Lyle and Erik Menendez: What happened to Erik’s lawyer Leslie Abramson?

In March 1990,  Lyle and Erik Menendez were arrested for the murder of their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion on August 20, 1989. About six months after the murder, Leslie Abramson took on Erik Menendez’s case. 

Before representing Erik Menendez, Leslie Abramson had taken part in high profile cases such as that of Arnel Salvatierra who shot his father three times as he slept and admitted to sending a fake death threat to him. The Los Angeles Times reported that “Using the same tactics that would prove so successful in the first Menendez trial, Abramson argued that Salvatierra struck out only because he could no longer endure the physical and psychological abuse his father had doled out for years. The strategy worked. Salvatierra was convicted of manslaughter and placed on probation--a stunning victory for the defence.”

Leslie Abramson was born in Queens, New York on October 6, 1943, and was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1970 after attending Queens college and law school at UCLA. She worked at the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office for six years. 

Leslie Abramson then opened her own practice and the prolific lawyer was considered by the Los Angeles Times as someone who "spent her working life building a reputation as a 4-foot-11, fire-eating, mud-slinging, nuclear-strength pain in the legal butt."

When it came to her personal life, Leslie Abramsan had a daughter Laine from her marriage to a pharmacist. She also adopted a son with Los Angeles Times reporter Tim Rutten and he died in 2022 after a fall at his home. Although the couple were divorced at the time of his death, they were reportedly on good terms. 

Although Leslie Abramson was asked to be interviewed for Netflix’s The Menendez Brothers, she declined. In an email to producers, she wrote that "Thirty 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 courts can do that and they have ruled."

When it comes to where Leslie Abramson is today, she is now retired. However, she does appear in public sporadically and delivered the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lecture at San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson Law School back in 2015.