Nick Reiner, Arrested in Deaths of His Parents: What We Know

The son of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, who was booked on suspicion of murder and remains in jail without bail, has long struggled with drug addiction.

Rob Reiner, the celebrated Hollywood actor and director, and his wife, the producer and photographer Michele Singer Reiner, had tried everything they could think of to help their son Nick Reiner overcome his struggles with drug addiction.

For years, the younger Reiner had been caught in an endless loop of drug abuse, rehab and relapse. He had experienced bouts of homelessness, and he once had a heart attack on an airplane because of his cocaine use. Initially, the challenges the Reiner family had experienced with their son, who began abusing drugs as a teenager, were largely kept private. As Nick grew into an adult, he openly discussed his addiction.

On Sunday, hours after Rob and Michele Reiner were found stabbed to death in their home in West Los Angeles, the police arrested Nick, now 32. He was booked on suspicion of murder on Monday and has remained in jail without bail. The Los Angeles County district attorney has yet to file charges.

Here is what we know about Nick Reiner.

He has struggled with drug abuse since childhood.

Nick Reiner, who was born in 1993, is the middle of three children born to Rob and Michele Reiner. He has an older brother, Jake, and a younger sister, Romy.

Nick began to abuse drugs as early as 15, when he entered his first drug-treatment program. As an adult, Nick was forthcoming in interviews about his struggles with addiction, estimating that he had been in drug treatment 18 times as a teenager.

In a 2018 interview, Nick recalled wrecking his parents’ guesthouse by “punching out different things” like a television and a lamp after being awake for days on cocaine. He also described having thrown a rock through a window at a treatment center in hopes of convincing officials that he needed medication.

“I was so lost — I didn’t know anything about myself or the world,” he said. “And that’s all I knew as a coping mechanism.”

Rob and Michele Reiner were sometimes at a loss about how to help their son. A close friend of the family recalled that Michele had spoken of her son’s struggles a few years ago. “We’ve tried everything,” she said. “We don’t know what else to do.”

He and his father made a movie that loosely resembled their stormy relationship.

“Being Charlie,” a drama co-written by Nick Reiner and directed by his father, was released in 2016. Loosely inspired by their relationship, the film follows Charlie, a Los Angeles teenager who abuses drugs and who has a difficult relationship with his father, a big-time actor with political aspirations. Throughout the film, father and son butt heads over Charlie’s care and over his father’s motives as he pursues his career ambitions.

Rob Reiner told The Los Angeles Times in 2015 that he had some regret over how he had handled his son’s crisis, including not listening to him after he had said a drug-treatment program was not working for him.

“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,” Rob Reiner said.

But the director said that making “Being Charlie,” which features Jake Reiner in a small part, had helped repair his troubled relationship with Nick.

“The whole process for me, I can just speak for myself, it did make me understand him a lot more and I think it made me a better father,” Rob Reiner said in an 2016 interview with AOL.

For his part, Nick Reiner told People that year that he had “very loving and supportive parents.”

He argued with his father the night before his parents’ bodies were found.

Nick Reiner attended a holiday party with his father at the home of the comedian Conan O’Brien the night before his parents were found to have been killed. One guest at the party, who asked not to be named to protect relationships, said that Nick and Rob Reiner had gotten into a shouting match at the party, and recalled the director telling his son that his behavior was inappropriate.

Another guest at the party, who also did not want to be named, said he had seen Nick hovering at the fringes of the gathering and that several guests had commented that he looked anxious and uncomfortable, in a way that unnerved them.

It was unclear what Rob Reiner and his son had argued about.

Nick has been booked on suspicion of murder.

Shortly after his parents’ bodies were discovered on Sunday, Nick Reiner was arrested. He was booked on suspicion of murder on Monday and has remained in jail without bail.

On Tuesday, Nick Reiner’s lawyer, Alan Jackson, said that his client would not appear in court, despite earlier speculation that he would. Jackson added that his client had not been medically cleared to be transferred from the jail to the courthouse. Prosecutors with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office have until the end of Wednesday to file charges.

The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed on Tuesday that photographs appearing to show a blurred image of Nick Reiner being detained by officers near Exposition Park, in Los Angeles, had been briefly posted online by its Gang and Narcotics Division. Those photos were later deleted.

His lawyer is one of L.A.’s most prominent.

Alan Jackson, whom Nick Reiner has enlisted as his attorney, is a high-profile criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles. He has represented the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, the actor Kevin Spacey and Karen Read, who was acquitted this year of murder charges in the death of her boyfriend in Massachusetts.

Mr. Jackson was once a prosecutor in the major crimes division of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. He was the lead prosecutor in the murder case against the music producer Phil Spector, who was convicted in 2009.

Brooks Barnes, Jill Cowan, Shawn Hubler, Julia Jacobs, Soumya Karlamangla, Melena Ryzik, Matt Stevens, Ali Watkins and Jason Zinoman contributed reporting.

Related Content