We Don’t Need To Know This Much About Rob Reiner’s Final Hours
The loved ones of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, have yet to lay the couple to rest. Unfortunately, celebrity gossip media and true crime voyeurism never sleep.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a medical aid call at the Reiner home to find the legendary director and his wife both dead with multiple stab wounds. Shortly thereafter, Los Angeles Police officers apprehended their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, whom law enforcement officers soon charged with two counts of murder in connection with his parents’ deaths. Since then, gossip writers and amateur investigators alike have been picking through every single publicly available piece of information on the Reiners’ relationship with their son, and the details of their final moments are now the fodder of headlines and viral tweets across the internet.
A media circus like this is inevitable any time someone as famous as Reiner is involved in such a violent tragedy, especially when gossip journalists can place even more A-list celebrities in the stories coming out about the Reiners’ last night. The average social media user can similarly attempt to piece together the events of Conan O'Brien's holiday party the night prior to Reiner's death, which has drawn considerable coverage due to the big names attached to the event.
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But, really, whatever happened between Reiner and his son in the final hours of his life is the business of the jury, not us.
Look, at a time like this, it's extremely tempting to click on every new article coming out about Reiner's relationship with his son, or the holiday party, or the 9/11 call that led to authorities discovering the bodies or any number of search-engine-dominating headlines that currently clog up the news feed of everyone who has ever streamed The Princess Bride. And, at the end of the day, every media outlet is a business, and we can't expect TMZ to simply ignore a gold mine.
But as the lives of celebrities continue to become more and more accessible while fascination with the macabre explodes due to the ever-burgeoning true crime entertainment industry, we're seeing an unprecedented number of attempts by both professional gossip-writers and amateur Twitter detectives to build a timeline, not just of Reiner's final moments but of his entire relationship with his son and alleged killer.
There's no point in pretending that we'll ever live in a world where a crime such as this one won't receive massive attention from the public and the press, and moralizing about the insensitivity of the media in regards to the case would be equal parts sanctimonious and naive – not to mention a little hypocritical, given how Cracked has also been covering the aftermath of the tragedy. But within our lifetimes, we have seen dramatic changes to the level of access that the press and public have to these cases, and the market's ability to monetize the details as true crime content is constantly evolving in ugly ways.
Now, with so much information coming out about the Reiners' activity this past weekend, anyone is able to play prosecutor and piece together a timeline that they think tells the full story of their final days. Many people will even make some money off of it. Meanwhile, the real-life wheels of justice move slowly, and Nick Reiner won't even enter a plea until next year, according to The New York Times.
By the time the justice system brings this case to a conclusion, those who were closest to the Reiners will have had to block so many Twitter accounts, hide so many key words from their newsfeeds and turn off their phones so many times that the closure that a verdict can bring will be watered down by how the entire world, seemingly, is trying to make them to relive the most explicit details of the case over and over again.
People inherently have a morbid fascination with murder cases, especially ones involving celebrities – that we can't repress. But we don't have to recreate them.
