Lyle Menendez’s heartbroken wife has admitted that she and the convicted double murderer are separated after DailyMail.com’s blockbuster exclusive telling how he is having a fling with 21-year-old student Milly Bucksey.

Rebecca Sneed, 55, took to Facebook to break the news to followers of Lyle and his younger brother Erik.

‘Guys! This is NOT a cheating scandal,’ she wrote.

‘Lyle and I have been separated for a while now but remain best friends and family.’

She said she is continuing to run his Facebook page ‘with input from him’, and she is committed to fight on for the brothers.

‘I will never stop fighting for them,’ she added.

Within hours of DailyMail.com’s story posting, Sneed had posted a cryptic message saying ‘Love, loyalty, family, and friendship change shape over time but still exist.’

Several hours later she published her second message.

She was not the only Menendez family member to comment following our exclusive that English student Milly Bucksey is the new woman in Lyle’s life and that they have maintained contact through an illicit cellphone that Lyle has in prison in San Diego.

Erik’s stepdaughter Talia Menendez wrote: ‘I want to make it clear that Erik and Lyle are two separate individuals.

‘The decisions of one brother shouldn’t overshadow the truth about the other,’ she added.

‘I’d appreciate it if people would consider my dad for who he is, and not based on the actions of someone else.

Talia, 26, wrote: ‘I want to make it clear that Erik and Lyle are two separate individuals. The decisions of one brother shouldn’t overshadow the truth about the other.

‘My family is going through a lot right now. And I’d appreciate it if people would consider my dad for who he is, and not based on the actions of someone else.’

Talia is the daughter of Erik’s wife Tammi who refers to him as ‘dad’.

Sources told DailyMail.com that Lyle, 56, is so besotted with blonde Milly Bucksey, 21, that he has told her he wants to divorce Sneed – who he married in 2003 the month before his new love was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧.

‘Lyle adores Milly’, an insider with knowledge of the romance told DailyMail.com. ‘And she refers to him as her boyfriend even though he’s married.’

According to those familiar with the situation, after spotting her on the Facebook group, he initially approached her under an alias before confessing his true identity to the smitten student.

Since then, their romance has spiced up and even led to Lyle getting busted by prison guards at the top-security Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, California, for possessing a contraband cell phone he was using to contact his new squeeze.

A record of that incident was included in ousted Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón’s resentencing memo, filed in Los Angeles at the end of October. It showed he was caught with the phone on March 15 in the cell he shares with ‘multiple other people’.

Despite being busted, DailyMail.com has learned that Lyle has since acquired a second illicit cell phone, which he has been using to stay in touch with the University of Manchester student.

Photos, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com, show the pair inside the prison.

In one they pose in front of one of the distinctive murals in the prison yard with their arms wrapped lovingly around each other.

In another, they pose with a large dog, and a third has Milly sitting on Lyle’s knee.

A time stamp on one picture shows it was taken on Saturday, September 14 – a date corresponding with the Friday to Sunday visiting hours at the lock-up and nine days before Milly’s university started its fall semester.

In what appears to be a loving gesture to her jailbird lover, Milly changed the cover photo on her Facebook page to a picture of Ocean Beach in San Diego on November 17.

The beach in the laid-back surfer neighborhood has a distinctive palm-fringed promenade and cream lifeguard towers, both of which can be seen in Milly’s photo.

In an ironic twist, Ocean Beach is just 20 miles from Imperial Beach – the southern San Diego neighborhood where Sneed has lived since relocating from California’s state capital of Sacramento in October 2020 to be closer to him.

When DailyMail.com attempted to contact Milly at her home in England, her father Peter, 78, firmly closed the door. A spokesperson for the Menendez family did not respond to a request for comment.

But this time, the stakes are higher for Lyle and his brother Erik, 53, who have become a cause célèbre following the smash-hit success of Ryan Murphy’s biographical crime drama anthology, Monster: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.

Los Angeles County DA Gascón announced he was planning to pursue a lighter sentence for the brothers in October, telling reporters that the pair ‘have paid their debt to society’.

But he was voted out of office in this month’s election and will step down on December 1. His replacement, Republican-turned-Independent Nate Hochman, 60, has thrown the brothers’ bid for freedom into jeopardy by saying he plans to review Gascón’s decision.

The revelation that Lyle had a second contraband cell phone could also have implications for the case, particularly as California Governor Gavin Newsom this week declined to offer the brothers immediate clemency – instead saying he intends to wait for the outcome of Hochman’s review.

That won’t happen until after Hochman takes office. A resentencing hearing scheduled for December 11 is likely to be postponed as a result.

In a statement to CNN following his victory, Hochman said: ‘Before I can make any decision about the Menendez brothers’ case, I will need to become thoroughly familiar with the relevant facts, the evidence and the law.’

The former federal prosecutor added: ‘I will have to review the confidential prison files for each brother, the transcripts from both trials and speak to the prosecutors, law enforcement, defense counsel and the victims’ family members.

‘If for some reason I need additional time, I will ask the court for that time.’

The brothers have been locked up since March 1990 when they were arrested for the brutal 1989 shotgun slayings of their parents Kitty and José.

Both confessed to the gruesome 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ings at the family home in Beverly Hills but said they snapped after enduring years of 𝓈ℯ𝓍ual abuse at José’s hands.

That argument fell flat at their 1993 trial with prosecutors successfully arguing that the murders were carried out for financial gain after the brothers went on a $700,000 spending spree in the weeks after the shootings.

As a result, they were both handed life without parole and sent to separate prisons, although they were eventually reunited at the San Diego lock-up in 2018.