THE MENENDEZ BROTHERS AND THEIR RISE TO FAME ON TIKTOK

The Menendez case is a very famous case which took place in the 80s, but very recently it has been brought back to fame and the spotlight thanks to TikTok and Generation Z.

But let’s begin with the head of the family.

Jose Enrique Menendez was born on May 6th, 1944 to a prosperous family in Havana, Cuba. His father was a well-known soccer player who owned his own accounting firm. His mother was a swimmer who had been elected to Cuba's sports hall of fame. Although the family was not among the elite, Jose's parents were celebrity athletes.

But in 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew the ruling government and seized the property of the wealthy and upper-middle class, he then came to power.
In 1960, a 16 year-old Jose left the country to live in the United States, flying with his sister's fiancé. His parents sent him to live with relatives in Hazelton, Pennsylvania.

In high school, he was a high achiever and won an athletic scholarship, but could not afford to attend an Ivy League college.
A star high school athlete, he won a swimming scholarship to Southern Illinois University.

Mary Louise Anderson also known as Kitty Menendez, was born on October 14th 1941, to a middle-class family in suburban Chicago, where her father owned an air-conditioning business. Her home life was very unhappy, with a cruel, abusive father and a battered mother.
While Kitty was still a child, her father abandoned the family to move in with a mistress. Very upset, Kitty turned into a moody and depressed child and had few friends. Eventually she cut off all contact with her father, whom she came to despise.
She attended college at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.
There she met her future husband, Jose Menendez, whom she married in 1964.

Both of their families were opposed to the marriage, his family because Kitty’s parents were divorced, her family because of Jose's Cuban heritage.
In their early married life she was an elementary school teacher, but after giving birth to her children, Lyle Menendez and Erik Menendez, she became a full-time homemaker. As her husband climbed up the corporate ladder, their life looked idyllic on the surface.

Intelligent, attractive, charming in public, Kitty appeared to be the ideal wife and mother. However, those who came to know her described her as a high-strung woman who had great difficulty coping with stress, and her husband's repeated affairs drove her to despair.
She coped with her problems, by drinking a lot of alcohol and prescription pills and some of her friends feared she became dependent on them.. In 1987 she attempted suicide, ingesting a bottle of sleeping pills.
She recovered, but she and Jose continued to have marriage problems, and their relationships with their sons became increasingly strained.

Jose Menendez always in command of every situation, arrived first at every conclusion and out-hustled every competitor. He also exercised great power over his household and hammered into his sons the ethic of success and achievement.
When the boys were 12 and 9, Jose Menendez started them on a demanding regimen calculated to make them into tennis stars. He paid for coaches, supervised practices and attended many matches. He also wanted excellence off the court: He expected them to be able to hold their own in dinner-table discussions of arms control and international politics. And when Jose wanted to make a point to his sons, his lectures could last hours and resemble a business meeting.

As the boys grew up, he didn’t relinquish control, as most parents do: He took great interest in who his sons were dating, how their studies were going and all the details of their lives.
Still, what Jose Menendez wanted for his sons was no more than what many success-oriented families want for their children. If he drove them hard on the tennis court, yelling and coaching from the sidelines, so do many others. No one can remember Jose Menendez ever striking his sons.. If he was tough and prone to lecture, he also hugged his kids frequently to show that he loved them, according to friends and relatives.
The boys took much of Jose’s advice to heart. But there were signs of rebellion beyond the tennis court, and in the two years before the murders, the friction between Jose and his sons worsened, as the brothers engaged in behavior not usually associated with model kids. Lyle was suspended from Princeton for plagiarism in the first term of his freshman year; Erik was accused of committing burglaries one summer. And Lyle clashed with his parents over his problems at school, over his girlfriends. It was not easy to be a son of Jose Menendez.
Jose Menendez was no different in the business world, developing a reputation as a tireless worker with a quick mind and an ability to solve problems. His first job was at the prestigious accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand.