Nathan J. Hochman, the recently elected district attorney of Los Angeles County, offered the strongest indication yet of his thinking on the case of Lyle and Erik Menendez, declaring at a news conference on Friday that the sexual abuse the brothers claim they suffered at the hands of their father “does not constitute self-defense.”
Lawyers for the brothers have pursued several legal avenues to free them from prison more than 30 years after they killed their parents at home in Beverly Hills, Calif. The most high-profile among them is an effort started by Mr. Hochman’s predecessor to have the brothers resentenced. Mr. Hochman did not say on Friday whether he would continue those efforts.
But he did weigh in on a second avenue. The brothers have sought to have their convictions overturned on the basis of new evidence, using what is known as a habeas petition. Mr. Hochman called the news conference on Friday to announce that he would oppose those efforts, and that he had filed an informal response arguing that the new evidence was unpersuasive, tardy and, in some cases, inadmissible.
It was in detailing his various objections to the petition that Mr. Hochman made clear some of his views on the decades-old case.
“Sexual abuse is abhorrent, and we will prosecute sexual abuse in any form it comes,” he said. “But sexual abuse in this situation, while it may have been a motivation for Erik and Lyle to do what they did, does not constitute self-defense.”
When asked if he believed the brothers had been sexually abused, Mr. Hochman said the corroborating evidence was “extremely lacking.”
The brothers, who have been serving sentences of life without parole, have long argued that they were sexually abused by their father, Jose Menendez, and that their mother, Kitty Menendez, knew about it. Their lawyers have said the brothers killed their parents because they feared for their lives.
Had the evidence and testimony about the abuse been admitted during the second trial, the brothers’ team has argued, they would have been seen as mitigating factors, and the brothers would have been found guilty of manslaughter rather than first-degree murder.
Relatives working toward the release of the Menendez brothers rebuked Mr. Hochman after his news conference and said that he was “silencing survivors everywhere.”
“He didn’t listen to us,” the Justice for Erik and Lyle Coalition said in a statement. “We are profoundly disappointed by his remarks, in which he effectively tore up new evidence and discredited the trauma they experienced. To suggest that the years of abuse couldn’t have led to the tragedy in 1989 is not only outrageous, but also dangerous.”
The group said that it now had to hope that a resentencing request in Los Angeles Superior Court would free the Menendez brothers.
The resentencing path was initiated last year by George Gascón, the former district attorney, who said that he believed the brothers had “paid their debt to society.” He asked that their sentences be 50 years to life with the understanding that they would be eligible for parole immediately under state law because they had committed their crimes when they were younger than 26.
In a motion that Mr. Gascón filed with the court in October, he said a resentencing was in the “interest of justice.” But Mr. Gascón, a liberal Democrat, was ousted by voters in November and replaced by Mr. Hochman, a former Republican who ran as an independent and vowed to be tougher on crime.
The election was not a referendum on the Menendez case. Mr. Gascón was vulnerable well before he decided to ask that the brothers be resentenced, and voters across California shifted to the right on crime last year.
After the election, Mr. Hochman said that he wanted time to review the facts of the case before deciding how to proceed. A Los Angeles judge delayed the original hearing from December to January to give the new prosecutor that time; the court date was subsequently postponed to March because the region was struggling to recover from the Los Angeles wildfires.
At the news conference on Friday, Mr. Hochman reiterated that he had not made a decision on the resentencing issue but that he would have more to announce in the coming weeks.
Separate from the resentencing efforts and the habeas petition, the brothers have also taken a clemency petition to Gov. Gavin Newsom. If the brothers are unsuccessful in court, their fate may rely on Mr. Newsom or his successors.
“The governor respects the role of the district attorney in ensuring justice is served and recognizes that voters have entrusted District Attorney Hochman to carry out this responsibility,” Izzy Gardon, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom, said in a statement. “The governor will defer to the D.A.’s review and analysis of the Menendez case prior to making any clemency decisions.”
The murders, in 1989, quickly became a national obsession. And the brothers’ initial trial in the early 1990s was one of the first to be televised to a national audience.
Jose Menendez was a high-ranking music executive; his wife, Kitty, was a former beauty queen; and the boys were tennis-playing beneficiaries of the family’s wealth. By their own admission, Lyle and Erik marched into the living room of their Beverly Hills mansion and murdered their parents in grotesque fashion, pumping both their mother and father with several rounds from shotguns.
All along, prosecutors portrayed the brothers as unrepentant killers who murdered to get their hands on the family’s assets, valued at the time at $14.5 million (about $35 million in 2025 dollars). A spending spree by the brothers in the months between the murders and their arrest, in which they bought a Porsche car, a Rolex watch and a restaurant in Princeton, N.J., was presented as evidence to support that theory.
In their first trial, the sexual abuse the Menendez brothers said they suffered at the hands of their father became key testimony in their defense. Lawyers for the brothers said they had confronted their parents about the abuse and that the brothers were worried their parents would kill them to prevent the family’s secrets from becoming public.
The brothers had separate juries in their first trial, and a judge eventually declared a mistrial after both juries failed to reach unanimous verdicts. Jurors later said in interviews that some of them believed the brothers’ assertions about the abuse and others did not.
When the brothers were tried a second time, there were no TV cameras present, and a judge excluded much of the evidence involving sexual abuse (which became known to some as the “abuse excuse”). Both brothers were convicted in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Erik Menendez was 18 and Lyle was 21 at the time of the murders. They are now 54 and 57.
New evidence has come to light in recent years that lawyers for the brothers have wielded as part of their habeas petition.
A letter written by Erik Menendez months before the murders, in which he described the sexual abuse to a cousin, was brought forward by Robert Rand, a journalist who has covered the case for years and has written a book about it.
In addition, a 2023 documentary series on the Peacock streaming service — “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed,” based on reporting by Rand and the journalist Nery Ynclan — reported allegations that Jose had sexually abused Roy Rosselló, a member of the boy band Menudo.
The Menendez brothers have also attracted enormous support on social media, where young people who were not born at the time of the murders have demanded their release.
And in recent months, Netflix released a docudrama about the brothers and a documentary in which the brothers discussed the case at length in prison interviews, putting further attention on the case.
Kate Selig contributed reporting.
