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Netflix Gives Lizzie Borden a Queer Love Story History Cannot Confirm

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is designed as provocative drama, but viewers should not mistake its romance between Lizzie and the family maid for settled history.

Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story arrived on September 17 with eight episodes, an all-star cast and a question that has followed Borden through decades of pop culture: was she a lesbian? The series does more than raise the possibility. It builds an intimate relationship between Lizzie, played by Ella Beatty, and the Borden family’s maid, Bridget Sullivan, played by Vicky Krieps.

That choice gives the show an immediately legible sapphic storyline. It also creates a fact-checking problem. The available historical record does not establish that Borden was a lesbian or that she and Sullivan were lovers.

What the Historical Record Establishes

Andrew and Abby Borden were killed with a hatchet in Fall River, Massachusetts, on August 4, 1892. Lizzie Borden was tried for the murders and acquitted in 1893. The case remains officially unsolved.

Bridget Sullivan worked in the Borden household and gave evidence connected to the timeline around the killings. TheWrap’s review of the historical record notes that Sullivan’s account of hearing Lizzie laugh became part of the evidence against her. It also says there is no historical evidence confirming a romantic relationship between the two women.

Borden later had a close friendship with actor Nance O’Neil. That friendship has helped fuel speculation about Borden’s sexuality, but it began after the trial and does not prove a particular identity. A woman remaining unmarried or forming close friendships with other women is not evidence enough to label her.

Why the Fictional Romance Matters

The show is free to invent private conversations and motives. The trouble begins when a real person’s unverified sexuality becomes part of a sensational murder narrative without a clear boundary between drama and evidence.

Queer audiences have good reason to be interested in lives that earlier archives failed to record honestly. Silence in the archive can reflect repression, destroyed letters or the limited language available at the time. But absence also means uncertainty. Responsible queer history makes room for that gap instead of filling it with confidence.

The distinction is especially important in true crime. A fictional lesbian romance can create representation, yet tying that romance to manipulation and murder can revive old ideas about queer women as dangerous or deviant. The answer is not to ban imaginative retellings. It is to identify them as interpretation.

How to Watch the Series Clearly

Viewers can enjoy the performances and the show’s gothic excess while keeping three facts in view: Borden was acquitted, the murders remain unsolved, and her sexuality is not confirmed by the surviving evidence.

That leaves a more interesting question than a forced label. Why does popular culture keep making Lizzie Borden queer, and what do those retellings reveal about each era’s anxieties around women, desire and violence? Netflix’s series adds another answer, but it should not be mistaken for the last word.