REINER FAMILY BREAKS SILENCE; BRAND CONFESSES ON A PODCAST; DAVID BURKE’S PHONE HELD CHILD PORN

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime and Justice for Tuesday, April twenty eight. Three cases with court dates ahead of us this week. On Wednesday, Nick Reiner, thirty two years old, is back in a Los Angeles courtroom for a discovery hearing in the murder of his parents, Rob and Michelle Reiner. Discovery is the stage where prosecutors lay out in writing what evidence they plan to bring to trial, and this weekend, for the first time since the killings last December, someone in that family spoke publicly. His older brother, Jake thirty four, broke a four month silence on Friday with a substack essay titled Mom and Dad. If you haven't read it yet, you probably should not read it alone. Also Wednesday, David Anthony Burke is in court for an evident status hearing in the murder of fourteen year old Celeste revas her Nandez.

1:01 That hearing is a check in before Friday's preliminary hearing, which is the real one, and we now know part of why the evidence is moving so slowly. Prosecutors announced last Thursday that David's phone and his iCloud account held, in their words, a significant amount of child pornography. Forty terabytes of digital evidence altogether, about thirty percent of it has been turned over to the defense so far and in October. Not this week, but worth circling on your calendar. Russell Brand fifty stands trial at Southwark Crown Court in London on six charges of rape and sexual assault and one of indecent assault. Six accusers, seven charges total. He denies all of it, but last Wednesday he sat down with Megan Kelly on her podcast and admitted that he had, in his word, exploitative consensual sex with a sixteen year old girl when he was thirty. He pointed out that the age of consent in the UK is sixteen, so the sex was legal. We're going to talk about what that admission is and what it is not. I'm Garrett Fisher today. A family asking to be remembered, a defendant staging his own defense on YouTube, and a pending murder case where the evidence keeps getting worse. This is daily crime and Justice. Let's start with the Rhiners. You have heard us cover this case since it broke in December.

2:31 Rob Reiner, seventy eight, one of the most beloved filmmakers of our lifetime, The Princess Bride, stand by me when Harry met Sally. A few good men misery. This is spinal tap. His wife, Michelle Singer Reiner sixty eight, a photographer and philanthropist married to Rob for thirty six years, a co founder of the Fulfillment Fund, which helps first generation and underprivileged students get to college. Both of them some were found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home on December fourteenth of last year. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner ruled the cause as multiple sharp force injuries. Their son, Nick, thirty two, was arrested at the scene.

3:14 He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first degree murder. He is being held without bail, and this Wednesday, April twenty ninth, he is back in court for a discovery hearing, the procedural step where prosecutors formally set out the evidence they planned to take to trial. We covered the arraignment chaos back in January, when his celebrity defense attorney Alan Jackson withdrew without explanation and Nick was assigned a public defender. We covered the TMZ documentary that reported his Schitzo effective disorder medication had been changed about a month before the killings. We have covered the argument he allegedly had with his father at a holiday party the night before the murders, a party that multiple outlets have reported was hosted by Conan O'Brien. But there is something we have never really covered because there was nothing to cover.

4:02 The family. Rob and Michelle had three children together. Jake is the oldest, thirty four, Nick is the middle son thirty two, Romy is the youngest twenty eight. Rob also had a daughter from his first marriage, Tracy Reiner sixty one, a working actress most people know from a league of their own, and Apollo thirteen four children total. Three adult siblings now trying to figure out how to survive the worst thing that has ever happened to them, while the fourth is sitting in a jail cell accused of causing it. They have not said a word publicly for four months until Friday Friday afternoon, April twenty fourth, Jake Reiner published an essay on substack titled Simply Mom and Dad. It is one of the rawest, saddest, most unembellished pieces of writing I've read in a long time, and I want to walk through it carefully because it does something that coverage of cases like this almost never does. It speaks from inside the grief, not from outside it. Jake writes that on the day it happened, December fourteenth, he was at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. He was attending a celebration of life for a close friend who had just died, so he was already at a funeral when his phone rang. It was his sister Romi, and she was calling to tell him that their father was dead.

5:23 Minutes later, she called him back to tell him their mother was also dead. Jake writes that the forty five minute lyft ride from downtown to the west side of Los Angeles was, in his word, unendurable. He writes that his world had collapsed. He writes that he was in a trance. The only thought his brain could hold was that he needed to get home. He needed to get to his sister, He needed to figure out what in the world had just happened. And then somewhere later that same day, he learned the second thing, that it was his brother, that Nick had been arrested at the scene, that the person who had allegedly done this to their parents was family. Jake writes that what has made this so impossible to process is not only losing both parents at the same time, though that alone is beyond anything most of us can imagine, but it is having your brother at the center of it, He says, it is almost too impossible to wrap your head around. He goes on from there. He describes his mother, Michelle, as the engine, the backbone, and the heart of the entire family. He describes his father, Rob as the dad who took him to Dodger games. He writes about watching musicals with his mom.

6:38 He writes about the love his parents had for each other, thirty six years of marriage as the standard he grew up measuring every other relationship against. And then he writes a line that stopped me. He writes, paraphrasing that he would trade every Dodger game, every Broadway show, every vacation for just one more hour with them, just one more hour to talk, just one more hour to say goodbye. He does not name Nick in the essay, not once. He refers to him only as my brother, which is either the kindest or the loneliest way to talk about someone, depending on how you read it. Probably both. He writes that when you are not living through a tragedy the specific way he and romy are, it is hard to wrap your head around how horrific it has been. He writes that other people can move forward or forget for a moment, but for him and his sister, it is every single day, every meeting, every conversation, every tear, every movement of their lives, all of it still connected to the fact that their parents were murdered and their brother is the one accused of doing it. Look, here is why I think this essay matters beyond just paying respect to Jake and Romey, who deserve whatever respect we can give them. We have a bad habit in true crime coverage of treating the surviving family like stage dressing. They show up at the sentencing, they read a victim in statement, the cameras find them crying in the gallery, and then we move on because the story we are actually following is the trial, the defendant, the evidence, the verdict. But

8:11 the people who lose someone to murder do not move on with the news cycle. They are still there after the documentary airs, after the book is optioned, after the true crime podcast wraps its season, they are still there every morning trying to convince themselves it was not a dream. Jake Reiner wrote that every morning he has to convince himself that this is not a dream. Nobody was paying attention to Romy on the night she found her parents. Nobody was paying attention to Jake sitting in a lift in a trance for forty five minutes. And nobody was paying attention to Tracy, who lost her stepmother and her father and has been dealing with it privately since December.

8:52 Now we are because Jake wrote it down. Wednesday, Nick is back in court. The discovery hearing will show us more of what prosecutors have assembled. The case has been quiet since the February arraignment. Ten sealed subpoenas a public defender now representing him. A trial date still on set. We will be watching Wednesday closely. But before the legal machinery turns over again, I wanted to take a minute to center the people who lost the most, Rob Reiner, Michelle Singer Reiner, and the three adult children they left behind, Jake, Romy, Tracy. Someone has to say your name, welcome back. Let me walk you through this carefully because it matters. Russell Brand fifty years old, sat down last week for a podcast interview with Megan Kelly. The episode was published last Wednesday, April twenty second. In it, he was promoting a new book.

9:56 The title roughly is how to Become a Christian in seven Days. That's the pitch. Russell Brand, former drug addict, former sex addict, former Hollywood movie star, former BBC radio host, former husband of Katy Perry, now a devout believer on the American right wing podcast circuit teaching you how to become a Christian. This is not just a book tour. Russell Brand stands trial in London starting October twelfth on seven charges, three of rape, three of sexual assault, one of indecent assault. Six accusers. The alleged incident spanned from nineteen ninety nine to two thousand and nine. He has pleaded not guilty to every single charge. His trial had been set to begin in June, it was pushed to October because of a jury shortage over the summer holidays in the UK, and once it begins it is expected to last about two months. So here's a man six months away from a multi accuser rape trial, going on a major American podcast, and this is what he said.

10:59 He said, paraphrasing, that the age of consent in the United Kingdom is sixteen, and that when he was thirty he slept with a sixteen year old. He called the sex consensual, he called it legal, and he called it and this is his word, exploitative. He said he recognized that at thirty he was a different person, immature, selfish, that he had not considered how his behavior affected the people he was having sex with. He described himself at that time in his life as, in his words, an exploiter of women. He said fame gave him endless consent, and he explained that the sex he had when he was famous and charismatic was not in his framing consent overridden.

11:43 It was in his framing consent directed. There are several things happening in that statement at once, and I want to separate them out. The first thing is that Russell Brand, six months before a rape trial with six accusers, is telling the English speaking world that is a thirty year old, at the height of his fame, he slept with a sixteen year old girl. That is new. That is him for the first time, I'm aware of admitting to sexual activity with a teenager. He is framing it as legal because in Britain the age of consent is sixteen. Let me underline that legally, in the United Kingdom, a thirty year old can have sex with a sixteen year old and no criminal offense has occurred. That is the law.

12:26 His point about the legality is technically correct. The second thing is that he is doing what defense lawyers sometimes call saulting the well. He is pre empting. The twenty twenty three Channel four Dispatches investigation that kicked this whole thing off included allegations from a woman who said she was sixteen years old and in school when Brand allegedly sexually assaulted her. She alleged grooming, that he told her to save his number in her phone under a fake name, that he coached her on how to lie to her parents so she could see him. She is an adult now. It is not publicly confirmed whether she is one of the six accusers in this trial, but Brand on Megan Kelly's podcast is now effectively saying, yes, the encounter happened, It was consensual, it was legal, It was a bad look shar but not criminal. The third thing, and this is the one I want you to pay attention to.

13:21 Is the phrase consent directed? Brand said, paraphrasing that fame and charisma gave him the ability to direct consent, that the women he had sex with were consenting, but the consent he allowed was being shaped by his power, his celebrity, his money, his ability to make a person's career or send their life in a new direction just by being seen with them. Here's why that phrase is worth sitting with, because consent directed is a phrase that tries to split the atom of criminal sexual conduct. He is saying, I was not overriding their no. I was manufacturing there yet yes. And the implication he wants you to walk away with is that manufacturing a yes. However cynically, however exploitatively is not.

14:09 Rape is not sexual assault is at worst a moral failure, forgivable through religion, redeemable through a book. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. That is not how consent works. Consent that is produced through coercion, through power, imbalance, through deception. Telling a kid to save your number under a fake name and lie to her parents is not meaningfully consent. The whole reason we have age of consent laws, The whole reason we have rules about power dynamics in workplaces is that the law already recognizes there are situations where a person's yes is not really a yes. Whether a British jury agrees with me is the question that will be answered in October. I am giving you my opinion, which is what you listen to this show. For Brand is trying to walk a line. He wants to admit to enough old behavior to seem contrite and humble and Christian, but not so much that he admits to any of the specific charge conduct. He wants you to see him as a former hedonist, not a current defendant. He is allowed to give interviews before his trial. His lawyers are presumably coaching him very carefully on what he can and cannot say. He did not describe any specific allegation He is consistently denied, including in this same podcast, that consent was ever overridden. He maintains, and he has the legal right to maintain, that he is innocent of every single charge,

15:42 and in a court of law that presumption stands until a jury decides otherwise. But the court of public opinion is a different place than a London court room, and in that court, admitting on a major American podcast that you slept with a sixteen year old when you were thirty, calling it exploitative and doing it six months before a jury gets impaneled. That is not contrition. That is a legal strategy. Accountability doesn't have a legal department. It also doesn't have a podcast. Six accusers, seven charges October twelfth at Southwark Crown Court, expected to last two months. We will be here for the opening. Welcome back. Quick update on the David case. That's D four VD pronounced David.

16:42 Real name David Anthony Burke, twenty one years old, charged last Monday, April twentieth with first degree murder with special circumstances in the killing of fourteen year old Celeste Revas Hernandez. He is pleaded not guilty. He is being held without bail and last Thursday, April twenty third, his case had a procedural hearing that was supposed to set the stage for an expedited preliminary hearing. Here is what we learned. First the numbers. Prosecutors told the court they have collected forty terabytes of digital evidence in this case, forty terabytes to give you a sense of scale, That is tens of millions of photos or thousands of hours of video.

17:23 Three of those terabytes are from his iCloud account alone, phones, computers, tablets, cloud accounts, and about thirty percent of that material has been turned over to the defense so far. Second, and this is the revelation that broke the case open. On Thursday, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman told the judge that David's iPhone contained, in her words, a significant amount of child pornography. She said the same material is on his iCloud, and she explained that under California law, child pornography evidence cannot be simply handed over from prosecution to defense. It has to be processed under a specific court supervised protocol. Her office cannot just email it or ship it over on a hard drive. It has to run through a dedicated computer system in the District Attorney's office. That is why Thursday's hearing did not become the preliminary hearing. David's defense team, led by attorneys Marilyn Bnarski and Blair Burke, had pushed for an expedited proceeding. Under California law, a defendant is generally entitled to a preliminary hearing within ten court days of arraignment. But you cannot run a hearing without the evidence, and the evidence is going to take a while. So here is the schedule this week. Wednesday, April twenty ninth, two days from now, there is a status conference to check in on how the evidence handover is progressing. Then Friday, May first, the preliminary hearing is tentatively set to begin.

18:50 That is the mini trial where a judge decides whether prosecutors have enough evidence to bind David over for a full jury trial. Two more things came out of Thursday that are worth knowing. First, prosecutors confirmed that three investigative grand juries have already looked at this case, one in November, one in December, one in February. Those were not indictment grand juries. They were the kind that compelled testimony, which means that for months witnesses have been quietly hauled in under subpoena to answer questions about what they know. Second, the Revas Hernandez family released a statement saying they are, in their words, absolutely devastated by the findings in the medical examiner's report. They asked for privacy. They did not attend Thursday's hearing. They are not expected at Wednesdays either.

19:37 I do not blame them. Mercedes Revus Jesus Reevus, a thirteen year old girl who went missing in twenty twenty four. A fourteen year old girl whose body was found with the limb severed and placed in a second bag in the trunk of a tesla at a Hollywood impound lot in September. Her parents have been through enough. We will be here when day. With what happens at the David status conference and the Nick Reiner Discovery hearing Friday, we should have the opening day of David's preliminary hearing. Celeste rob Michelle, someone has to say your name. That's Daily Crime Injustice for Monday, April twenty seventh, twenty twenty six.

20:24 I'm Garrett Fisher. A programming note before we go. Starting a week from tomorrow, Tuesday, May fifth, we are rolling out a ten episode series called Fighting Back. The production team is taking a vacation and I am hosting solo ten episodes of underdog cases, David Versus Goliath, The Central Park Five, The Radium Girls, Stella Leebeck, and the McDonald's coffee that was not actually her fault. Aaron Brockovich, The Sacklers and Perdue Pharma, Karen Silkwood, Gideon Versus Wainwright. No murder coverage during the Fighting Back series. Just people who stood up when nobody thought they could win. It starts Tuesday, May fifth with the Central Park five Part one. Back Here Tomorrow, Do Better. Closing disclaimer. Daily Crime Injustice is an independent podcast produced by Calaroga Shark Media. This episode draws on court filings, LAPD and district attorney statements. Jake Reiner's April twenty fifth, twenty twenty five substack essay, Mom and Dad, The Megan Kelly Show podcast published April twenty second, twenty twenty six, and reporting from The Daily Mail, Washington Times, Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, CNN, CBS News, Los Angeles, KTLA, ABC News, NBC, Los Angeles e News, Daily Voice, huff Post, Global News, and Parade, along with AI assisted research. We do our best to get it right, but we are

21:54 a podcast, not a court room. Nick Reiner, Russell Brand, and David Anthony Burr have all pleaded not guilty and are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court. A note on accuracy. Michelle Reiner's age has been reported variously as sixty eight and seventy. We use sixty eight, which matches current reporting. The holiday party on the night before the Reiner murders has been widely reported as hosted by Conan O'Brien, that has not been confirmed in court violin. Garrett's analysis of Russell Brand's consent directed phrasing is editorial opinion, not legal analysis. When we get things wrong, we correct them on air. Everything here is our opinion and interpretation of events, offered in the spirit of honest handed conversation about cases that matter.