And I’ll tell you that afterwards we all came out of the courtroom and everyone was just speechless. And Nick Dunne asked if I would take a walk down the hallway with him. He said to me, “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I think I believe him.” Nick looked ill, his face was ashen.
He and I did a weekly show on Court TV at the time. He would be his usual prosecution cheerleader, and I thought I was representing the truth. And that first day Lyle testified, after Nick told me privately that he believed Lyle, we’re about to go live on national TV for our weekly debate, and I’m kind of curious, you know, what’s he gonna say? And of course, they went to him first, and the first words out of his mouth about Lyle’s testimony were, “I didn’t believe one word.”
I’m standing right next to him, and I’m thinking, You know what? I can actually bust him on national TV right now and I was going back and forth about what I would say, and I decided that would be unprofessional for me. He was certainly the famous guy, and I was just some guy from Miami who certainly didn’t have that cachet or reputation.
[Dunne died in 2009. In his 2017 biography Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne, Robert Hofler reported that, “Dominick did believe the two sons’ accusation against Jose Menendez,” at least at first.]
The media portrayal of Lyle and Erik has always been damaging. They really were portrayed as spoiled rich kids and crybabies. They were mocked on Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show. His reporting was largely based on rumor and innuendo—that’s what he did and he did it well. But the show slants that way.
For instance, one of the opening scenes has Lyle choosing a Milli Vanilli song to play at his parents’ memorial service to a shocked and disturbed audience. In a sense, that happened, but not how it’s portrayed. Jose’s company LIVE Entertainment hired this big PR firm, Rogers and Cowan, to put together a showy memorial. They asked the brothers, like, “What music did your dad like,” and they said Milli Vanilli, which he did. I don’t think anyone thought it was strange at the time. Afterwards there were two other memorials, one in Princeton, and one in Miami—those were the real memorials, the ones actually put together by the family, but that’s not in the show.
