New Aaron Hernandez Documentary Sheds Light on the Late NFL Star's Life

A new documentary coming to Netflix on Wednesday explores the tormented life of late NFL star and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez. The ...

A new documentary coming to Netflix on Wednesday explores the tormented life of late NFL star and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez. The trailer for the three-part story, titled Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, states, “No one has allegedly murdered two people then played an entire season as a professional athlete.” The clip also includes a recording of a call from Aaron to his mother from jail, where he blames her for his problems. “I was the happiest little kid in the world, and you f***ed me up,” he says, to which his mother replies, “I ain’t living with that.” “You did,” he insists on the call. “I had nobody. What’d you think I was going to do? Become a perfect angel?”

The former New England Patriots star committed suicide at the age of 27 in 2017 while serving a life sentence in prison. He had been convicted of masterminding the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd, his fiancée’s sister’s boyfriend.

The documentary also investigates the traumatic childhood of the football player, of Puerto Rican descent. Aaron revealed his father was physically abusive to him as a child. “Our father would hit us for anything from a bad grade to disrespectful behavior to sheer clumsiness,” his brother, Jonathan Hernandez, told PEOPLE. He also said Aaron had suffered sexual abuse when he was young, without revealing details. “He had a lot of things happen, both good and bad,” he added. “People think they know about my brother, but they really don’t. They know what they saw in the news, but they don’t know all the struggles he faced.”

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Aaron also had ups and downs in his relationship with his mother. “One minute she was dead to him, the next minute, he wanted to call her to see how she was,” a teammate revealed to PEOPLE. The teammate argued that Hernandez was conflicted over his own sexuality and was romantically involved with both men and women. “He wanted to be the big man on campus who was having sex with a lot of women, but then he’d find guys on the down low,” the teammate alleged. “The girls were public, the guys were not.”

The documentary also explores the claims from Aaron’s attorneys that he suffered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that has been linked to head trauma from playing football, which the NFL has denied. The story sheds light on how other people close to the athlete were impacted by his actions. “This isn’t just the Aaron Hernandez story,” the trailer says. “There were a lot of lives affected by this guy.”