What the director said on Piers Morgan in September 2025, why nobody paid attention at the time, and why the clip changed everything after his death.
Rob Reiner spent a decade telling anyone who would listen that Donald Trump was a threat to American democracy. He hosted fundraisers for Kamala Harris. He called the Trump presidency an autocracy in formation. He made no secret of which side of American politics he was on.
So when Charlie Kirk, one of Trump’s closest conservative allies and co-founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed at a Utah university in September 2025, most people assumed Reiner would stay quiet or let it pass. He did neither.
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What Rob Reiner Said About Charlie Kirk
The interview aired September 26, 2025, on Piers Morgan Uncensored, sixteen days after Kirk’s assassination. Morgan asked Reiner directly for his reaction to the killing.
Horror. Absolute horror. And I unfortunately saw the video of it, and it’s beyond belief what happened to him. And that should never happen to anybody. I don’t care what your political beliefs are. That’s not acceptable. That’s not a solution to solving problems.
Rob Reiner
Piers Morgan Uncensored · September 26, 2025
He did not qualify it. He did not say “despite our differences.” He did not frame it as a political statement. He called it what it was, and stopped there.
Snopes authenticated the clip in full, confirming it was genuine and unaltered, placing the exchange between 2:08 and 3:16 of the original YouTube broadcast. There had been claims circulating online that the video was edited or taken out of context. It was not.
Reiner and Kirk had no documented personal history. No public feud, no direct confrontations, no mutual attacks. Reiner’s political fire was directed at Trump, not at Kirk. His response to the assassination came from no calculation. He simply believed political murder is wrong.
The Interview Reiner Was Actually on Piers Morgan to Do
This detail is missing from almost every account of the story, and it matters.
Reiner had not gone on Piers Morgan Uncensored to discuss Charlie Kirk. He appeared to promote his new book, A Fine Line Between Clever and Stupid, about the making of This Is Spinal Tap. He was also there to dispute a claim in Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days, in which Harris wrote that Reiner screamed at her husband Doug Emhoff during a June 2024 debate watch party: “We’re going to lose our democracy and it’s your fault.” Reiner called the account “ludicrous” and denied it flatly. Jake Tapper’s book had repeated the same claim, and Reiner disputed that too.
The Kirk question came up within a broader conversation about political violence and free speech in America. It was not the point of the interview. Reiner was not prepared with a statement. What Morgan got was the spontaneous reaction of a 78-year-old man who had watched a video of someone being shot in public and could not make peace with it.
The interview was recorded from the office of his Brentwood, Los Angeles home. The same home where he and his wife Michele would be found dead less than three months later.
Erika Kirk’s Forgiveness, and Why Reiner Praised It
Five days before the Piers Morgan interview, on September 21, 2025, Erika Kirk addressed 90,000 to 100,000 people at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, at her husband’s memorial service. The service drew over 100 million streams. Erika had been named CEO of Turning Point USA days earlier.
Fighting back tears, she said:
My husband, Charlie, he wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life. That man, that young man. On the cross, our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they not know what they do.’ That man, that young man. I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer, we know from the gospel, is love, and always love.
Erika Kirk
Charlie Kirk’s Widow · Memorial Service, Glendale, Arizona · September 21, 2025
She had also stated publicly that she would not pursue the death penalty for the suspect, saying she did not want his “blood on her ledger.”
Reiner told Morgan he had followed that speech and saw in it exactly what he believed.
“I felt like what his wife said at the service, at the memorial they had, was exactly right,” Reiner said. “I’m Jewish, but I believe in the teachings of Jesus, and I believe in ‘do unto others,’ and I believe in forgiveness. And what she said, to me, was beautiful. She forgave his assassin. And I think that that is admirable.”
What Happened to Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk, 31, was speaking at an outdoor campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on September 10, 2025, as part of his “American Comeback Tour.” He was answering a student’s question about mass shootings when a single shot fired from a rooftop approximately 130 to 160 metres away struck him in the neck. There were roughly 3,000 people in the audience. Kirk was taken to hospital and pronounced dead.
Tyler James Robinson, 22, of Washington, Utah, surrendered to authorities the following day after his parents recognised him from surveillance images released by the FBI and helped facilitate his arrest. Key facts from prosecutors:
- Robinson had planned the attack for over a week
- The rifle used was a bolt-action weapon given to him by his grandfather
- DNA on the trigger matched Robinson
- He texted his partner after the shooting: “To be honest I had hoped to keep this secret till I died of old age. I am sorry to involve you.”
Robinson was charged with aggravated murder on September 16. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty. An ATF ballistics report released in April 2026 was described as “inconclusive,” and the FBI is running further tests.
An Associated Press review found the university had deployed only six officers, conducted no drone monitoring of surrounding rooftops, and had no bag checks or metal detectors at the event, despite the outdoor venue being enclosed by tall buildings. Former campus police officers had warned administrators years earlier about exactly this type of threat.
Why the Clip Resurfaced Three Months Later
Reiner’s Kirk comments passed without much notice through September and October 2025. That changed overnight on December 14, 2025, when Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner, 68, were found fatally stabbed at their Brentwood home. Their son Nick Reiner, 32, was arrested the following day and charged with two counts of first-degree murder on December 16.
Andrew Kolvet, executive producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, posted the Piers Morgan clip that same morning, writing on X: “Rob Reiner responded with grace and compassion to Charlie’s assassination. This video makes it all the more painful to hear of he and his wife’s tragic end.”
Within hours, President Trump posted on Truth Social blaming Reiner’s death on “a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” calling him “very bad for our country.”
The backlash came from within Trump’s own party:
- Jenna Ellis, Trump’s former lawyer: “The Right uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s death. This is a horrible example from Trump and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.”
- Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY): “Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered.”
- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: “This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.”
- Conservative commentator Erick Erickson: “All those people who lost their jobs for their disgusting tweets about Charlie Kirk’s assassination are staring at the President of the United States’s social media account in disbelief.”
At Kirk’s own memorial, Trump had said the conservative activist’s killing was “the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.” The distance between that statement and his Truth Social post about Reiner was not lost on anyone watching.
One final detail: Michele Singer Reiner photographed the cover of Donald Trump’s 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal. Trump’s original publisher, Peter Osnos, confirmed this publicly in the hours after the Truth Social post. Trump made no mention of it.
The Piers Morgan interview was recorded from inside Reiner’s Brentwood home. The same house. The same room, most likely, where he had spent years writing, arguing, and warning about where the country was headed.
He condemned political assassination from the place where he would later become a victim of violence himself. He said what he believed, unprompted and without any benefit to saying it, and then went back to talking about a movie he made forty years ago.
That is the part of this story that does not fade.
Sources: Snopes, Axios, The Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, The Hill, Fox News, CNN, ABC News, NPR, FBI.gov, Wikipedia, Deadline, CBN News, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Britannica, Rev.com.
