Where is Leslie Abramson, Erik Menendez’s lawyer, now? Why she didn't participate in new doc

"Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story“ and an accompanying Netflix documentary featuring the Menendez brothers’ commentary are revisiting the ‘90s murder trial and media sensation.

Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted of killing their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, in 1996. Leslie Abramson represented Erik Menendez at both trials, including the first that ended in a hung jury, and is portrayed by Ari Gaynor in "Monsters."

Abramson didn’t participate in Netflix’s documentary about the Menendez brothers, but the documentary includes a written statement from her.

“30 years is a long time. I’d like to leave the past in the past. No amount of media, nor teenage petitions will alter the fate of these clients. Only the court can do that and they have ruled," she said in an email, per the documentary.

Who is Leslie Abramson?

Originally from Queens, New York, Abramson stood at only 4-feet-11 inches, with a “whorl of blond hair” that gave her a “distinctly feral quality,” and became known as a “fire-eating, mud-slinging, nuclear-strength pain in the legal butt,” wrote The Washington Post in 1996.

According to her profile in The Washington Post, Abramson was married and a mom of one before moving to Los Angeles and earning her law degree from UCLA in 1964.

After her 1969 divorce, she married Timothy Rutten, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, earned her stripes in L.A.’s public defender’s office, and then opened her own private practice.

She was named trial lawyer of the year by the L.A. Criminal Courts Bar Association — twice — and was known for taking on tough cases. Dominick Dunne wrote in Vanity Fair in a 1990 story about the Menendez brothers that she was “considered to be the most brilliant Los Angeles defense lawyer for death-row cases.”

In 2018’s “The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings that Stunned the Nation,” Robert Rand wrote that she had defended 600 felony cases by 1990.

Some of her more prominent ones included:

• In 1988, Abramson's client Arnel Salvatierra was convicted of voluntary manslaughter (rather than the original charge of first-degree murder) in the case of his father’s death, and after Abramson said the father had abused his son, he was given probation, per the Los Angeles Times.

• In 1990, she represented Dr. Khalid Parwez, a gynecologist originally from Pakistan who was accused of killing and dismembering his adolescent son, an acquittal, as the Los Angeles Tmes wrote.

• Only one of her clients, Ricky Sanders, was ever sentenced to the death penalty. He’d shot four people and injured others during a robbery at Bob’s Big Boy in 1980, and was given the death penalty in 2017.

• Post-Menendez, one of her most high-profile clients was record producer Phil Spector, who was charged with second-degree murder related to the 2003 death of actor Lana Clarkson in his home. Abramson replaced lawyer Robert Shapiro (who had worked on O.J. Simpson’s murder defense), and then resigned. Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009.

Speaking to the Washignton Post, Abramson said her upbringing was informed by growing up in a family affected by the Holocaust. Her German and Russian-born relatives were killed in the Holocaust, but her grandparents escaped.

“I have always been very concerned about the government overreaching,” she told the Washington Post. “They have the power to destroy individuals, which is us. A murderer is a citizen. The laws are the first line of attack on citizens. If the government is going to take on a citizen, it’s under the criminal laws … then you have a multi-million-dollar agency prosecuting a crime, and you are the indigent. This is not a level playing field.”

What was her role in the Menendez trial?

Abramson represented Erik Menendez at both of his trials — the first in 1993 which ended in a mistrial, and the second that ended in a first degree murder conviction in 1996.

Abramson disagreed with Lyle Menendez’s defense attorney Jill Lansing over strategy. They debated about going public about the abuse the young men say they endured at the hands of their father for “more than a year,” Rand wrote, with Lansing preferring not to introduce it at trial.

Abramson went forward, arguing that the abuse Erik Menendez had faced mitigated his crime. But she made another, more controversial move by — as it came out at trial in 1996 — allegedly asking Erik Menendez’s psychiatrist to Dr. William Vicary delete and rewrite parts of his notes to conceal statements, per a disciplinary filing by the medical board of California.

At Erik Menendez’s retrial, Vicary testified that he had deleted a portion of his therapy session notes at Abramson's insistence, per the Los Angeles Times. When asked to respond in court, Abramson asserted her 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination and said that her discussions were protected by attorney-client privilege.

Speaking to The Washington Post, Abramson said she “never told him” to “rewrite” the notes. Rather, she asked him to “clarify” passages or white them out.

Vicary, in the same story, had a different take. “She and I argued about this for hours,” he says. “Had she just said, ‘Wipe this out, cross it out, black it out,’ don’t you think I could have just done it right there in her office? I’m saying she said, ‘Take it out….’ The logical conclusion was that rewriting would be the only way to accomplish what she was insisting on.”

Vicary was placed on probation for three years and removed from the panel of mental health professionals appointed by Los Angeles Superior County judges to analyze defendants.

She was allowed to remain on the case, but put under a gag order so she couldn’t argue in front of the jury any more. Her co-counsel took over and wrapped up the case. She was investigated by the State Bar of California and cleared of misconduct in 1999.

Abramson defended the brothers’ character, telling The Washington Post in 1996, “These are not murderers. These are troubled kids in a very difficult and grotesque home environment, and they cracked,” she said.

She spoke out against their conviction. “It’s a grotesquely disproportionate verdict and punishment for what happened here,” she said. “When children kill their parents, something is wrong in that family.”

Where is Leslie Abramson today?

After the case, Rand wrote that Abramson told reporter, “What I would really like to do is become completely invisible for the rest of my life, because I don’t find celebrity very much fun.”

She went on to publish “The Defense is Ready: Life in the Trenches of Criminal Law,” defend more accused killers and appear as a court commentator on “Nightline” and Court TV.

She and Rutten divorced in 2007, per court documents.

Abramson has retired from the law while still appearing in public from time to time.

In 2015 she gave the Ruth Bader Ginsburg lecture at Thomas Jefferson Law School in San Diego. “What I think is something necessary to be a great criminal lawyer is something I think women already have,” she said in her speech. “A desire to understand people and human relationships.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com