Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon snapped at a reporter when questioned over whether his call for the Menendez brothers to be resentenced was influenced by his fight for re-election.
Gascon, 70, held a press conference Thursday to recommend Erik and Lyle Menendez receive a new sentence – 35 years after they murdered their parents Kitty and Jose inside their Beverly Hills mansion.
After calling for the brothers to be eligible for parole, arguing the pair have ‘paid their debt to society’, a reporter at the press conference asked if Gascon was trying to score political points two weeks before election day.
‘Would you please stop! I am not going to talk about re-election,’ Gascon shouted back.
The reporter did not even finish their question before Gascon’s outburst, as the DA’s supporters jumped in to tell them to ‘relax.’
‘It’s a fair question,’ the reporter said, to which a woman abruptly snapped back: ‘No, it’s not.’
Gascon added: ‘You want to talk about re-election, let’s go outside and we can talk about re-election there… I’m sorry sir, you’re interrupting.’
It comes as Gascon faces an uphill struggle to remain district attorney, with polls showing he is heavily trailing his challenger, former prosecutor Nathan Hochman, with two weeks until election day.
In one recent poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and LA Times, he was a staggering 30 points behind Hochman, 51 percent to 21 percent.
Once dubbed the ‘godfather of progressive prosecutors’, Gascon saw his popularity in Los Angeles plummet amid a rise in violent crime and his office’s lenient stance on criminality.
The LA Times reported this week that Gascon’s fall has also seen his fundraising dry up, and Hochman is out-fundraising and outspending Gascon by 11 to 1.
Gascon may have seen the Menendez case, which shot back into the public consciousness following a controversial Netflix show about the murders, as a way of scoring political points off public sympathy for the brothers.
Lyle and Erik were convicted of the murder of their parents, Jose and Kitty, in 1996 after their first trial was declared a mistrial.
The brothers never denied killing their parents by shooting them 14 times with 12-gauge shotguns in their million-dollar Beverly Hills home in August 1989 when they were just 18 and 21.
But Lyle and Erik, now aged 53 and 56, claimed they acted in self-defense.
They said they were lifelong victims of sexual abuse at their hands of their father, a high-flying businessman who worked across several industries, and that they were terrified that their parents were about to kill them to prevent the allegations from coming out.
However, Gascon’s decision to recommend a resentencing was quickly slammed by the Menendez brothers’ uncle, who criticized Gascon’s justification for his decision and for not informing him before the bombshell press conference.
Milton Andersen, the brother of Kitty Menendez who was slain alongside her husband by her sons in 1989, called it ‘extremely offensive.’
‘Mr. Gascón’s disdain for Mr. Andersen is absolutely criminal,’ an attorney for the uncle, 90, said in a statement.
‘He didn’t see fit to let Mr. Andersen know what he was going to do before he told the general public, and that is extremely offensive,’ he continued.
Andersen has said he ‘firmly believes that his nephews were not molested.’
Gascon can only recommend a resentencing and the brothers’ fate will ultimately be left up to the courts.