By JAIMIE DING, Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Erik Menendez was denied parole by panel of California commissioners Thursday.

During his hearing he offered his most detailed account in years of how he was raised and why he made the choices he did — both at the time of his parents’ killing and during his decades in prison.

Erik Menendez appears before the parole board via teleconference on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. (California Department of Corrections via AP)

He and his brother Lyle were sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for fatally shooting Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion in 1989.

The state corrections department chose a single reporter to watch the videoconference and share details with the rest of the press.

Here’s a look at Erik’s remarks:

His upbringing

“I was not raised with a moral foundation,” he said.

“I was raised to lie, to cheat, to steal, steal in the sense, an abstract way. When I was playing tennis my father would make sure that I cheated at certain times if he told me too. The idea that there is a right and wrong that I do not cross because it’s a moral bound was not instilled in me as a teenager.”

Relationship with his father

Menendez has said for years he was sexually abused by his father. He told commissioners: “I fantasized about my father not being alive.”

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Prosecutors asked why Menendez chose to kill his father rather than leave the family home, as he was already 18. He said: “In my mind, leaving meant death. There was no consideration. I was totally convinced there was no place I could go.”

He also spoke about the fear of his father: “It’s difficult to convey how terrifying my father was.”

The murders

The panel of commissioners asked Menendez why he killed his mother as well, if his father was the abuser.

Menendez explained that he did not see any difference between his parents because he found out that his mother knew about the abuse: “It was the most devastating moment in my entire life. It changed everything for me. I had been protecting her by not telling her.”

On shooting his mother: “I wish to God I did not do that.”

Breaking the prison rules

Commissioners focused on numerous rule violations Menendez committed in prison, including drinking alcohol, affiliating with a gang and having a cellphone.

On why he chose to use a cellphone: “What I got in terms of the phone and my connection with the outside world was far greater than the consequences of me getting caught with the phone.”

On substance abuse: “If I could numb my sadness with alcohol, I was going to do it … I would have taken other drugs to numb that pain … I was looking to ease that sadness within me.”

Changing his life

Menendez decided to become sober in 2013 and found faith, he said: “From 2013 on I was living for a different purpose. My purpose in life was to be a good person … I asked myself, ‘Who do I want to be when I die?’ I believe I’m going to face a different parole board when I die.”

Why he was denied parole

A panel of two parole commissioners said Menendez was unsuitable for release. They said his actions in prison, including affiliating with a prison gang and having a cellphone in violation of the rules, showed he was a risk to public safety.

Commissioner Robert Barton said: “One can pose a risk to public safety in many ways, with several types of criminal behavior, including the ones you were guilty of in prison.”

Menendez can come before the parole board again in three years. Barton encouraged him to change his behavior.

“You have two options,” he said. “One is to have a pity party … and then you become a self-fulfilling prophecy, probably not getting granted next time. Or you can take to heart what we discussed.”

By DAVID FISCHER, MIKE SCHNEIDER and FREIDA FRISARO, Associated Press

MIAMI (AP) — A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Thursday halting further expansion and ordering the winding down of an immigration detention center built in the middle of the Florida Everglades and dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” that advocates said violated environmental laws.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ injunction formalized a temporary halt she had ordered two weeks ago as witnesses continued to testify in a multiday hearing to determine whether construction should end until the ultimate resolution of the case.

The state of Florida filed a notice of appeal Thursday night, shortly after the ruling was issued.

FILE – President Donald Trump tours “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility, on July 1, 2025, in Ochopee, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

“The deportations will continue until morale improves,” DeSantis spokesman Alex Lanfranconi said in response to the judge’s ruling.

The judge said she expected the population of the facility to decline within 60 days through the transferring of the detainees to other facilities, and once that happened, fencing, lighting and generators should be removed. She wrote the state and federal defendants can’t bring anyone other than those who are already being detained at the facility onto the property. The order does not prohibit modification or repairs to existing facilities, “which are solely for the purpose of increasing safety or mitigating environmental or other risks at the site.,”

The preliminary injunction includes “those who are in active concert or participation with” the state of Florida or federal defendants or their officers, agents, employees,” the judge wrote in an 82-page order.

The judge said state officials never sufficiently explained why the facility needed to be in the middle of the Florida Everglades. “What is apparent, however, is that in their haste to construct the detention camp, the State did not consider alternative locations,” Williams said.

Judge cites decades-long efforts to preserve Everglades

Williams said her order gave the state and federal defendants time to wind down the facility so that it can undergo the required environmental assessments. She noted the three-quarters century of efforts to preserve the Everglades.

“Since that time, every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote. “This order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”

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President Donald Trump toured the facility last month and suggested it could be a model for future lockups nationwide as his administration races to expand the infrastructure necessary for increasing deportations.

Environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe had argued that further construction and operations should be stopped until federal and state officials complied with federal environmental laws. Their lawsuit claims the project threatens environmentally sensitive wetlands that are home to protected plants and animals and would reverse billions of dollars’ worth of environmental restoration.

Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, called the ruling a landmark victory for the Everglades and Americans who believe this imperiled wilderness should be protected.

“It sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government — and there are consequences for ignoring them,” Samples said in a statement.

Miccosukee Tribe Chairman Talbert Cypress said this isn’t the first time the tribe has has to fight for its land and rights.

“We will always stand up for our culture, our sovereignty, and for the Everglades,” Cypress said in a statement.

Attorneys for the state and federal defendants didn’t immediately respond to emailed inquiries late Thursday. But they have previously argued that, although the detention center would be holding federal detainees, the construction and operation of the facility was entirely under the state of Florida, meaning the federal environmental law didn’t apply.

The judge has said the detention facility was, at a minimum, a joint partnership between the state and federal government.

Hasty construction of detention center

The detention center was quickly built almost two months ago at a lightly used, single-runway training airport in the middle of the Everglades. It currently holds several hundred detainees but was designed to eventually hold up to 3,000 detainees in temporary tent structures.

Inside the compound’s large white tents, rows of bunkbeds are surrounded by chain-link cages. People held there say worms turn up in the food, toilets don’t flush and flood floors with fecal waste, while mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere. At times the air conditioners abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat. Detainees are said to go days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and can only speak to lawyers and loved ones by phone.

Witnesses for the environmental groups testified during the hearing that at least 20 acres (8 hectares) of asphalt had been added to the site since the Florida Division of Emergency Management began construction. They said additional paving could lead to an increase in water runoff to the adjacent wetlands, spread harmful chemicals into the Everglades and reduce the habitat for endangered Florida panthers.

Attorneys for federal and state agencies have asked Williams to dismiss or transfer the injunction request, saying the lawsuit was filed in the wrong jurisdiction. Williams ruled Thursday that her court was the proper venue.

Another federal judge in Miami dismissed part of a lawsuit earlier this week that claimed detainees were denied access to the legal system at the immigration detention center and then moved the remaining counts of the case to another court.

Both lawsuits were being heard as Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ′ administration apparently was preparing to build a second immigration detention center at a Florida National Guard training center in north Florida.

The American Eagle Outfitters Inc. Sydney Sweeney “Good Jeans” controversy happened in late July — a lifetime ago in internet terms — but here we are, halfway through August, and people are still talking about it.

One of the latest references happened last Friday, when Dr. Phil, outraged that liberals found fault with the ad, announced plans to buy American Eagle blue jeans for every woman in his family.

It’s easy to read this episode as yet more evidence of our degraded civic discourse. But what if this is merely the latest front in the decades-long battle over the meaning of blue jeans?

They’re part of our common culture, yes, but they have a long history of “triggering” one group or another — the inevitable consequence of the fact that so many groups think that this most ubiquitous and recognizable article of clothing belongs to them.

One man’s name is inseparable from the birth of blue jeans: Levi Strauss. In 1873, one of his customers — a tailor named Jacob Davis, based in a mining town in Nevada — approached him with a proposition.

Davis explained that he had been making tough trousers out of denim that he had purchased from Strauss. These pants, reinforced with metal rivets, had proven popular with miners, and Davis wanted Strauss to help him build the business.

The two men secured a patent for the design (note the miner and his pickaxe), soon founding a company to sell the pants and hawking them to miners and cowboys who wanted clothing that could handle wear and tear.

Other companies got into the business, too, and over the next half century, blue jeans — then known as “waist overalls” — became popular across a broad swath of the nation’s working class.

Look at the iconic photographs of working Americans taken during the Great Depression, and one thing stands out: virtually everyone wore blue jeans, along with their close cousins, denim coveralls and overalls.  It was the uniform of the masses — the ordinary people who worked in factories and on farms. And had it remained that way, there would be no occasion for this column.

That same decade, though, witnessed another trend that proved a harbinger of things to come: the cultural appropriation of blue jeans as a fashion statement. The first offenders were affluent Americans who began visiting so-called “dude ranches” out West. Hanging out with cowboys and other “authentic” Americans led to a fashion fad focused on “Dude Ranch Duds,” with Levi Strauss & Co. in the lead. The company even launched the first blue jeans for women in 1934: Lady Levi’s.

In the process, blue jeans went from being a functional item of clothing associated with working-class Americans to something far more malleable: a literal canvas by which wearers broadcast their identity.

And broadcast they did. Jeans became ubiquitous thanks to Marlon Brando. Long before he became a household name, Brando refused to abide by the dress codes that aspiring actors followed. “During what might be called his Blue — or Blue Jean — Period, Brando went everywhere in such clothes,” reported the Washington Post in a breathless profile of the star.  Receptionists and gatekeepers at talent agencies and in Hollywood “mistook him for a man who had come to repair a broken pipe or wash the windows.”

Brando translated his own style onto the screen, beginning with The Wild One, where he played the jean-wearing leader of a biker gang that takes over a small town. White middle-class high schoolers and college students loved the look and immediately adopted it as their own.

Their elders were not amused.

In 1957, the New York Times informed readers that blue jeans, formerly a wholesome bit of clothing, had gotten a bad rep. “Ever since the ‘motorcycle boys’ started wearing blue jeans in anything but a neat manner, many schools over the country have banned this attire from the classroom,” the paper reported.

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By the 1960s, the transgressive power of jeans exploded, particularly after they became the uniform of the youthful tribes that made up the counterculture. Vietnam War protesters wore jeans embroidered with peace signs, while feminists wore jeans, not skirts, to claim equal rights. Civil Rights protesters embraced the look because it mirrored denim worn by enslaved people and sharecroppers — a subtle suggestion that not much had changed in the segregated South.

From there, the jean wars only intensified. On the one side, bell bottoms became the signature look of 1970s radicals. By 1980, jeans had slimmed, but were associated in some circles with declining morals. That year, a then 15-year-old Brooke Shields appeared in a series of highly sexualized ads for Calvin Klein jeans that social conservatives decried.

At the same time, a conservative counterrevolution began reclaiming jeans for themselves. After Ronald Reagan became president, he broadcast an image of himself as a rancher at heart who was happiest wearing his beloved blue jeans. George W. Bush took the same look and ran with it when he was president, helping reclaim jeans for conservatives.

As the Sydney Sweeney jeans controversy gradually fades from the spotlight — at least as much as it can in today’s hostile political climate, where it’s bound to resurface from time to time — it’s worth remembering that dust-ups surrounding denim are far from unprecedented. And in an era in America when so little feels familiar, perhaps that sense of déjà vu can be a guide for navigating similar culture wars.

Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.”

Today is Friday, Aug. 22, the 234th day of 2025. There are 131 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Aug. 22,1972, John Wojtowicz (WAHT’-uh-witz) and Salvatore Naturile took seven employees hostage at a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Brooklyn, New York, during a botched robbery; the siege, which ended with Wojtowicz’s arrest and Naturile’s killing by the FBI, inspired the 1975 movie “Dog Day Afternoon.”

Also on this date:

In 1791, the Haitian Revolution began as enslaved people of Saint-Domingue rose up against French colonizers.

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In 1851, the schooner America outraced more than a dozen British vessels off the English coast to win a trophy that came to be known as the America’s Cup.

In 1910, Japan annexed Korea, which remained under Japanese control until the end of World War II.

In 1922, Irish revolutionary Michael Collins was shot to death, apparently by Irish Republican Army members opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty that Collins had co-signed.

In 1965, a fourteen-minute brawl ensued between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers after Giants pitcher Juan Marichal struck Dodgers catcher John Roseboro in the head with a baseball bat. (Marichal and Roseboro would later reconcile and become lifelong friends.)

In 1968, Pope Paul VI arrived in Bogota, Colombia, for the start of the first papal visit to South America.

In 1989, Black Panthers co-founder Huey P. Newton was shot to death in Oakland, California.

In 1992, on the second day of the Ruby Ridge siege in Idaho, an FBI sharpshooter killed Vicki Weaver, the wife of white separatist Randy Weaver.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation that ended guaranteed cash payments to the poor and demanded work from recipients.

In 2003, Alabama’s chief justice, Roy Moore, was suspended for his refusal to obey a federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of his courthouse.

In 2007, A Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Iraq, killing all 14 U.S. soldiers aboard.

Today’s Birthdays:

Author Annie Proulx (proo) is 90.
Baseball Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski is 86.
Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Bill Parcells is 84.
Writer-producer David Chase is 80.
Retired CBS newsman Steve Kroft is 80.
International Swimming Hall of Famer Diana Nyad is 76.
Baseball Hall of Famer Paul Molitor is 69.
Rock guitarist Vernon Reid is 67.
Country singer Collin Raye is 65.
Rock singer Roland Orzabal (Tears For Fears) is 64.
Singer Tori Amos is 62.
International Tennis Hall of Famer Mats Wilander (VEE’-luhn-dur) is 61.
Rapper GZA (JIHZ’-ah)/The Genius is 59.
Actor Ty Burrell is 58.
Celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis is 55.
Actor Rick Yune is 54.
Singer Howie Dorough (Backstreet Boys) is 52.
Comedian-actor Kristen Wiig is 52.
Talk show host James Corden is 47.
Pop singer Dua Lipa is 30.