Ryan Murphy Says His Team Attempted to Contact the Families and Friends of Jeffrey Dahmer Victims for "Input" on the Miniseries

Ryan Murphy, creator of Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, claims that his Netflix team reached out to those who knew 20 victims.

It seems that the team behind Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story felt like they didn't need permission to proceed with the Netflix show. Per THR, During a promotional event at the DGA Theatre in Los Angeles on Thursday (October 27), show creator Ryan Murphy defended the controversial miniseries, claiming that he contacted friends and families of 20 Dahmer victims for "input."

“It’s something that we researched for a very long time,” Murphy said. “And we — over the course of the three, three and a half years when we were really writing it, working on it — we reached out to 20, around 20, of the victims’ families and friends trying to get input, trying to talk to people. And not a single person responded to us in that process. So we relied very, very heavily on our incredible group of researchers who… I don’t even know how they found a lot of this stuff. But it was just like a night and day effort to us trying to uncover the truth of these people.”

Taking it as a sign to move forth with the show, Murphy and his team recreated the deaths of Dahmer's 17 victims from 1978 and 1991. For nearly 15 years, Dahmer gruesomely killed men, and the surviving family members of some of those victims have spoken out aganist the Netflix series. Rita Isbell, sister of Errol Lindsey, who was murdered by Dahmer at 19-years-old, called out Netflix for profiting off the tragedies. Shirley Hughes, the mother of Tony Hughes, who was murdered by Dahmer at 31, says her son's story was exaggerated. However, Murphy still stands behind his show.

“Something that we talked a lot in the making of it is we weren’t so much interested in Jeffrey Dahmer, the person, but what made him the monster that he became,” Murphy explained. “We talked a lot about that… and we talked about it all the time. It’s really about white privilege. It’s about systemic racism. It’s about homophobia.”