this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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The troubled teen industry gets parents to send their kids there through a web of scare tactics and lies to obscure what they really are from parents. Also, at this point in his life, Nick had been to rehab at least once (he ended up going a total of 17 times in his life), and his parents probably felt like they were out of options, which is where the predatory company preyed on stressed parents and struggling kids to feed their million dollar child abuse machines. They don't turn anyone who goes through them into better people, but at the end of the day, Nick is still here and his parents aren't. Nick Reiner is not the principal victim of the Nick Reiner story.
CW for brief discussion of suicide.
I think it's undeniable that the troubled teen industry will sometimes produce violent outcomes. What they do to children is unbelievable, it just ends in suicide more often than homicide.I personally don't think we need to rank victims here. We don't know anything about what happened and why. All we know is that he was a troubled person growing up and that he was sent to a child abuse camp by his parents - though they almost certainly didn't know that's what it was. That's not enough information to really even be sure what happened, let alone why.
That’s really hard to do when two people are dead and one isn’t.
Yeah, the people who are dead raised the one who isn't. It's possible - though that doesn't excuse it and doesn't mean they deserved it - that their actions, including sending him to be tortured as a child, contributed to this outcome.
Accordingly, and seeing that we have no real details about this whole situation (either further mitigating or non-mitigating context for anyone involved), I don't think we need to sit here coming up with a numerical ranking of who was the bigger victim.
Edit: It's possible (extreme example) that this had nothing to do with his upbringing. It's also possible (other extreme) that they abused him his whole life and this is the result. We don't know. I find it most likely that this is the tragic outcome of a situation which was allowed to happen by a completely broken society, and I don't think we gain anything from determining a "primary" victim, especially with the limited information available.
We don't need to numerically rank victims, I agree with you on that front. But Nick is the only party here who gets to defend himself from the allegations or spread more light on the issue. It's also worth mentioning that this entire thread is operating under the assumption that he did it, and that also isn't known.
Agreed, both good points.