Nine months. That’s how long it’s been since Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were killed in their Encino home, and their son Nick is the one facing murder charges for it. Nine months, and it’s taken this long for someone close to the family to actually sit down and talk about what it’s like living inside that nightmare. That person is Martine Singer, Michele’s younger sister, and honestly, her interview with ABC7 News is a gut punch.

She’s Not Okay, and She’s Not Pretending to Be

“I’m functioning,” Martine told ABC7 in the interview that aired October 2. Not “I’m fine.” Not “we’re healing.” Functioning. That word choice says a lot, if you ask me. She went back to work in January, running one of Southern California’s largest children’s nonprofits, because that’s what you do, I guess. You put one foot in front of the other even when your sister and brother-in-law were murdered and your nephew is the one accused of doing it. It's a familiar kind of restraint – Isaiah Washington took thirteen months before revealing his wife's death was a huge shock to him too.

“But it’s always there,” she said. “It’s always in my mind and in my heart.” And yeah, of course it is. How could it not be? This isn’t some stranger-danger crime story where the family gets to be angry at a faceless villain. This is her nephew. Someone she presumably watched grow up, probably went to holidays with, maybe even babysat at some point. There’s no clean way to process that kind of loss when the person accused of causing it shares your blood.

A Quick Refresher, Because the Timeline Still Feels Surreal

Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were allegedly killed by their 33 year old son Nick on December 14, 2025. The night before, Nick reportedly got into a very public argument with his dad at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party, which, if that detail doesn’t stop you in your tracks, I don’t know what will. A Hollywood holiday party. Conan O’Brien’s house. And less than 24 hours later, police say Nick killed both his parents. He was eventually caught near the UCLA campus. The whole thing still feels almost impossible to wrap your head around, even now, nine months out.

Why Is She Speaking Now?

That’s the question I kept asking myself reading through this. Why now, nine months in, after presumably staying quiet through the arrest, the arraignment, the initial headlines? My guess – and this is just a guess – is that pretrial hearings have a way of dragging a family’s grief back into the spotlight whether they want it there or not. Nick has made court appearances where he’s spoken directly to the judge, and each one of those reopens the wound for everyone connected to this case. Maybe Martine felt like staying silent wasn’t an option anymore. Maybe she wanted to control the narrative a little, rather than let it be shaped entirely by court filings and tabloid headlines. A similar delay played out when Mabel Lowe finally broke her silence on her sister's tragic death years after it happened.

“It’s always there. It’s always in my mind and in my heart.”

I keep coming back to that quote because it’s just so plainly human. No spin, no PR polish. This is someone who runs a major nonprofit, someone who presumably knows how to handle media and public statements professionally, and yet what comes out is this raw, almost unguarded admission. That tells me this wasn’t some calculated press strategy. It feels like she just… needed to say it.

The Family Dynamic Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here’s the thing that makes this whole case so uniquely awful compared to other high profile murder trials. Usually there’s a clear line between victim and perpetrator, and the victim’s family gets to grieve in a straightforward way, united against whoever did this terrible thing. But when the accused is the victims’ own child? That line gets blurry fast. Martine isn’t just grieving her sister. She’s also, in some complicated way, grieving the nephew she apparently once knew, who either became someone capable of this or always had that capacity hiding somewhere underneath. Gypsy Rose Blanchard's family broke their silence over her ex-boyfriend's tragic death with a similarly complicated kind of grief.

I’m not a psychologist and I’m not going to pretend to know what’s going on in Nick Reiner’s head, or what led to that argument at Conan’s party, or what snapped (if anything specific did) in the hours after. But I will say this – families of defendants in cases like this often get forgotten in the public conversation. Everyone focuses on the victims (rightly) and the defendant (because true crime obsession is just how our culture works now), but the extended family members, the aunts and uncles and cousins who loved everyone involved? They’re stuck in this impossible middle space with basically no roadmap for how to grieve.

What This Actually Means

I don’t think Martine’s interview is going to shift public opinion on Nick’s guilt or innocence one way or another – that’s going to come down to whatever evidence prosecutors present at trial, not an aunt’s heartbreak on the evening news. But it does humanize a story that’s been reduced, understandably, to headlines about a Hollywood murder and a famous director’s tragic death. Rob Reiner wasn’t just “the director of The Princess Bride” in this story. He was somebody’s brother in law. Michele was somebody’s sister. And now there’s a woman going back to work every day, functioning as best she can, carrying all of it with her.

The trial is still ahead of us, and if the pretrial hearings are any indication, this case isn’t going away quietly. Nick has already appeared before a judge once, speaking for himself in court, and there will almost certainly be more hearings, more headlines, more moments where this family’s private grief becomes public spectacle again. I don’t envy Martine having to live through that on repeat. Functioning might be the best any of us could ask for in her position. I just hope, whatever the verdict ends up being, she eventually gets to feel like more than that.