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Back in December of 2025, Rob and Michele Reiner were found stabbed to death in their home in Brentwood, California.
Their son Nick Reiner was arrested for their murders and is currently awaiting trial.
Just hours before the murders, the Reiners attended a holiday party thrown by their friend and neighbor Conan O’Brien.
The party was to serve as a fun conclusion to a painful year, with many of the attendees having lost their homes in the wildfires that swept Southern California in January of 2025.
Instead, the gathering took a disturbing turn when Nick began loudly arguing with his father.
Nick is still awaiting trial, but police and prosecutors believe he brutally murdered his parents later that same night.
Now, Conan is speaking out about the tragedy for the first time.
“Very simply, we had a party, we invited our really good friends and then, the next day, this terrible thing happened,” O’Brien said in a new interview withThe Hollywood Reporter.
“Whatever difficulties my wife and I have experienced having our name attached to it are nothing compared to the scale of the tragedy for the family and the loss of Rob and Michele,” he continued, adding:
“If you’re a known person, your name is going to get dragged into things sometimes, but it is not a hardship. There is only sadness that they’re gone.”
Given the fact that he was one of the last people to see Rob and Michele alive, it was inevitable that Conan would speak out about their murders at some point.
But he wisely chose to center the victims rather than focusing his comments on himself or the other guests at his party.
The Reiners have two other children, whose grief in this situation is surely more profound than anyone else’s.
Elsewhere in the interview, O’Brien talked about the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show and the demise of late night television.
He said he had a revelatory moment when his appearance on the hit YouTube series “Hot Ones” went ultra-viral in 2024.
“That was the moment the scales fell from my eyes,” O’Brien told The Hollywood Reporter.
“If a guy can do World Series numbers with overhead that looked, to me, to be about $600, and you have every big star lining up to do his show or Chicken Shop Date … that’s when I profoundly understood that late night shows are in trouble.”
Conan will be hosting the Academy Awards this Sunday on ABC.