been in there and it clearly shows that there is a there was some kind of decision made to not allow what I believe and you can weigh in yourselves obviously on what you believe, but what I believe is actually a legitimate self defense argument that these.

These boys for years had been sexually victimized by their father and their mother apparently had told them she knew about it all the time and she blamed the boys, which is we've seen this was in the movie precious remember that movie precious where the daughter was raped by the father and the mother blamed the daughter precious.

This is exactly what the mother did in this case or at least what the guys say the mother, their mother did she blame them she took it out on them she was she was cold and distant to them when she should have been protecting them right Laura well I'm going to talk about kitty in a moment but firstly I just want to take a step back because.

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