The Menendez Brothers: How True Crime Is Re-Examining Old Cases

Across TikTok and Instagram in particular, there are hundreds of accounts, many run by people who weren’t even alive when the Menendez case was unfolding, that have become invested. They often push for the brothers’ release, especially as new evidence appears to support their abuse claims.

Two often cited examples of how public support can bring widespread attention to criminal cases, and inspire reconsideration, are those of the Central Park Five and the West Memphis Three. But the phenomenon took a different form in 2014, when the first season of the investigative journalism podcast “Serial” — which scrutinized the conviction of Adnan Syed — was downloaded more than 100 million times in its first year. (In 2020, The New York Times Company bought Serial Productions, the company behind the podcast.)

The season was called podcasting’s first breakout hit by David Carr, a critic at The Times; prompted an HBO docuseries; and inspired scores of amateur sleuths and activists to involve themselves in the case as well as learn more about the criminal justice system — all factors that helped turn Syed into a cause célèbre.

Syed had been serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of his high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. In 2015, a Maryland court agreed to hear an appeal from Syed, and later that year, a judge granted him a new hearing that would allow the introduction of new evidence. Since then, it has been topsy-turvy ordeal for Syed that has included his conviction being overturned and then reinstated. In August, the Maryland Supreme Court ordered a redo of the hearing that freed him.

The most recent example that mirrors the case of the Menendez brothers is that of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who has been the subject of true crime fascination since she was found guilty of helping to kill her mother in 2015 and was freed from prison after serving seven years of her 10-year sentence. Her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, had abused and controlled her daughter, mentally and physically, for decades in what is believed by many to be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

The case is a prime example of what an evolving true crime industry is capable of: allowing audiences to examine a case from multiple angles in real time as it evolves. In 2017, her story was told in the HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest.” And in 2019, it received the scripted treatment with “The Act,” a limited series on Hulu for which Patricia Arquette won an Emmy. This year, Gypsy Rose Blanchard joined social media almost immediately after her release and was able to craft her own version of events in the Lifetime docuseries “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.”