Nick Reiner's Trust Was Written When He Was a Baby — Nobody Updated It for 32 Years

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
According to multiple reports, the trustee overseeing Nick Reiner's individual trust fund is preparing to ask a judge to release the money. Not fighting it, not blocking it, asking the court to hand it over. A hearing has reportedly been scheduled for August. And if a judge signs off, the money that Rob and Michele Reiner set aside for their son when he was an infant will allegedly be used to hire the defense attorney representing him against charges that he stabbed them to death in their Brentwood home. Hard to see that one coming a mile away. I mean, not today, in a mile away. I don't mean earlier this year. I'm saying when he was an infant, let's put this away for him. He'll use it someday to hire Alan Jackson to represent him in our own murders.
You've been asking me about this for months. Different words, same fury.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:13)
How is this legal?

**Tony Brueski** (1:15)
Can he really use their money for this? Doesn't the law stop this?
We're going to get into all that today. I'd love to get your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. The links are in the description.
The short answer is the law that's supposed to stop this, the Slayer Statute, only kicks in after a conviction or a civil finding. I've broken that down before. I've covered a state of LAD, the NGRI loophole, the preponderance standard, all of it. Go watch those episodes if you need the full legal picture. But this episode isn't about whether the law will eventually catch up. It's about why the law can't stop what's happening right now. And the answer isn't a broken statute. The answer is a trust document that was written in 1993, signed when Nick Reiner was a baby and reportedly never updated to account for the possibility that circumstances might change. He may not be the adorable bubbling baby that he was when he was small. I also have a hard time believing that he was ever that. Three provisions, that's what was allegedly missing. Three clauses, that is state attorneys draft every day for families dealing with situations far less extreme than this one. Any one of them built into that trust at any point over the last 32 years would have made this petition legally impossible. The hearing wouldn't be scheduled, the argument wouldn't exist, the money wouldn't be moving, and I'm gonna walk you through all three. But first you need to understand what the trust actually says, because that's where the whole thing breaks, okay?
And if you haven't hit subscribe yet, please do. The Reiner Children's Trust was established in 1993 According to the probate petition, Robin Michele Reiner created individual trusts for each of their children, Nick, Jake and Romy. These were reportedly funded independently of the larger Reiner Family Trust and the broader estate, in terms of Nick's trust allegedly required half of the funds to be distributed when he turned 30, which happened before the murders. A couple years before the murders.
And the other half, when he turned 35, mandatory distributions, fixed ages, no conditions attached.
Nick turned 30 on September 14th, 2023 That was 27 months before his parents were killed. According to the petition, nobody has explained why the money wasn't released to him then. His parents were alive, no crime had been committed. The distribution date came and went and the money reportedly stayed in the trust. His legal team's entire argument starts there. If the trust required a payout at 30 and the payout never happened, then the money stopped being trust property on that date. It became his legally, regardless of what happened 27 months later. That's the argument. And whether you find it enraging or legally sound, and I know most of you find it enraging, it exists because of how the trust was structured. Mandatory payouts at said ages, no off switch, no mechanism for the trustee to say, hold on, the circumstances have changed. We need to pump the brakes. The trust, I mean, it's right in the name, trust, which is very hard to have in anybody. The trust was reportedly designed to function like a vending machine. Put in the birthday, out comes the money. And once it vests, even a murder charge allegedly can't pull it back because the money was technically his before anyone died. And I want to be clear about something. The Reiner's weren't negligent. They weren't careless. They did what the vast majorities of families do when they set up a trust for their kids. They picked reasonable ages. They funded the accounts. They trusted the process. In 1993, nobody's sitting in a lawyer's office thinking about worst case scenarios for their infant son. What if he becomes a killer? You're thinking about college. You're thinking about a first department. You're thinking about giving your kid a financial foundation when they're old enough to use it. That's what this trust was. A gift written with love, structured with the default settings that most trusts use and never revisited as the years went by and the circumstances got darker.