If you love someone with substance use problems, this was a particularly cruel week to be on the internet.
As soon as authorities said they suspected that the person responsible for Rob and Michele Reiner’s deaths over the weekend was their son Nick, who’s been open about his experiences with drug addiction, the internet moved quickly to offer their armchair psychoanalysis.
Some kids are just born “bad seeds,“ one woman wrote on X, alongside a photo of Nick as a child with what she called an “empty expression.”
“He has Sanpaku eyes,” a number of people wrote on social media, lifting a term from Japanese face reading that’s used to describe eyes where you can see white above or below the iris.
Others scrutinized Rob and Nick’s body language in interviews from 2016, when the pair were promoting “Being Charlie” — a film Rob directed and Nick co-wrote, drawing on his own experiences with drug addiction and periods of homelessness.
