Why Did Nick Reiner's Trustee Quit After Four Months?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
So Nick Reiner filed his petition. Now the ball is in the family's court, literally. Jake and Romy already cut the money off once, and the trust itself has been a revolving door. The payout was reportedly withheld for two years before Paul Kanin even took over in February. Kanin raised his own concerns about Nick's judgment, and now he's out. Brand new trustee, Jodi Montgomery, was just appointed and is already apparently asking to meet with Nick. Eric, Kane's stated reason for not giving into the past, capacity to make sound decisions. Nick's lawyers have fired back saying, no court has ever declared him incompetent.
How much weight does a trustee's judgment call like that? I mean, actually carry in a probate court because again, it's an opinion, it's someone saying he doesn't have the capacity to make good decisions. Well, great, that's kind of something that a judge or a doctor needs to make and then the judge can go, yep, I agree with it. We don't really have that here. I mean, unless you go back to where he was, there was that moment several years back where it was under California estate, he was, what was it, there was some ruling that was made where he was, I think, in comp, it was something. I don't want to say it incorrectly, but it was something where he was, do you know what I'm talking about? I'm trying to think what the terminology was where he was under the supervision basically of-

**Robin Drake** (1:41)
Conservatorship.

**Tony Brueski** (1:42)
Conservatorship, that's what I'm looking for, the conservatorship for that year essentially. And then the way California law is set up is that the conservatorship can be battled 50 ways to Tuesday because California doesn't like having conservatorships and which a year it was lifted. So I don't know, do they have much of an argument here when one person's opinion is they don't have the sound capacity to make decisions? Again, that's an opinion.

**Eric Faddis** (2:08)
You know, if I was a judge, the trustee's opinion as to the capacity of the recipient would matter, but it certainly would not be dispositive. It would not just be taken as gospel and be like, oh, well, okay, this trustee can sort of do whatever they want. And, you know, because that's so ripe for abuse, Tony. And I think, you know, trustees under so many different scenarios could, they might not like the person, they might not like the person's girlfriend. They might, you know, these things can come up and they could use, you know, this alleged lack of capacity as a pretext to not give what is a lawfully obligated distribution.
And so I'm not sure the judge is going to just, you know, look at that and say, oh, this trustee had good reason not to disperse, especially without some kind of medical report, some kind of psychological analysis. I think that that opinion alone really is not going to hold a ton of weight at all in the eyes of a probate judge.

**Robin Drake** (3:04)
Is there any way you think that the family can argue this legally and that would actually hold up or even get the time of day because it looked pretty rock solid just looking at how that trust was set up?

**Eric Faddis** (3:15)
Yeah, I mean, you know, talking up, they can talk about the conservatorship. They can say, hey, look, this guy needed somebody to manage his affairs because he was incapable of doing so.
But if that conservatorship was then lifted at some point, that tends to indicate that the individual no longer required someone to make all their decisions for them. And at that juncture, probably, a court is going to look at it and say that this distribution should have happened. And so I'm not sure how much legal foundation this family is going to have to try to resist at least the distribution at 30 years old. Like it's the distribution of 35 years old, it's a much different story.

**Robin Drake** (3:56)
And I remember the conservatorship when they initially had it, it was established, again, this is when we first started covering this case. And so correct me when my memory fails me properly on this one, but it only lasted a certain period of time just because of basically I'm going to just butcher this.

**Tony Brueski** (4:13)
The law in California.

**Robin Drake** (4:14)
Yeah, the law in California, I was going to say, statute of limitations of it expired and so they couldn't continue the conservatorship. So is there any way the family could argue that the law prohibited from keeping it in place when they really wanted it in place that actually could be a mitigating factor?