Kim Kardashian and ‘Monsters’ Actor Cooper Koch Visit Menendez Brothers, Other Inmates
Kim Kardashian visited a group of about 40 inmates, including brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, on Saturday at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County to speak about prison reform, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Kardashian was also joined by actor Cooper Koch, who portrays Erik in Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, in addition to Khloé Kardashian, Kris Jenner, and film producer and Anti-Recidivism Coalition founder Scott Budnick.
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Erik and Lyle were convicted in 1996 for the murders of their parents, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez. Both boys were given consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Kardashian and Koch’s visit came two days after Erik slammed Murphy‘s latest true-crime anthology Netflix series, which chronicles the case. “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,” he wrote in a statement, which his wife Tammi Menendez posted on social media Thursday night.
“It is sad for me to know that Netflix’s dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward — back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women,” Erik’s statement continued. “Those awful lies have been disrupted and exposed by countless brave victims over the last two decades who have broken through their personal shame and bravely spoken out. So now Murphy shapes his horrible narrative through vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander.”
The Menendez case and trial became a media sensation in the early 1990s. During their original 1993 trial, the brothers claimed they shot their parents after suffering years of sexual abuse at the hands of their father and with the knowledge of their mother. Erik and Lyle were later convicted of premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
Kim, who recently starred in Murphy’s American Horror Story: Delicate, regularly visits different prisons to learn and speak about inmate rehabilitation programs and prison reform. Earlier this year, Kim and Khloé visited two California prisons in Chowchilla, Valley State Prison and Central California Women’s Facility.
TMZ was first to report Kim and Koch’s visit on Saturday.
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