Netflix’s “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” invents a courtroom alliance between Lizzie Borden and the stage star Nance O’Neil, but the two women did not meet until 1904, over a decade after a jury acquitted Borden of killing her father and stepmother.
The eight-episode season, which premiered Sept. 17, casts Jessica Barden as O’Neil and Ella Beatty as Borden. In the series, the actor meets Borden in 1892, witnesses her family’s cruelty over dinner, then turns up during the murder trial to teach her how to look innocent in exchange for patronage. No evidence supports that arc. O’Neil was still building her career in San Francisco in 1892, and Borden’s lawyers, not an actor, encouraged her to present herself as delicate before the jury.
The real friendship began in Boston, where Borden approached O’Neil backstage. Billed as the “American Bernhardt,” O’Neil ranked among the country’s best-known performers. Borden later visited her country home in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts. In 1905, newspapers reported that Borden entertained O’Neil’s company at Maplecroft, the Fall River house she shared with her sister, Emma. Emma left soon afterward and never returned. She acknowledged that something drove her out but refused to say what. O’Neil later denied ever visiting the house or meeting Emma.
The nature of the bond remains unresolved. No letters or diaries survive, and rumors about Borden’s sexuality trace largely to this friendship and to Ed McBain’s 1984 novel “Lizzie.” Cara Robertson, author of “The Trial of Lizzie Borden,” told Vanity Fair the relationship was “definitely romantic, but maybe not sexual.” O’Neil married the actor Alfred Hickman in 1917. After Borden died on June 1, 1927, O’Neil described their friendship as “ships that pass in the night.” The series stops short of portraying them as lovers, though it shows Borden infatuated with her.
Reviews have split over the liberties. Time argued the season strays further from the record than any earlier chapter of the anthology, while another critic dismissed its feminist framing as hollow. Some viewers have embraced the invention as the appeal. Creator Ian Brennan has said the season examines misogyny and the expectations Victorian society placed on women, using Borden’s story as its vehicle.
