Ryan Murphy is defending DAHMER.
After families of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer‘s victims criticized the hit Netflix series for not reaching out before depicting them in DAHMER – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, the creator is telling his side of the story.
“It’s something that we researched for a very long time,” Murphy said at a panel promoting the show on Oct. 27. “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 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.”
Instead, Murphy explains the team had to rely “very heavily” on a group of researchers, saying it was “a night-and-day effort to us trying to uncover the truth of these people.”
DAHMER, which depicts the infamous serial killer’s 1978 to 1991 spree in which he gruesomely murdered 17 men and assaulted at least five others, first began receiving backlash after it premiered on Sept. 21.