For years, I had heard about the boys who had killed their parents. But that's kind of all I knew about it and I wanted more. I started watching documentaries and reading articles about their two trials. I couldn't believe what I was reading.
I've never understood why we allow men and women to be held to different standards when it comes to abuse. It's hard for me to understand how people can view abuse of a man different from abuse of a woman. Abuse is abuse. As for these boys, (and yes I'm going to be calling them boys because they were younger than my 26 years of age when this happened), they believed after years of abuse their parents were conspiring to kill them. The sexual and physical abuse from their father continued throughout their childhoods up to the point of Jose's death. Not to mention the constant verbal abuse from their mother. I've seen the trial, I've seen the transcripts, I don't believe they did this with malicious intent.
It's interesting to me that we can support a woman killing her husband, claiming self defense under the assumption of battered wife syndrome, but we can't apply that same scenario to two sons whose parents were abusing them.
As for this book, Robert Rand makes it apparent very early on that he supports both the Menendez Brothers. That being said, the views portrayed in the book are very biased, aside from the trial transcripts included throughout the text. I was completely unaware of his stance before picking up this book, but it is similar to my own.
I don't believe we will ever truly understand what happened that fateful night in August 1989.
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