Is Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story a True Story? Fact vs. Fiction Explained
I watched all eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story in two sittings, and honestly? I came out of it needing to fact-check almost everything I’d just seen. That’s the Ryan Murphy effect — gorgeous production, magnetic performances, and a script that treats historical accuracy like an optional side dish. If you’ve finished the season and you’re sitting there wondering how much of it actually happened, good instinct. Keep questioning it. Most of what makes this show feel dangerous is invented.
Let’s break down what’s real, what’s pure Hollywood theater, and why the gap between the two matters more than people are giving it credit for.
The Murders Actually Happened — And They’re Still Unsolved
Strip away the Ryan Murphy gloss and you’re left with a genuinely disturbing true crime case. On August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were killed in their Fall River, Massachusetts home in broad daylight. Abby went first, attacked upstairs while she tidied a guest room — struck close to 19 times. Andrew came home later, dozed off on the parlor sofa, and was hit roughly 10-11 times, hard enough that his face was barely recognizable.
The only people confirmed near the house that morning were Lizzie, Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, and Bridget Sullivan, the family’s maid. Lizzie became suspect number one almost instantly, and honestly, the circumstantial pile-up against her is wild:
- No sign of forced entry anywhere in the house
- A documented, sour relationship with her stepmother
- She’d tried buying poison days before the murders
- She burned a dress in the kitchen stove shortly after, calling it a paint accident
She stood trial in 1893, and it turned into a full-blown media circus — arguably America’s first true tabloid trial. And then she walked. Acquitted. The all-male jury reportedly couldn’t stomach the idea that a churchgoing Sunday school teacher was capable of this. She spent the rest of her life in a fancier house nearby, shunned by Fall River society, until she died in 1927. Nobody was ever convicted. The case is still officially open, unsolved, over 130 years later. That alone should be more than enough dramatic fuel — no embellishment required.
What the Show Actually Nails
Credit where it’s due, because the series isn’t a total fabrication:
- The house itself is depicted accurately as cramped, outdated, and weirdly stingy given Andrew’s wealth — no indoor plumbing, tucked into an unfashionable part of town near his properties. That’s real, and it’s an important detail: Andrew was loaded and chose to make his family live like they weren’t.
- The family tension is grounded in fact. Lizzie and her sister Emma genuinely fought with their father over money and inheritance, and both women coldly referred to Abby as “Mrs. Borden,” never “mother.”
- Bridget Sullivan’s grinding daily workload, the brutal heatwave that week, and the basic morning-of timeline all line up with actual trial testimony.
So the atmosphere is legitimate. The bones of the story are real. It’s everything Murphy and Ian Brennan bolted onto those bones that turns this into fiction wearing a documentary costume.
Where It Completely Goes Off the Rails
1. Aileen Wuornos has nothing to do with this story — and the show knows it
This is the choice that broke the internet, and rightfully so. The series drags Sarah Paulson’s Aileen Wuornos and even Elizabeth Bathory into Lizzie’s narrative, building toward a finale where a dying Wuornos hallucinates Borden. Here’s the problem: Lizzie Borden died in 1927. Wuornos was executed in 2002. These women never existed in the same era, let alone crossed paths. Brennan has defended it as a thematic device exploring whether monsters are “born or made.” I get the ambition. I don’t buy the execution. It plays less like insight and more like padding an anthology season to hit an eight-episode order.
2. The Lizzie-Bridget romance is invented, full stop
The show leans hard into a sexually charged bond between Lizzie and her maid, framing it as their shared escape from a suffocating, repressive household. It’s compelling television. It’s also fiction. Speculation about Lizzie’s sexuality has floated around pop culture for decades, sure, but there is zero documented evidence of any romantic relationship with Bridget Sullivan. Trial records show Bridget as exactly what she was: an employee trying to survive a miserable job in a dysfunctional house.
3. The show tells you Lizzie did it. History never did.
This is the one that actually irritates me. Lizzie Borden was acquitted. Legally, she did not commit these murders. The show sidesteps that entirely and just shows her planning and executing the killings on screen, no ambiguity offered. Historians have spent over a century floating alternate theories — an unknown intruder, her sister Emma, even her visiting uncle John Morse. By picking a side and presenting it as settled fact, the series trades genuine historical mystery for a tidy, dramatic conclusion. That’s a real disservice to a case whose entire cultural power comes from the fact that nobody actually knows.
Where to Watch Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Online Free – How to Stream Ryan Murphy Series
Fact vs. Fiction, At a Glance
| Element | Real History | Netflix’s Version |
|---|---|---|
| The murders | Actually happened, Aug 4, 1892 | Depicted accurately in setting/timeline |
| Lizzie’s guilt | Legally acquitted, case unsolved | Shown as definite fact |
| Lizzie & Bridget | No evidence of romance | Portrayed as intimate, romantic |
| Aileen Wuornos connection | None — different centuries | Fabricated crossover storyline |
| Family conflict | Documented and real | Accurately portrayed |
| House conditions | Accurately restrictive despite wealth | Accurately portrayed |
So Is It Worth Watching?
Yes, but treat it as historical fiction, not a documentary — because that’s exactly what it is. Ella Beatty’s performance genuinely earns the hype; there’s a reason it’s being called a career-making turn. The first half of the season, when it’s just the Borden household simmering under Victorian repression and heat-wave misery, is genuinely tense, well-built television. It’s the back half — once the multi-era “monster” mythology kicks in — where the show loses me and, based on the Reddit threads I’ve been scrolling through, loses a lot of other viewers too. People are calling the Wuornos-Bathory detour distracting filler, and I don’t disagree.
If anything, the show works best as a gateway. Watch it, enjoy the performances, then go read the actual 1893 trial transcripts and the century of competing theories around who really killed Andrew and Abby Borden. The true story doesn’t need a serial-killer crossover to be terrifying. It’s already one of the most genuinely unresolved mysteries in American crime history — and that ambiguity is worth way more than anything Ryan Murphy invented for it.
