Hearing tragic echoes in the Reiners’ murder, we asked Jonathan Rosen to reflect on his study of his childhood friend Michael, who murdered
The scourge of mental illness and addiction makes Rob Reiner’s death, at the hands of his son Nick Reiner (pictured), all the more tragic. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images; illustration by The Free Press)
By Jonathan Rosen for The New Press
I learned that Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had been murdered when a journalist friend texted me the tragic news, adding that the Reiners’ son Nick was the prime suspect. Though I grew up in New Rochelle, New York, where Rob Reiner spent his childhood, I did not have a personal connection to the victims; it only felt that way. Like millions of Americans who grew up in the ’70s watching All in the Family, I have a place in my brain where Meathead, the character Reiner played, is on permanent display, like Archie Bunker’s chair in the Smithsonian.
Our shared imaginary world is not the only reason my friend texted me; it was because of a book I’d written, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, which is about my childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, who grew up across the street from me in New Rochelle, went to Yale the same year I did, but suffered a psychotic break a few years after graduating.
Brilliant and charming, Michael managed to go to Yale Law School despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia and an ongoing battle with delusions he sometimes recounted to his professors. After a profile in The New York Times showcased his battle with mental illness—it ended with the dean of Yale Law School calling Michael “a brilliant young person who has conquered what is always difficult—an illness—but has conquered it extraordinarily well,” he sold his life story to Ron Howard, who, like Rob Reiner, had been a beloved TV star before becoming a director. Brad Pitt was cast to play Michael, and I allowed myself to think that Hollywood had saved him. But he had stopped taking his medication, spiraled into psychosis, and stabbed his pregnant fiancée to death in a psychotic rage.
In the 10 years I spent writing my book, I found that the deepest mysteries—questions I most wanted to answer, like “Why?”—could only be framed, not answered. I cannot pretend to know what was going on in Nick Reiner’s life, or in his brain, that would lead him to kill his parents. There are public stories of addiction and disorder, homelessness, violence, and a recent report of schizophrenia which itself cannot explain what happened.
But I recognize in the outpouring of baffled grief that goes with violent loss the guilty horror of a prophetic intuition that can only be understood after it is fulfilled.
After Rob and Michele Reiner were murdered, I found myself watching an old interview Rob Reiner gave to Charlie Rose in 1997. It is not about any of his wonderful movies but about the brain, a sort of promotional video called I Am Your Child that Reiner made with a long list of famous actors and public figures—Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks, Charlton Heston, Michael J. Fox—to promote the idea that the first three years of life are make or break for a child’s brain.
“You will not find one single person in jail for a violent crime who had a great childhood,” Reiner tells Rose. His large-hearted passion is so great, the science so poor, and the leaps of faith from personal experience to public policy so extravagant that it filled me with a peculiar sort of despairing admiration in the midst of the larger sorrow I was feeling after his death. The belief that “It all comes down to attachment” was not only poignant after what had happened but a reminder of the beliefs and policies I had grown up with, and spent so many years studying while trying to understand what had gone so terribly wrong for my friend.
To watch the interview on the one hand, while reading in the New York Post that Conan O’Brien allegedly stopped guests from calling 911 at his holiday party where Nick Reiner was acting so erratically, brought back all the painful paradoxes that haunted so many people who asked themselves, as I still do, what we might have done differently.
“I Am Your Child” was not a small endeavor. “We’re talking about a partnership that would be created between the federal government, the state governments, local communities, and corporate America,” Reiner told Rose, “coming together to make an investment in communities, to have comprehensive interlocked services of healthcare, quality childcare, parent education, and intervention services for families at risk. And if we can provide those services for every community in this country, we have a chance to not only raise living standards, kids doing better in school, competing in the global economy better, all of those things . . . are gonna happen because we’re making the investment at the prevention level.”
Somehow, all these wonders were going to happen if people learned the importance of babies, “if we read to them, sing to them, hold them, nurture them” and learn to love them at the personal and policy level. It was relevant to my book about schizophrenia because it seemed to take a basic belief of psychoanalysis, that all your troubles are rooted in childhood, and retrofit it with scientific data and brain scans that sounded empirical but were more like stories in a movie that helped you feel something that wasn’t really there. Reiner described images of healthy brains and unhealthy brains, as different as smokers’ lungs and the lungs of an athlete.
Rose asked if there were really studies that showed that adults who had a happy childhood don’t commit violent crimes. Reiner’s answer was an emphatic yes, but of course the answer is no. “You can look at every single person who has either raped or murdered, and there is some dysfunction, and we can now track it and see. We can. We don’t talk about it in terms of touchy-feely stuff anymore. This is something we thought about in terms of child development. But now we have hard brain science to back it up.”Rob Reiner walks with sons Nick (center) and Jake in Midtown Manhattan in 1999. (Photo By Arnaldo Magnani/Getty Images)
I am not suggesting he was making it up. No doubt, scientists had done studies; and George H.W. Bush had declared the ’90s “the decade of the brain.” We were promised cures for schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, though it turned out that our brains are far more complex than we had imagined, with constellations of connections we have still not untangled, even if we pretend that artificial intelligence will do the thinking for us.
I have begun to see reports that Nick Reiner suffered from schizophrenia in addition to the drug addiction frequently discussed in articles and interviews given by Nick himself and Rob Reiner, who made a movie loosely based on his son’s battle with addiction that was released in 2016, Being Charlie. There are drugs that can make people violently psychotic, like methamphetamines, but even marijuana, sadly reclassified by the Trump administration, can do that, especially in someone suffering from an underlying psychiatric disorder. (It is now believed not only that heavy use of marijuana can bring on schizophrenia in an adolescent with a genetic predisposition to the psychotic disorder, but may be linked to its development in someone who does not.)
There are also drugs—antipsychotic medications—that can ease the symptoms of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, especially the “positive symptoms,” which doesn’t mean the nice ones but the intrusive thoughts, delusions, and hallucinations.
Nobody takes antipsychotic medication for pleasure, but they have helped millions of people with severe mental illness lead ordinary lives. You are less likely to read about them, for the same reason you don’t see front page stories about airplanes taking off and landing without incident. If you did, you would recognize the courage it takes to lead an ordinary life while managing an illness that, untreated, can include among its insidious symptoms a firm conviction that there is nothing the matter with you.
As Frederick Frese, a psychologist who spoke eloquently about his life with schizophrenia, reminded patients and families: “It’s only a delusion if you don’t think it is.” You would also recognize the folly of describing a chronic brain disorder like a mountain to be conquered rather than a condition to be managed.
I mention this because the sudden suggestion that Nick Reiner had schizophrenia, which could be central to an insanity defense, along with the suggestion that his psychiatric medication could have caused homicidal violence—rather than, say, the use of street drugs along with antipsychotic medication—might give people the false idea that treating schizophrenia is the real danger.
How long did it take the advocates of deinstitutionalization to notice that their efforts to empty state hospitals and rewrite commitment laws had dramatically increased the number of people with serious mental illness living and dying on the streets, or swelling prison populations? In many cases, shutting state hospitals had merely facilitated the reinstitutionalization of the people they purported to set free. Easier to look away as people in need of treatment wound up in jails, or turn that fact into an argument against the “carceral state,” which did not solve the original problem but, on the contrary, wound up treating everyone as if they were afflicted with a free-will impairing disorder.
Meanwhile, policies implemented with the best intentions increased the stigmatization of people with severe mental illness by raising the bar to treatment, and by making violence the sole criterion for hospitalization, rather than recognizing society’s obligation to treat people palpably unable to care for themselves or seek the treatment they need. People with schizophrenia who do receive treatment they need are no more likely to be violent than people in the general population. Those who do not, or who use drugs, including marijuana, are more likely to be violent.
Unfortunately, one of the most insidious and under-appreciated symptoms of psychotic disorders is anosognosia—a firm conviction that you are not sick. This can cruelly persuade those most in need of help that the people trying hardest to help them, often family members, are in fact malevolent monsters. What makes anosognosia especially complicated in a culture devoted to autonomy is the natural tendency of people to consult the distressed person they are trying to help, whose delusional distress they may not understand. People trying hard to honor the autonomy of an irrational friend or relative, unaware of anosognosia, are more likely to disregard the dangers of an illness that attacks the sense-making organ in a way that compromises the autonomy of the person they are deferring to.
The first time my friend Michael was hospitalized, he had been patrolling the house with a kitchen knife, convinced that his parents were not his real parents but artful Nazi replicas engineered to look just like them. After one of Michael’s psychiatrists told me that my friend had never been violent—before stabbing his pregnant fiancée—I reminded him of this episode. He was unpersuaded, because he saw the knife as merely reactive, a normal precaution taken in response to an abnormal belief. Luckily, on that occasion, Michael’s mother had called the cops, and Michael spent nine months in the hospital getting the care he needed.
People who cannot draw a border, any border, for fear it will be in the wrong place, rather than accepting imperfection as a precondition of any enterprise, and building in corrective measures, have shaped our mental health system accordingly, in part by referring to “mental health” rather than illness. It is a system that would rather wait until people with an addiction or mental illness that has robbed them of judgment take the final leap into violence, so they can be reclassified as criminals. That at least is what happened to my friend. Refusing treatment and hospitalization that he desperately needed, but that nobody felt could be imposed on him against his will—even though his will was the first victim of his illness—he wound up killing someone he loved, convinced she was someone else, along with his unborn child. Three years after The New York Times had celebrated him as a valiant warrior, he was on the cover of the New York Post, a shackled man with wild eyes under a one-word headline: PSYCHO.
Nick Reiner is being held without bail in the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles, which is frequently referred to, with good reason, as California’s largest mental healthcare facility, much as Rikers Island is New York’s. His lawyer did not enter a plea when Nick was arraigned this past Wednesday, which leaves open the possibility of an insanity defense. Insanity, like not guilty, are legal terms. His fate is in the hands of lawyers and psychiatrists now.
I cannot presume to know what happened between Nick Reiner and his beloved parents. I can only say that if I had met my friend on the cover of the New York Post I would have had no idea who he was, or the challenges that he and the people who loved him faced.
