Why Rob Reiner’s Murder Hit This Hippie So Hard
Addiction kills (Updated - Dec. 23rd, 2025)
Rob Reiner was an anomaly in Hollywood: the unabashedly Democratic liberal “good guy” who honestly wanted to dialogue and passionately debate issues such as marriage equality with Republican conservatives as a way of advancing democracy and seeking a more perfect union.
“I’ve always said, ‘You cannot have a healthy democracy unless you have a healthy Republican Party and a healthy Democratic Party so that we can actually debate the ideas of where we are,’” Reiner told Republican political commentator Margaret Hoover, host of PBS’s Firing Line With Margaret Hoover in a tribute rebroadcast of a show recorded April 2019. “I mean, we are a…capitalist nation but we also have a lot of socialist programs inside the capitalist nation and we have to find a way to balance those things. And the only way to do that is to have two parties arguing with a common set of facts.”
Reiner talked about how he befriended many Republicans after Republican legal icon Ted Olson shared his deep belief that marriage is an individual freedom and therefore a fundamental right for lesbian and gay individuals. He reminded Hoover, a longtime LGBTQ+ ally, that they first met at the federal district court in San Francisco for the hearing over California’s anti-gay Prop 8. She excitedly reminded him that they sat together.
Hoover actually served on the Advisory Council for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER) , the organization Reiner created with longtime gay friend and fellow progressive advocate Chad Griffin and Griffin’s business partner Kristina Schake. The idea for the federal challenge to Prop 8, which passed with 52 percent of the vote in 2008, started formulating soon thereafter during a lunch with the three and Michele Reiner at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Later, an acquaintance suggested they contact Ted Olson, who supported marriage equality.
Reiner shared his excitement when Democratic stalwart David Boies, Olson’s opponent in the infamous 2000 Bush v Gore case, joined the federal case, effectively taking politics out of the argument. (Read New York Times investigative reporter Jo Becker’s book Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality for an engrossing behind-the-scenes look.)
Watching Hoover and Reiner spar, laugh and exchange stories is a horrific reminder of what we’ve lost. Who else could head up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after Donald Trump and his acolytes have left the scene?
The sudden brutal stabbings of Rob Reiner and his beloved wife Michele in the bedroom of their Brentwood home in the early morning hours of Sunday, Dec. 14, allegedly at the hands of their drug addicted, mentally ill son Nick, hit many of us personally. Through his acting, writing, and incredible films or through his work on progressive issues, we felt we knew Rob Reiner. And our hearts break for their immediate and extended family.
“Words cannot even begin to describe the unimaginable pain we are experiencing every moment of the day,” Romy Reiner, 27, and Jake Reiner, 34, said in a statement Wednesday. “The horrific and devastating loss of our parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, is something that no one should ever experience. They weren’t just our parents; they were our best friends.”
The siblings requested respect. “We are grateful for the outpouring of condolences, kindness, and support we have received not only from family and friends but people from all walks of life. We now ask for respect and privacy, for speculation to be tempered with compassion and humanity, and for our parents to be remembered for the incredible lives they lived and the love they gave.”
But their request was met with outrageous moral indecency from Trump and click-bait speculation by Megyn Kelly that Nick’s attorney might try the Menendez defense.
While these cruel antics have generally been met with disgust, other human beings are bearing their anguish over the murders and the alleged murderer in silence.
Those who experience mental health issues and their sphere of healthcare providers face heightened uninformed stigma after it was revealed that Nick had been diagnosed with schizophrenia several years ago and his medication had recently been adjusted or changed.
And many in 12 Step communities are bereft. We are excruciatingly familiar with alcoholic/drug addict arrogance, impulsiveness and the compulsion to get what we need by any means necessary. “I want what I want when I want it - and I want it NOW!”
And this: “An alcoholic is someone who could be lying in a gutter and still look down on someone.” And then there’s rage that’s so exhilarating, you forget what you’re enraged about. Whether hooked, self-medicating or mixing street drugs with pharmaceuticals, there are some drugs that can take a brain hanging ten over a cliff of insanity and tip it over with a whisper or nudge. Some who have fallen don’t get back up. Others don’t want to.
There are drugs that can take a brain hanging ten over a cliff of insanity and tip it over with a whisper or nudge. Some who have fallen don’t get back up. Others don’t want to.
What are loving parents to do?
LSD tipped me over and, at the age of 20, I became a ward of the State of Connecticut after an almost successful suicide. The nurses put me in a bed previously occupied by a young woman who hoarded her sleeping pills and died there three days earlier. The staff asked me if I needed any pills to help me sleep.
The absurdity was clarifying. I stayed in that Norwalk Hospital psyche ward for months – my parents were too afraid, too ashamed to visit and left me to “experts” who visited for 10 minutes and lots of Nurse Ratched wanna-bes. I learned what I had to do to avoid shock “therapy” – smile, nod, lie and not judge my fellow inmates.
When I finally got out, I gave up LSD and, having dropped out of college, I studied philosophy at Fairfield University. My brain kept pressing existential questions as if they were immediate and real. I took up the occult and hitchhiked to Alfred University in Upstate New York to study A.E. Russell, W.B. Yeats and the Rosicrucians. I lived with a bunch of witches and warlocks with whom I drank beer and watched the original “Star Trek” broadcast from Canada – after which we smoked doobies and argued existential bullshit about each episode.
One guy in the house had dropped so much acid, he was stuck. He’d either wander around blank eyed or jump on the furniture like a threatening chimp. I was glad I’d given up acid.
I didn’t get clean and sober until 1980 when my bosses at CBS News thought I’d make a good test project for their new Employee Assistance Program. The theory was: it’s easier and cheaper to sober up a good screwed up employee than to hire and train a new one. I balked. I had reasons. I had excuses. They didn’t understand. I’d stop on my own.
But I couldn’t stop and they did understand. They gave me an ultimatum. Go to rehab or get fired. I thought of jobs where I could drink and use without hassle. But being a journalist had become my identity. Who would I be without that? Now that was an existential question.
I had two bad glasses of white wine and smoked a joint before I went to a rehab that June near the Amityville Horror House. But I’ve been clean and sober ever since.
It took me WAY LONGER to surrender my alcoholic arrogance and even decades later, in recovery, I still have bouts of depression, which I link to my dormant addiction. Today, I cherish life and my choices.
But with Rob and Michele Reiner’s murders, a rehab phrase has reappeared: “You know you’re getting better when you’re homicidal and not suicidal.”
I know this was intended metaphorically to help a suicide addict like me: first, a ludicrous smile; then access the long-oppressed anger, fear and abandonment; then taking steps to get out of it. But recognizing that addiction kills is no laughing matter.
I do not know Nick Reiner. I met Rob Reiner through Chad Griffin and AFER. However, like so many others, I appreciated him “representing” hippies as caring progressives on “All in the Family.” He was similarly caring in real life, as evidenced by his humble, emotional reaction on Piers Morgan’s show, honoring Erika Kirk’s forgiveness of her husband Charlie Kirk’s assassin.
I do not know Nick’s story – I do not know the anguish of having schizophrenia and drug addiction. But I know in my heart his parents loved him to the moon and back. I suspect Romy and Jake and the Reiners’ friends are struggling not just with unimaginable grief but with how in some way to have an inkling of compassion for this ill addict they loved who lived among them.
Perhaps this is an odd way to express gratitude to America’s greatest “good guy.” I hope by sharing my story, the spirits of Rob and Michele may realize they did everything they could – they did not fail their son. He, too, has individual freedom – including to make horrible wrong choices willingly, even those orchestrated by addition. Or did mental illness combined with addiction strip him of that choice?
Forgiveness is not yet on the horizon. But perhaps a greater willingness for compassionate understanding can be.
And hopefully, by sharing these human frailties, those who are struggling will find the strength to defy stigma, fear and addiction’s arrogance and reach out for help.
As for me, today, I humbly acknowledge: “There, but for the Grace of God, go I.”
SAMHSA’s National Helpline is a free, confidential, 24/7, 365-day-a-year treatment referral and information service (in English and Spanish) for individuals and families facing mental and/or substance use disorders.