Rob and Michele Reiner are always on Conan O’Brien’s mind nearly one year after their deaths.
“It’s so devastating and surreal that Rob and Michele are not with us anymore,” O’Brien, 63, said at the 2026 Children’s Institute’s annual Cape & Gown Gala on Sunday, November 8, per People. “I think multiple times a week, it will hit me that they’re not here. It leaves you feeling very hollow.”
Sunday night’s event raised a record-breaking $4 million and celebrated the late filmmaker and his wife.
“This event, something that they cared about so much, the Children’s Institute, is just a way to imagine and realize that they’re here and they’re working,” O’Brien continued. “They started something, and we keep them with us. We keep them close if we join in and do the work because that’s what they were all about.”
Rob, 78, and Michele, 70, were found dead in their Los Angeles home in December 2025, one day after attending O’Brien’s holiday party with their son Nick Reiner. Nick, 33, was later arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstance allegations of multiple murders, murder by means of lying in wait and using a dangerous and deadly weapon, a knife. (The late couple also shared son Jake, 35, and daughter Romy, 29, while Rob was the adoptive father of ex Penny Marshall’s daughter Tracy, 62.)
Nick pleaded not guilty to the murders in August following a Los Angeles County grand jury indictment.
In September, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman announced that his office would not seek the death penalty. If convicted, Nick faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A hearing is scheduled for January 13, 2027, to decide whether to unseal grand jury transcripts. Nick is currently being held without bail at the Los Angeles County Twin Towers Correctional Facility until his trial next year.
On the night before Rob and Michele’s murders, the When Harry Met Sally director was seen arguing with Nick at O’Brien’s holiday party, a source confirmed to Us at the time.
O’Brien broke his silence on his longtime friends’ deaths in a February interview with The New Yorker.
“I knew Rob and Michele, and then increasingly got closer and closer to them, and I was seeing them a lot,” he said at the time. “My wife and I were seeing them a lot, and they were so — they were just such lovely people. And to have that experience of saying goodnight to somebody and having them leave and then find out the next day that they’re gone.”
He continued, “I think I was in shock for quite a while afterward. I mean, there’s no other word for it. It’s just very — it’s so awful. It’s just so awful. And I think about how Rob felt about things that are happening in the country, how involved he was, how much he put himself out there — and to have that voice go quiet in an instant is still hard for me to comprehend.”
