What Happened To Judalon Smyth From Netflix’s Monsters?

Content warning: This article discusses themes and subject matter that some readers may find triggering, including murder and sexual abuse.

Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix true crime drama “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” has reignited the public’s fixation with one of the most obsessed-about murder cases in American history. The killing of José and Kitty Menéndez by their sons in the summer of 1989 first entered the murder-to-entertainment pipeline when Lyle and Erik’s trial was broadcast on Court TV in 1993. The story was the perfect true crime cocktail: it had an outwardly perfect family, conflicting testimony, sexual violence, gory killings, and — in case audiences got bored of all that — some messy B-plot side drama among the supporting characters.

The tip-off that got the Menéndez brothers arrested came from an unlikely source: their psychologist’s mistress, Judalon Smyth (played by Leslie Grossman in “Monsters”). Smyth told the cops about the existence of audiotaped confessions of the murders, along with other key pieces of information. In an interview with Vanity Fair that same year, she claimed that she’d heard the Menéndez brothers confessing to the crime and threatening the psychologist, Dr. Jerome Oziel, as she listened to their session through the door of his office.

However, the relationship between Oziel and Smyth was riddled with its own scandal and controversy, even beyond Oziel being a married man. A few weeks after the police tip-off, Smyth filed a lawsuit against Oziel alleging that he’d used his position as her therapist to drug her and that he’d raped and physically assaulted her during the relationship. Oziel’s lawyer hit back by comparing Smyth to Glenn Close’s bunny-boiling scorned woman in “Fatal Attraction.” (Oziel lost his license to practice psychology in 1997 following a state board complaint that he’d broken confidentiality rules and had sex with female patients; he surrendered his license but admitted no wrongdoing.)

Three years after she played a key role in the Menéndez brothers’ arrest, Smyth walked back her original story and actually testified as a witness for the defense. She claimed that she had actually only heard “bits and pieces” of the conversation, but Oziel had “brainwashed” her into thinking that she had heard more — including the brothers threatening to kill him. 

Being the key witness in a murder trial surrounded by a media circus meant that Judalon Smyth was essentially put on trial as well — in the court of public opinion. 

“I really didn’t understand the attack I was going to come under for doing the right thing,” she said in an interview for the 2015 Reelz Channel series “Murder Made Me Famous.” Much like the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard, the Menéndez case has divided opinion over whether the Menéndez brothers truly were “monsters,” or whether they were victims who had finally fought back after years of abuse. Some who are sympathetic to the killers see Smyth as a snitch; she recalled the papers calling her a “nutball” and criticizing her for having “loose lips.”

In “Murder Made Me Famous,” Smyth is careful to specify that she only overheard “parts” of the conversation in Oziel’s office (in keeping with her “bits and pieces” testimony from 20 years earlier), but says that she “did overhear them say that they killed their parents.” Justifying why she didn’t go to the police until March 1990, despite overhearing the conversation in October 1989, Smyth says that she was “scared” of becoming a fresh target for the Menéndez brothers. “I mean, if you’ll kill your parents, who won’t you kill?”

At the time of her relationship with Oziel, Smyth was running her own audiobook business. Her LinkedIn page indicates she’s gone through several career shifts since then, including freelance work in the entertainment business and founding several other companies. She mostly stayed out of the public eye after the initial publicity storm surrounding the trial, and hasn’t given any media interviews about the Menéndez case since appearing in “Murder Made Me Famous.”

“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is available now on Netflix.