Actor Cooper Koch shared on September 26 how he was able to meet Erik Menendez, the convicted murderer he portrayed in ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,’ and his older brother Lyle Menendez, all thanks to an invitation from Kim Kardashian.

Koch told TODAY that he met Erik and Lyle Menendez after the series premiered on September 19, when he went to the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility outside San Diego, where the brothers are serving life sentences for killing their parents in 1989.

Kardashian and film producer Scott Budnick arranged the meeting, Koch said.

“They went to this meeting to hear about this green space project that Lyle and Erik are leading, basically to make prisons look more like a college campus,” Koch explained. “That’s actually how they do it in Norway, and it only helps to bring about more rehabilitation.”

“Kim called me and then invited me to come along, and of course I said yes,” he continued. “Basically we went to this gymnasium and sat with about 30 incarcerated individuals, and they all basically shared their stories. It was very emotional, and they were all so vulnerable and so kind. And I met Erik and Lyle.

Koch said he was also able to speak with Erik Menendez on the phone the night before the show premiered, and they had a “really nice conversation.”

“I basically just had to tell him that I believed him, and I did everything I could as an actor to portray him as accurately and authentically as possible,” Koch said.

Koch spoke about the moment he first saw Erik Menendez in the prison gym in an interview with Variety published on September 26.

“We just looked at each other and immediately hugged. He was so nice. Lyle too, I got to hug them both and just be in their presence,” he said. ‘They are such genuine individuals. They have done so much work in their prison. Erik teaches meditation and speech classes, and they are doing this green space project to improve the prison grounds. It was just amazing.”

The actor explained why he hopes the Menendez brothers will one day be released.

“They committed the crime when they were 18 and 21 years old, and at that time it was very difficult for people to believe that sexual abuse between men and women could happen, especially when it involved father and son,” Koch said. “It was very difficult for people to understand that the story they were telling was true, and this theory that they killed their parents for money is just crazy. But it was easier for people at that time to swallow that story. But now, after 35 years, we have so much more evidence of child sexual abuse and sexual abuse between men that I think they deserve to be tried again. And also in everything that happened in that second trial, they were not allowed to use their claims of sexual abuse.”

He added: “I really hope they can get paroled and have a great rest of their lives.”

Koch said he connected with Erik Menendez because of spirituality.

“I always knew I wanted to meet them,” he said. I always knew I wanted to tell them that I believed them and that I wanted to be an advocate for them. So when it happened, it felt strangely normal, like I already knew them because I’d been watching them for so long and I’d seen them and heard them talk for hours and hours and hours.”

Kardashian’s mother, Kris Jenner, and sister, Khloé Kardashian, also attended the meeting, Koch told Variety.

After the show premiered, controversy arose among viewers, especially over content suggesting the brothers were lovers. Erik Menendez also criticized the show. He said the show was “rooted in horrible blatant lies” and called the show a “dishonest portrayal” in a statement his wife, Tammi Menendez, posted on X.

“It is with a heavy heart that I say: I believe that Ryan Murphy cannot be so naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives that he can do this without bad intentions,” Menendez said, referring to the creator of the show.

Erik and Lyle Menendez shot and killed their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, in Beverly Hills, California, in August 1989. The brothers were charged with the murder of their parents about seven months after the murder.

During their first trial, the brothers’ defense team argued that they had been sexually abused by their parents. The trial ended in two hung juries, and in their second trial a judge ruled that evidence of alleged sexual abuse of their parents would be inadmissible.

Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted of murdering their parents in 1996 and were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“It is sad for me to know that Netflix’s unfair portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crime has taken the painful truths several steps backwards – back in time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative based on a belief system that men were not sexually abused. and that men experienced rape trauma differently than women,” Erik Menendez said in Tammi Menendez’s statement.

“How demoralizing it is to know that one man in power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma,” the statement continued. “Violence is never an answer, never a solution, and is always tragic. “That is why I hope it is never forgotten that violence against a child creates a hundred gruesome and silent crime scenes, dark behind the glitz and glamor and rarely visible until the tragedy reaches all involved.”

Representatives for Murphy and Netflix did not respond to a request for comment from TODAY.com, but Murphy did respond to Erik Menendez’s criticism in an interview with E! News on September 23, saying he found it “curious” because he knew Erik Menendez hadn’t seen the show.

“We show many, many, many, many perspectives. That’s what the show does. In each episode you get a new theory based on people who were involved or reported on the case,” Murphy said. “Some of the controversy seems to come from people thinking, for example, that the brothers have an incestuous relationship. There are people who say this never happened. There were people who said it really happened.”

“We know how it ended,” he added. “We know that two people were brutally shot. Our position, and what we wanted to do, was to present you with all the facts and let you do two things: make a decision about who is innocent, who is guilty, and who is the monster, and also have a conversation about something that has never been talked about in prison. our culture, namely sexual abuse by men, and we do it responsibly.”

Koch spoke to TODAY about Erik Menendez’s statement on the show.

“I understand how he feels, and I understand that it’s so hard to see your life, and not even just your life, but the worst part of your life, on television in a kind of dramatized Hollywood TV version of it” , says Koch. said. “So I just understand how difficult that would be. And you know, I support him and I understand that it must be very difficult.”

Koch appeared on TODAY alongside two of his castmates, Javier Bardem, who played Jose Menendez on the series, and Nicholas Chavez, who played Lyle Menendez.

When asked if he had plans to hook up with Lyle Menendez one day, Chavez said, “You take on these jobs as an actor, and then I think a big part of that job, at least for myself, is letting it go gracefully and then moving on to the next thing.”

Chavez, who along with Koch were both born after the Menendez brothers were convicted, described the process of investigating the brothers for their roles.

“Your performance is the basis of a lot of things. First of all, it’s the research you do – which should be extensive. You feel obliged to do that by playing a real character, but then you also assimilate the creative desires of both directors and showrunners. It is a complicated and multifaceted process,” Chavez explains.

Bardem, also executive producer of the series, said he hadn’t heard much about the Menendez brothers’ case while living in Spain, but was excited at the thought of working with Murphy again after starring in 2010’s film “Eat, Pray, Love,” which Murphy co-wrote and directed.

“I knew how great a person and loving man (Murphy) is, and then I didn’t know the story because it wasn’t that popular in Spain,” Bardem said. “And once I got into it, I thought, ‘Wow, this is really heavy stuff, but (it’s) really important to talk about.'”

“I mean, the idea of ​​opening a discussion about childhood abuse, it’s an important issue to deal with,” Bardem added.