Rob Reiner and wife Michele Singer Reiner, both of whom were found stabbed to death Sunday at their home in Los Angeles’ Brentwood neighborhood, “tried in every way to help” son Nick Reiner, who has been arrested and held without bail in their grisly deaths. An insider told People that the late couple “could never reach stability” with the 32-year-old, who has battled substance abuse since at least age 14.
“They tried everything — giving him space, keeping him close — but his struggles are so deep. It’s just a parent’s worst nightmare,” said another source.
Nick once admitted to harboring ‘ill will’ toward his parents.
The murders come nearly a decade after Nick told the outlet he “used to harbor a lot of ill will toward” his parents — who sent him to a treatment center upon learning of his drug use — though it had “diminished to almost zero.”
“If I wanted to do it my way and not go to the programs they were suggesting, then I had to be homeless,” Nick said in 2016, while promoting Being Charlie, a film about a politician’s son’s reluctant recovery from drug abuse, which he co-wrote and his father directed.
He was at one point homeless.
He said he’d been homeless “in Maine … in New Jersey … in Texas” and “could’ve died. … You roll the dice and you hope you make it.”
“I spent nights on the street. I spent weeks on the street. It was not fun,” he shared. “That made me who I am now, having to deal with that stuff. … Now, I’ve been home for a really long time, and I’ve sort of gotten acclimated back to being in L.A. and being around my family. But there was a lot of dark years before.”
He blamed his parents’ fame for his lack of identity and passion.
Also in 2016, Nick said in an podcast chat with comedian Paul Mecurio that he’d “had no identity, and I had no passions” due to living in the shadow of his father and late grandfather Carl Reiner.
“That fame sort of informs who you are,” Nick said at the time. “So, I wanted to edge out my own identity with a more rebellious, angry, drug-addicted sort of persona.”
The Princess Bride director, who was 78, said in 2015 he believed the film “did make me understand (Nick) a lot more and I think it made me a better father, hopefully it did.”
At one point, he had gotten sober.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik this week recalled a “revealing, heartwarming and jarring” dinner he had 10 years ago with Rob, Michele, Nick, and his sister Romy. At the time, Romy, now 28, referred to Nick as “my best friend.” She was the one who found their parents’ bodies Sunday.
“I’m so proud; it’s incredible. He’s been through everything; it’s so hard, you’re in this position of no control. And how he’s sober, here on his 22nd birthday, and he wrote this movie,” Rob Reiner said at the time, which followed Nick’s estimated 18 stints in rehab.
Nick said he “had resistance every time they tried to reach me,” a reality which his father said he and his wife failed to accept.
“We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son,” said the A Few Good Men director.
But he later relapsed.
Nick was using again by 2017, and later admitted to having “started punching out different things in my (parents’) guest house.”
TMZ reported Monday that Nick attended Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party with his parents, where the director and Nick got into a “very loud argument” according to witnesses. Reiner and his wife, 68, then left, though it’s unclear whether Nick, who had been living in their guesthouse, followed suit.
His parents were evidently worried about him in the days leading up to their murders.
Reiner family sources told TMZ and the Los Angeles Times that the couple had been increasingly worried about their son’s mental health. Rob, Michele and their children Nick, Romy, and their eldest son, Jake, were photographed together at the September 9 premiere of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
It would be the family’s final public appearance together.
-by Jami Ganz
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