Erik Menendez Opens up About Abuse, Fight With Parents Night Before Murder

He’s done keeping secrets. Erik Menendez is sharing everything about his life before he and his brother Lyle brutally murdered their parents Lyle and Kitty in their Beverly Hills mansion. While on trial for their murders, which they were eventually found guilty of, the boys insisted that they suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of their father.

In one of his first interviews in more than a decade, Erik Menendez opened up about the abuse — and shared details about the fight he had with his parents the night of the murders in August 1989. “I was in the foyer,” Erik said from jail as part of A&E’s special, The Menendez Murders: Erik Tells All. “Lyle was coming out of the den and my mom was following him and saying, ‘You’re not going out,’ and Lyle said, ‘Why?’ And my mom said, ‘Because I said so,’ and then my dad came out and he told my mom to shut up. He looked at Lyle and said, ‘You’re not going out.’ He told me to go to my room and told me he would be there in a minute.”

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According to the court testimonies, Lyle then took on his father — telling the patriarch not to touch his brother. In his recent interview, “Dad, he charged at Lyle and he said, ‘I do what I want in my family. He’s not your little brother, he’s my son.’”

While on trial, the boys said they feared that their father planned to kill them — so they killed their parents first. In last night’s TV special, Erik described the moment that his brother told him it was “happening” now, explaining, “I felt like my heart was going to explode, it was just pounding, and I felt like — I felt like my life was over right then.”

In The Menendez Murders: Erik Tells All, the 47-year-old made it clear that they were driven to murder because they felt they didn’t have any other way out. “From the moment after, I wanted to go back in time and take back everything that Lyle and I did. It was so wrong,” he said. “I didn’t want my parents dead, I just wanted the abuse to stop. Years and years of pain exploded that night in unimaginable violence. It is my own personal hell.”