Jake Reiner has broken his silence about how his brother Nick Reiner was the “key man” in the murders of his parents Rob and Michelle Reiner.
“We lost more than half of our family that night in the most violent way imaginable,” the 34-year-old wrote in a heartbreaking essay for Substack published Friday, reflecting on the murders of the couple who died in December 2025.
“Losing a parent is definitely a shock, but nothing compares to losing both parents at the same time and then having your younger brother at the center of it all,” he explained. “It’s almost impossible to process.”
“I understand that people have questions about what happened,” Jake said, adding that “some of the answers will come in time.”
“Keeping them private is the only way to preserve what little remains of what was taken from us,” he continued.
Nick was arrested a day after news broke that Rob and Michelle were stabbed to death at their California home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The 32-year-old was charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
He is being held without bail at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles while awaiting trial.
Jake did not mention Nick elsewhere in his vulnerable essay, which included a shocking account of how he learned of Rob and Michelle’s deaths.
“I was at Union Station to celebrate the life of one of my best friends, Christian Anderson, who passed away in October,” Jake wrote. “Just then, my sister Romy called me to tell me that my father had passed away. A few minutes later, she called me back and told me that my mother had also passed away.”
The actor said that “nothing can prepare you” for the “living nightmare” of “losing both my parents at the same time and in an instant.”
He “recounts again and again how terrified” Rob and Michelle must have felt.
“They were the last people in the world who deserved what happened to them,” Jake wrote. “They should have been able to enjoy the rest of their lives peacefully and grow old together. Instead, that was taken away from them, from me, from Romy. There was nothing we could do about it.”
He and Romy, who will be “telling her[the story]in her own way and in her own time,” originally released a joint statement last year about their parents’ deaths.
“Words cannot even describe the unimaginable pain that we are experiencing every moment of every day,” they wrote at the time. “The horrifying and devastating loss of our parents, Rob and Michelle Reiner, is something no one should ever have to experience.
“They were more than just our parents, they were our best friends,” the brothers added.
They did not mention Nick, who has pleaded not guilty to murder, in their statement.
Nick had been suffering from drug addiction and was diagnosed with schizophrenia for several years prior to this gruesome serial murder.
