An icon in the shape of an angle pointing down.
Associated Press/Netflix
- “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is about two brothers who killed their parents in the ’80s.
- The brothers claimed their parents abused them for years.
- Judalon Smyth played a key role in the brothers’ trial. Here’s where she is now.
“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” revisits one of the biggest murder cases of the 1990s, when two brothers were convicted of killing their parents.
The Netflix series is the latest buzzy true crime offering from producer Ryan Murphy following “The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” “Feud: Capote vs The Swans,” “The People v. O. J. Simpson,” and “The Assassination of Gianna Versace.”
The show details the Menendez’s lives years before the murder, as well as their trials which took place during the 1990s. Judalon Smyth (Leslie Grossman), was in a relationship with the brothers’ psychiatrist Dr. Jerome Oziel.
Smyth claimed she overheard the brothers describe shooting their mother’s eyeball out of its socket, but she didn’t tell the police until after he ended the relationship.
During the trial, she was used as a witness by the defense to discredit Oziel, and claimed that he manipulated her and “implanted” memories of events “that didn’t exist,” the Los Angeles Times reported. She also alleged that he drugged and sexually assaulted her during their relationship. Oziel denied all the allegations.
Judalon Smyth re-trained as an EMT in 2012
In 2015, Smyth opened up about how she was treated by the media for her involvement in the case on Reelz’ “Murder Made Me Famous.”
“It was a little confusing for me the way the media was. I really didn’t understand the attack I was going to come under for doing the right thing,” she said per People.
Smyth added: “There was some paper that said something about me having loose lips. It’s like, excuse me. If that was your mother and father getting murdered, would you like someone to have tight lips or loose lips?”
According to Smyth’s LinkedIn profile, which has not been updated recently, she didn’t work for 10 years after the Menendez trial. She became a travel agent in 2006 and stayed in that role until 2012, when she retrained as an EMT.
In the description, she wrote: “I’m a trained and NREMT certified Emergency Medical Technician and hold a current and valid CPR accreditation. I have ambulance experience, large events, and work for movie, television and commercial productions.”
If the LinkedIn account is still accurate, Smyth lives in Los Angeles.
Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.
