Accused murderer Nick Reiner is fighting in court to get the inheritance left by the parents he is accused of stabbing to death in their $20 million Los Angeles mansion.
A new court petition shows he is fighting to get $750,000 of his $1.5 million trust as his legal bills pile up.
His legendary film director father, Rob Reiner, and his mother, Michele, set aside the trust for him, dictating he was to receive half of the funds when he turned 30 and the other half when he turned 35.
Reiner, 32, now claims the trustee, lawyer Paul Kanin, has refused to hand over the funds, alleging “unsubstantiated ‘concerns’ about Nick’s so-called competence to ‘manage a trust,’” according to documents obtained by Daily Mail.
The accused murderer hired high-profile defense attorney Alan Jackson to represent him in court, but he withdrew from the case when Kanin refused to hand over the money, forcing Reiner to rely on the services of a public defender.
The petition states “time is of the essence” to get the money to pay Jackson, and argued that any continued delay risks “further jeopardizing my defense in the criminal matter.”
Reiner says he has no other way to pay his legal bills.
“Every additional week of delay is a week in which the counsel of his choice cannot investigate or prepare on his behalf – prejudice to his defense that cannot be undone,” Nick’s lawyers claim, according to the outlet.
“The harm is irreparable and it grows with each day the Trustee withholds funds that are already Nick’s,” they write in the petition.
“In the meantime, for reasons unknown to Petitioner, the Trustee continues to deplete Nick’s funds by paying lawyers to raise one reason after another for holding on to Nick’s money for another two years, all of which violate the plain terms of the Trust.”
Reiner, who has a history of drug and mental health struggles, was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder with a special circumstance of multiple murders in the Dec. 14 killings. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty.
The fatal stabbings of Rob and Michele shocked Hollywood to its core, with Nick arrested the day after his parents’ bloody bodies were discovered inside their Brentwood home.
