Kathy Griffin understands Romy Reiner’s fear of her brother.
In December, the horrific murder of Michele and Rob Reiner led to the arrest of their own son, Nick.
Since then, critics have second-guessed every choice that the parents made before their grisly deaths.
Kathy is clapping back — recalling the alleged crimes and the death of her “pedophile” oldest brother, and how he nearly tore apart her family.
Kathy Griffin is all too familiar with what the Reiner family must have gone through for years
Content Warning: topics of both domestic violence and child sexual abuse (CSA) are both tragically relevant to this topic.
Soon after his arrest, reports shed light on 32-year-old Nick Reiner’s diagnosis of schizophrenia and his lengthy battle with substance abuse.
On her YouTube channel, Kathy Griffin is discussing her own family’s struggle. Her eldest brother, Kenneth, cast a shadow across much of her life until he died in 2001.
Kathy is not one to mince words. She refers to her late brother “as a wife-beating pedophile.”
She has not spoken about her brother much since her first book, which came out in 2009. At the time, her family was distressed that she was airing dirty laundry in this manner.
“Well, my eldest brother, Kenneth — who is now dead, thank God — he was a crack addict,” Kathy told her followers.
“He lived on the streets, was extremely violent,” she described.
According to Kathy, her late eldest brother “probably had an undiagnosed mental illness that obviously did not go well with crack cocaine.”
Sometimes, people self-medicate with substances, legal or otherwise, that actually alleviate some symptoms. In other cases, the substances make a bad situation worse.
“I can just tell you it was heartbreaking watching my parents try to save him his whole life,” Kathy expressed. The problems she said, began in Kenneth’s teens.
According to her, Kenneth was both ‘violent’ and a ‘pedophile’
“I will tell you that I remember from the age of 10,” Kathy Griffin recalled. “His first wife telling me and me alone, that he beat her so badly that it was almost inconceivable.”
As an adult, Kathy is aware that this was a strange and inappropriate thing to tell a 10-year-old under most circumstances. However, cries for help do not always make sense.
She recalled her now-former sister-in-law telling her that Kenneth would “beat her and then push her out of their apartment naked.”
Kathy continued: “And she would be locked out of their apartment, where there was a courtyard, beaten and naked.”
Kenneth’s “longtime girlfriend” also described him as “violent.” However, she had more to reveal — something that haunts Kathy to this day.
