This is Roy Rosselló, the Latin boy band member who could help get the Menendez brothers released

The Menendez brothers murdered their parents in 1989 for which they were sentenced to life in prison without parole seven years later. The first-degree murder conviction was handed down during a second joint trial for the two brothers in which they were not allowed to use much of the evidence presented at their individual first trials about suffering years of emotional, physical and sexual abuse, primarily at the hands of their father, Jose Menendez.

However, after the release of a Peacock docuseries ‘Mendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed’ in 2023, there has been renewed interested in their case and scrutiny. This prompted the Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón to recommend their sentence be reviewed which could see the brothers released from prison. That was in no small part to the claims by Roy Rosselló, who says he too was raped in the 1980s when he was 13 or 14 by Jose Menendez.

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This is Roy Rosselló, the Latin boy band member who could help get the Menendez brothers released

Menudo was a popular Puerto Rican boy band created by former producer Edgardo Díaz in 1977. Rosselló joined the formation in 1983, a year before Ricky Martin, the most internationally known member. He said in the docuseries that when he was visiting the home of Jose Menendez that the then-RCA Records executive drugged and raped him.

In a habeas corpus petition filed in May 2023, shortly after ‘Mendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed’ was released, attorneys for the Menendez brothers allege that Rosselló was raped a second time by Jose Menendez in a New York hotel. Rosseló claims that he when he woke up he was bleeding and “in terrible pain” that lasted a week.

Rosselló has also accused Díaz of sexually abusing him when he was in Menudo. The former producer of the boy band is under investigation by the LAPD over those allegations. Rosselló wasn’t the only member of the band to suffer physical, sexual and mental abuse.

Further allegations are laid out in four-part HBO Max docuseries that came out in 2022, ‘Menudo: Forever Young’. The title is in reference to the fact that group members would be replaced when they turned 16 with new younger talent to keep the group eternally young.

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