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Conan O’Brien says he is still devastated by the murders of Rob and Michele Reiner, nearly a year after the couple were killed in their Los Angeles home.
The comedian, 63, opened up about his grief this week at the Children’s Institute’s annual Cape & Gown Gala in Los Angeles, an evening dedicated to honoring the late couple.
“It’s so devastating and surreal that Rob and Michele are not with us anymore,” O’Brien said at the event, according to Us Weekly.
He added that losing his friends “leaves you feeling very hollow.”
The Reiners are rarely far from his mind, either. O’Brien said he thinks about their murders every week.
For O’Brien, the tragedy is deeply personal. He and his wife were friends and neighbors of the Reiners, and the couple attended a holiday party at the O’Brien home just hours before they died.
Rob and Michele were found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home in December 2025. Their son Nick Reiner, now 32, attended the party with his parents and was later arrested in connection with their deaths.
Police and prosecutors believe Nick killed his parents later that same night. As of March, he was awaiting trial.
The party had been meant as a bright spot at the end of a brutal year for many of the guests, several of whom lost their homes in the wildfires that swept Southern California in January 2025.
Instead, the evening took a disturbing turn when Nick began loudly arguing with his father in front of other attendees.
Because he was one of the last people to see the couple alive, O’Brien’s name became tied to the case almost immediately. He didn’t speak publicly about it until March, when Conan addressed being ‘dragged into’ the Reiner murder coverage.
“Very simply, we had a party, we invited our really good friends and then, the next day, this terrible thing happened,” he said in that interview.
O’Brien was quick to brush aside any attention he and his wife had received in the aftermath, insisting the focus belonged elsewhere.
“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 explained at the time.
“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,” he continued.
Eight months after those comments, O’Brien’s remarks at the gala show that sadness is still very much with him, and that the shock of the loss hasn’t worn off.
He described the couple’s absence as surreal, a word that echoes how suddenly the night of the party turned from a celebration among friends into a crime scene the next day.
Sunday’s gala was built around the Reiners’ charitable work with the Children’s Institute, and members of the Reiner family turned out alongside a number of celebrities to pay tribute to the couple.
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