Sorting Fact From Fiction In Netflix’s ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’

Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s true crime anthology has returned for a fourth installment, and this time the subject is not a convicted killer but a woman who was formally acquitted of the crime she remains associated with more than a century later. Premiering on Netflix, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story focuses on the 1892 axe murders of Lizzie’s parents, Andrew and Abby Borden, and the historic trial that ended in her acquittal. The season stars Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden and marks the first installment of the anthology to focus on an alleged female perpetrator.

Given the franchise’s track record of blending documented history with dramatic invention, viewers have understandably started asking how much of this new season reflects the historical record and how much is pure Ryan Murphy embellishment. The answer, according to multiple outlets that have compared the show against the case file, is that ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ borrows its skeleton from real events while filling in nearly everything else with speculation.

The Real Case Behind Lizzie Borden’s Legend

The bones of the story are not in dispute. Andrew and Abby Borden were killed in their Fall River, Massachusetts home on August 4, 1892, and Lizzie, Andrew’s daughter and Abby’s stepdaughter, became the central suspect and was tried the following year. A jury acquitted her, and no one else was ever legally identified as responsible, which is part of why the case still resists the tidy resolution that television dramas tend to prefer.

Some of the most repeated details about the crime are actually inaccurate, even outside the Netflix retelling. Abby was Lizzie’s stepmother rather than her mother, the weapon was more likely a hatchet than an axe, and the famous schoolyard rhyme about forty whacks is far off since autopsies recorded eighteen wounds to Abby’s head and ten to Andrew’s. The rhyme has nonetheless shaped public memory of the case for well over a century.

The Borden home itself has become a tourist destination, and the fascination shows no sign of slowing. Borden history specialist Larry LoVerde told the Hollywood Reporter that the property, converted into a themed bed and breakfast in 1996, sees a constant stream of visitors through the summer season and an especially heavy crush of Halloween tourists who fold the house into their Salem trips.

That enduring public appetite is part of why this is at least the fourth major narrative adaptation of the Borden case, following ‘The Legend of Lizzie Borden,’ ‘Lizzie Borden Took an Ax,’ and ‘Lizzie.’ Each version has taken its own liberties, and Netflix’s is no exception.

What The Series Gets Right And Wrong About Lizzie Borden

One detail the show does pull directly from the historical record involves the family’s live in maid. Bridget Sullivan really was called Maggie by Lizzie and her sister Emma, and at trial Sullivan herself testified that she was sometimes called Maggie by the Borden sisters. That small, verified detail sits alongside much larger inventions elsewhere in the season.

Other moments blur the line between documented fact and dramatic license in more complicated ways. In one episode, actress Nance O’Neil is shown dining with the Borden family, and while O’Neil really did dine with Lizzie according to historical accounts, that dinner reportedly took place years later at Lizzie’s Maplecroft home rather than the murder house itself. Elsewhere, the show depicts Lizzie and Maggie killing a neighbor named Bertha Manchester, when in reality a twenty two year old woman by that name was murdered with an axe in Fall River just days before Lizzie’s trial, a case that was never connected to Lizzie.

The deeper relationships the show hinges on, including Lizzie and Maggie’s romance and the abuse Lizzie allegedly suffered at home, fall into a category historians simply cannot confirm or deny. Bridget Sullivan was a real witness with an important place in the historical record, but any version of the story that gives her an inner life, secrets, or a private motive is necessarily moving from source material into invention. The season’s own framing acknowledges this gap between drama and documentation.

Netflix has been fairly upfront that this is not meant to be read as a factual reconstruction. Co-showrunner Ian Brennan told Netflix’s Tudum that the job of the show was to throw into contrast the cage that any woman living in that era would have felt, particularly a strange young woman who loved animals and lived in a repressive household. That is a thematic argument rather than a historical one, and it is worth keeping that distinction in mind while watching.

Casting Ella Beatty And The Rest Of The Ensemble

Beatty was reportedly chosen after an extensive search, and she has said she came to the role with little prior knowledge of the case. She has explained that when the audition came up she listened to every true crime podcast she could find to learn the facts of the case before diving into the character work. That research clearly informed how she approached separating the documented Lizzie from the version written for the show.

Beatty has also been candid about where her job as an actor ends and where historical accuracy stops mattering to the performance. She has said her task was to explore the character that Brennan and Murphy created, taking the available source material about the real person’s life and translating it into a heavily fictionalized version for the screen. She’s framed her work less as an impersonation than as an interpretation built around a question the writers were chasing.

The supporting cast draws from Murphy’s usual pool of collaborators alongside newer faces. The season also stars Vicky Krieps, Charlie Hunnam, Rebecca Hall, Jessica Barden, Joey Pollari, Billie Lourd, and Sarah Paulson. Krieps plays Bridget Maggie Sullivan, Hunnam plays Andrew Borden, Hall plays Abby Borden, and Lourd plays Lizzie’s older sister Emma.

Critical response so far has leaned favorable, particularly toward the central performance. One review described the season as an outrageously engaging entry in the anthology, calling Beatty’s take on the character genuinely compelling. That reception echoes the broader pattern of the franchise, which has consistently found an audience even when critics are split on the ethics of its subject matter.

Sarah Paulson’s Aileen Wuornos Twist Explained

The season’s boldest departure from the historical record involves a killer who was not even alive during the Borden case. Paulson appears as Aileen Wuornos, an American serial killer, in a storyline that has no basis in the actual timeline of events. The show stretches from Lizzie’s childhood in the mid nineteenth century all the way up to the 1990s, allowing the Borden murders to trickle down through the decades and connect to another infamous killer.

Beatty has framed that connection as thematic rather than literal. She has said the exploration of why women kill was part of what drew the writers to Wuornos, since her presence helps the season examine that same question from another angle. Whether that framing lands will likely depend on how comfortable individual viewers are with the anthology stretching historical fact for the sake of a broader argument.

The move fits a franchise that has repeatedly prioritized psychological throughline over strict chronology. Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story became one of the most highly watched series in Netflix history, reaching one billion view hours in its first sixty days, while the Ed Gein season drew 12.2 million views globally in its first three days. That built in audience gives Murphy and Brennan room to take swings that a smaller show might not attempt.

With eight episodes now available and the historical gaps in the Borden case as wide as ever, the show leaves plenty of room for viewers to decide for themselves where the line between Lizzie Borden the documented defendant and Lizzie Borden the television character should actually sit, and it’s worth hearing where that line falls for those who’ve already made their way through Fall River’s bloodiest chapter.