Grand jury in New Mexico charged the actor for a shooting on Rust set that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins
Actor Alec Baldwin is facing a new involuntary manslaughter charge over the 2021 fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the movie Rust.
A Santa Fe, New Mexico, grand jury indicted Baldwin on Friday, months after prosecutors had dismissed the same criminal charge against him.
During an October 2021 rehearsal on the set of Rust, a western drama, Baldwin was pointing a gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins when it went off, fatally striking her and wounding Joel Souza, the film’s director.
Baldwin, a co-producer and star of the film, has said he did not pull the trigger, but pulled back the hammer of the gun before it fired.
Last April, special prosecutors dismissed the involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin, saying the firearm might have been modified prior to the shooting and malfunctioned and that forensic analysis was warranted. But in August, prosecutors said they were considering re-filing the charges after a new analysis of the weapon was completed.
I’m like 90% sure now that the absolutely glacial pace this is moving at confirms that the only reason verdicts come down so quickly in most other cases is because most accused can’t afford the court and lawyer’s fees to keep fighting for as long as they realistically could.
Except if your name is Trump. Somehow he’s able to drag out all his court cases and not pay his lawyers.
That I chalk more up to how pants shittingly terrified judges are of setting a new precedent, let alone one as impactful as jailing a former president. None of them want to be the guy who goes down in history as having locked up a major political figure without the most air tight case imaginable.
This is the most airtight case imaginable. We sat here and watched him crime right on tv.
Thats because he has people pretending to be lawyers instead of real lawyers
This from the start has seemed to me like a prosecutor trying to make a name for themselves by taking down a famous person.
If you’re doing a scene where you throw acid on somebody is the person throwing the acid supposed to check to make sure it’s not actually acid before they throw it?
Should they check to make sure the knife they’re about to stab someone with is actually a prop?
If you get to the person who’s been told to “do this action convincingly” and you want them to double check all the safety work you’re doing it wrong. Their job isn’t making sure they’ve been given safe tools, it’s using safe tools to make someone that’s fake but convincing.
Everyone in the armoring company should be charged with murder … but Alec Baldwin did not put live rounds into a gun. He went into work, did his job, and because other people screwed up someone got shot. Maybe the industry itself needs to change but that shouldn’t be Alec Baldwin’s problem. That’s not justice.
But you’re right, and the management who kept ignoring problems is going to be tried here. It just so happens that the producer was also an actor and happened to be the one given a bad prop. Alec was the manager of everyone: he hired people, and decided they were doing a good enough job. After employees complained about safety problems, he ignored them. After people QUIT over those safety problems, he continued ignoring them. Alec the producer is the one on trial, not Alec the actor.
He’s being charged because he was an executive producer not because he pulled the trigger
He’s being charged for pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger. Him being an executive is an argument against the “I was told it was unloaded” defense. NM law is clear on criminal negligence with a firearm and there is no movie production exemption. Being handed a gun by someone else who says it is safe does not negate liability under the law. His failures as a producer with prior safety lapses and incidents leading up to the tragedy are important as well, but at the end of the day he pulled the trigger and that’s what he is being charged for.
Executive producer typically means you are the money behind the project, not that you have hands-on control of the daily details.
Well my understanding is that he was an executive producer on the film, which is a leadership position that impacts decisions on hiring staff like armory/weapons consultants.
As an actor he’s probably not responsible but as EP he is .
There are 14 producers on this movie, and bdwin was not the executive producer according to IMDB. None of the other producers who were actually most likely responsible for those decisions are facing charges. It’s simply because Baldwin is an opponent of trump and the prosecutor wants to gain political influence and notoriety.
but Alec Baldwin did not put live rounds into a gun.
He was pointing the gun at someone. That should never happen.
that shouldn’t be Alec Baldwin’s problem
He was a producer on a set which was being mismanaged to the extent that a large proportion of the crew had just walked off the job over safety concerns.
It is very much his problem.
The cinematographer wasn’t an actor. They weren’t rolling. Why would you aim a (ostensibly prop) gun at somebody during a time when the cameras weren’t rolling and they’re not an actor?
Because they were doing a camera test. The gun was drawn and pointed in the direction of the camera, which had people behind it because there weren’t supposed to be live rounds in the gun.
I thought this had been settled that it was the fault of the master amorer who was wholly unqualified to be doing the job.
There is blame from the armorer for sure, but I thought I heard something about real guns being on set to shoot for practice. Don’t take my word on that. If that was the case I do think Alec should take part of the blame, because real weapons have no place on a set. If you want actors to have target practice you take them to a gun range.
You would never do this even if there were blanks in the gun. Blanks can kill at point blank.
Who was hired by Baldwin, and who complained to Baldwin that he wasn’t letting her do her job. She was unqualified and she still identified the dangerous situation. The biggest problem for her was not resigning in protest.
If you’re doing a scene where you throw acid on somebody is the person throwing the acid supposed to check to make sure it’s not actually acid before they throw it?
Should they check to make sure the knife they’re about to stab someone with is actually a prop?
I think any reasoning person would say the answer is “yes”. Ultimately you are responsible for your own actions.
Think about it like this, remove the context of this being a movie. Your friend hands you a gun and says it’s not loaded, should you check before firing the gun at someone? Your friend hands you a bucket of “not acid” and tells you to throw it on someone. Do you check that it’s really not acid first?
It seems like the suggestion is that the film set is removing these base line responsibilities for our own actions and I don’t think that’s very reasonable.
There’s a specific reason the actors aren’t supposed to check the gun. They cannot do anything that might fuck with a prop and fucking kill someone. They are to only use the weapon they’ve been given as instructed. It’s the job of the master armorer to ensure that all weapons, prop or otherwise, are properly handled.
This is protocol so it’s clear who’s at fault when an incident like this happens because they can just trace chain of custody. If Baldwin had checked the gun or handled it in any way other than instructed, he would be liable.
By that logic, if someone drives a car with poor brakes and those defective brakes fail causing an accident, the driver is at fault.
Say you’re an actor, and I hand you a revolver, assuring you that it is not loaded. The scene it’s involved in requires that the hammer is already pulled back (as the character in question is threatening someone at gunpoint).
Should you, the actor, check the chamber? With the hammer back and the cylinder locked, doing this would require a complex maneuver of blocking the hammer with your finger, PULLING THE TRIGGER, and then rotating the cylinder to look at the one that was chambered - then rotating it back, and re-cocking it.
Now imagine, being an actor that is a novice with revolvers, you mix up which spot you’re meant to block with your finger. If, as you suggest, there is any chance at all that there’s a live round in the chamber, aren’t you introducing further risk with this maneuver?
Sounds like a great argument for the actor first receiving a gun where the hammer is not pulled back.
If you get the gun in a state where safety checks cannot be done safely, someone has fucked up.
It’s far better for the actor to know how to cock a hammer, have them go through the safety checks to make sure everything checks out, and then cock the hammer.
Basic gun safety involves handling guns as if they were loaded, so a gun should only be passed to someone without the hammer cocked and also with the safety on, because the gun will be assumed to be loaded by whoever receives it, and handing someone a gun that’s loaded with the hammer cocked is a monumentally stupid idea.
Even as an actor, if you are handed a replica of a deadly weapon you have a responsibility to make sure it is functioning properly and safe. And every actor should know that those firearms they get handed are most often real and can fire real ammunition. In such an environment, (particularly if you are also a producer - aka management), YOU are the final safety step before the director yells Action!
The “I didn’t know it was loaded” is never a legal excuse for anyone at any time.
Except that’s not how it works at all.
Proper procedure is for the prop master and armorer to be responsible for making sure the weapon is safe. They will then hand it off to whoever, and will loudly announce “cold gun”.
The gun can be handed to an assistant or the actor, if it is passed to an assistant first, when they hand it over to the actor they, too, must announce “cold gun”.
This lets everyone on set know that the gun has been verified safe by the armorer.
Baldwin was handed a gun, and the person handing it over loudly announced “cold gun”. He was then expected to treat it like it was not loaded, because he was loudly told.
The reason why you hire an armorer in the first place is because you don’t want your actors to think they know how to handle weapons. You want positive control of every weapon on set.
That broke down on the Rust set.
The story of how that broke down on the Rust set is actually quite interesting. It was a combination of nepotism (the armorer was the daughter of a famous armorer, and got the job through her dad’s connections) and the complete failure on the part of a prop company.
See, the live rounds were reloads, loaded into the exact same casings as the dummy rounds normally used. The reason the reloads were made was actually valid. A different armorer on a different film shoot made them to let the actors of that film get an idea of how the guns they were using would actually kick.
At the end of that film, the live rounds got co-mingled with the returned dummy rounds, and then those co-mingled rounds were rented out to the Rust production.
The armorer for Rust should have caught these rounds. They were not completely identical to the dummy rounds. But this was her second film, and she had never actually worked with live ammo.
When questioned by police after the shooting, she didn’t even know the brand name on the dummy rounds.
Anyway, she had prepped the gun for filming, and then the assistant director took it from her cart and handed it to Baldwin, announcing “cold gun”. The assistant director did not check the gun either, he just grabbed it and handed it off.
As a note, there were not supposed to be any live rounds, or even any blanks on set. Just dummy rounds.
The other failure here was actually sort of on the victims. Industry standards for filming scenes like that is to use a monitor, and not have anyone standing in the potential path of a bullet, even if there are no bullets. The cinematographer and director were both standing behind the camera. Mostly because setting up a monitor takes time, and they were under a bit of a crunch to get the scene filmed.
In the US, “I didn’t know it was loaded” is not a legal excuse. Try it in court yourself and see how far it gets you.
The VERY first rule about firearms is that 'All guns are treated as if loaded at all times". And you NEVER trust anyone when they tell you it’s unloaded. You check yourself to be sure. This includes a prop gun handed to you by a prop person who announces “cold gun!” It takes mere seconds to check it yourself. No excuses…
Your last paragraph shows even more negligence on the part of Baldwin. He broke another cardinal rule of gun safety by pointing an assumed unloaded gun at something he wasn’t intending to destroy or kill. And coupled with supposed rush to film, added to the complete breakdown of basic common sense firearms safety rules.
There was negligence all around that ended at Baldwin. And no one else gets away with that much negligence, (remember he was also a producer - The Boss), in a fatal “accident” and doesn’t get tried in court. Because Baldwin is famous and rich should not prevent his day in court.
I’m tired of hearing about this. Start the fucking trial already.
Is there a reason they had a gun loaded with actual bullets or even actual bullets on the set? Isn’t like everything in movies done with blanks?
It’s my understanding the person in charge of making sure weapons were loaded with blanks had issues with using real rounds in the past.
It’s armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, and she has been charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter, and tampering with evidence. The trial starts next month and she could face up to three years in prison if convicted.
I think it was something about it being used for target practice off set IIRC.
It’s US, live bullets are just everywhere, real guns are everywhere (in Europe prop guns use different caliber, you can’t use them with live ammo). Movie sets are no exception.
Yeah, just this morning I walked outside and tripped on a shotgun. Damn near lost my left foot.
He hired the cheapest firearms manager, tolerated crew playing with real bullets, and so when he’s handed a loaded gun, it’s a direct result of his own mistakes.
Lowest bidder aside, how is this clearly not the armorer’s fault front and center? It was her responsibility to handle the set props. What Baldwin paid them is irrelevant to what she claimed she could provide and was obligated to provide under contract.
She is literally the one to (a) claim the firearm was safe, but (b) load it with live ammunition.
???
Work in the industry, doc side but this is pretty basic producer stuff. This is 100% on the armorer and the only reason they keep trying to charge Baldwin is the legal grey area of the state they filmed in. Had this happened in a state with more production (Georgia, Louisiana, California) there would be a more direct way for prosecutors to go after the correct person. Georgia and California specifically has legal precedent from deaths on set like this.
One of the reasons credits are so long is because we hire people to maintain a safe set - think of it like a foreman for safe worksite in construction (which we also hire often). We hire a ton of people for safety from actual police to medics and rescue personnel.
Hiring an armorer is SPECIFICALLY to avoid situations like this. Because the production company is like “hey you know what? I don’t think me, some producer knows how to use a gun safely, I should hire someone who’s certified to do that.” It’s not some token job, they’re supposed to be trained on how to properly load the powder of the blank rounds, how to mark and flag hot guns and dead props, and pretty fucking much rule #1A is never bring live ammo anywhere near your set.
Baldwin should not be held criminally liable and any half decent entertainment lawyer will settle that. Now civil liability, that’s certainly more realistic. But even then it should be the production LLC not any 1 person.
This is 100% on the armorer
… Except for one other guy taking a gun he knew nothing about, pointing it at a person and pulling the trigger.
No, I think they are both guilty. Obviously not equally.
If the common judicial practice is different - then maybe some day there’ll be a new precedent.
An article I read right after this happened (which very well could have been a hit piece) said she (the armorer) was in her early 20s and would fuck around and go shooting with the prop guns when filming wasn’t happening. So… kind of. Yes
Sounds like there’s lots of blame to go around
He was far from the only producer. Quite frankly I doubt very much he did any real work besides acting.
The liability belongs to the company as a whole, absent some slam dunk of a memo where Baldwin personally said “Hire this lady, she’s my cousin’s kid, also I personally know she falsified her credentials but fuck it.”
It’s essentially a question of “who’s in charge around here and whose ass will be on the line?” Nearest example I can think of is if your boss tells you to deliver something and you get into a car accident, your work covers you with their insurance (USA!)
Even more concisely summed up with an incredibly apropos phrase, “if you give a monkey a gun, you don’t get to blame the monkey when someone gets shot.”
One of the biggest rules of gun safety is treat every gun as if it’s loaded even when as far as you know it isn’t. Regardless of how you think the ratio of culpability falls or who should be held legally accountable, he is at least partially responsible because he was the person holding the gun and aiming it at someone.
That’s rule number one on the shooting range, It’s not quite the same in film or on stage.
In those cases, actors have to trust their prop master or armorer.
Those are the people specifically hired to make sure the gun or the bullets are fake.
Baldwin was handed a gun, and specifically told that it was cold. The person handing it over even called out for the entire set that it was a cold weapon. The director then immediately called places. Because that’s how it works.
But the gun was not cold.
Now, the person whose job it was to maintain those weapons was incompetent. Baldwin didn’t hire her, he didn’t hire anyone. He was one of 10 producers and mostly handled fundraising and script changes.
But he made fun of Trump a few times, and was involved in a gun death in a Trump friendly area. In California the armorer would be facing these charges, and would have faced them as soon as the initial investigation was over, not several years later.
Rule 1 of gun safety, check the gun you’re handed for any ammunition.
What else needs to be said?
Everything else is its own issue to be dealt with.
He was given a firearm, did not do HIS due dilligence by checking the gun. He killed a fucking human being. . End of story
Can’t really expect that any more than you expect that Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone personally made sure the paint buckets he swung at Joe Pesci were actually empty. It’s just not how it works.
It’s up to the props people, in this case the armorer.
I honestly would not expect a bunch of Californian actors to know that. You’re often not dealing with a crowd of people who grew up hunting or at the range. You’re dealing with people who hire an armorer to bring that expertise to the set.
The rules of firearm safety apply when your buddy is showing off his new canik, not when you’re a professional on a movie set. A million other actors have ignored those rules on a million other sets, and it’s typically perfectly safe because the armorers know what they’re doing, and the crew isn’t bringing live rounds on set.
I mean… by this metric Michael Massee should have done time for shooting Brandon Lee during the filming of The Crow.
Yeah, the director and editors are gonna love you making sure your props are cleared every single shoot.
He is the producer.
Hi hired her. He tolerated crew using real bullets on set for playing target practice during down time.
The boss created unsafe conditions, and killed his employee through negligence.
I find that to be a pretty big leap. When she took the role of armorer she assumed all responsibility on set to ensure the safety of the crew, which was the entire point in Baldwin hiring someone to that position in the first place. Her gross negligence if not outright fraud is a result of her own actions and nobody else.
At most I’d give 20% responsibility to Baldwin for not examining her background more closely.
Baldwin was one of 10 producers and was not the hiring director. He, in fact, hire her.
I’ve heard that there were live fire practices on set, but could never back that up.
What I did find the last time this came up was a write-up about how there were reloads intermixed with the dummy rounds, re-loads that had been used on a completely different film shoot, where the actors of that film were walked tough some target practice with live rounds, so that they would better understand how a gun firing live rounds would kick.
Then a coffee can full of mixed live and dummy rounds ended up kicking around for a couple of years before being sent out to the Rust filming location, and the armorer didn’t know how to check the bullets. Or didn’t know that she had to. She was told that everything sent was a dummy round.
There were a bunch of live rounds found mixed into props, including Baldwin’s ammo belt.
All of them looked like the standard dummy round.
The thing is, he’s not the one who hired her.
He was one of 10 listed producers on that film, and was not the hiring director.
He’s the one who just took a gun laying nearby (without asking anyone about it being normal), jokingly pointed it at a person and squeezed the trigger.
People defending him seem to think that “criminal stupidity” is not a thing.
This is not accurate. At.all. it’s really funny how much stuff gets repeated online without any evidence. Social media is just one big game of telephone
I would love to see a source on that story, because it sounds super made up
Um no. That’s a blatant lie.
He was handed a gun, and told it was cold.
According to a search warrant, the guns were briefly checked by armorer Gutierrez-Reed, before assistant director Halls took the Pietta revolver from the prop cart and handed it to Baldwin.[38][39] In a subsequent affidavit, Halls said the safety protocol regarding this firearm was such that Halls would open the loading gate of the revolver and rotate the cylinder to expose the chambers so he could inspect them himself. According to the affidavit, Halls said he did not check all cylinder chambers, but he recalled seeing three rounds in the cylinder at the time. (After the shooting, Halls said in the affidavit, Gutierrez-Reed retrieved the weapon and opened it, and Halls said that he saw four rounds which were plainly blanks, and one which could have been the remaining shell of a discharged live round.)[40] In the warrant, it is further stated that Halls announced the term “cold gun”, meaning that it was empty.[38] Halls’s lawyer, Lisa Torraco, later sought to assert that he did not take the gun off the cart and hand it to Baldwin as reported, but when pressed by a reporter to be clear, she refused to repeat that assertion.[41]
People attacking him just make shit up left and right.
Do you know his involvement in her being hired? Being a producer can mean anything from total involvement to it just being a name on paper.
If he’s not lying about not pulling the trigger, then he, or the firearms manager, also bought a dangerously cheap gun.
The whole thing was a cascading failure, imho, with Baldwin at the end of it, making him no less culpable than anyone before him. Ultimately, “I didn’t know the gun was loaded” is never an excuse.
All that is why he is civilly liable for her wrongful death.
The reason he is criminally liable is because, without bothering to check that the weapon was safe, he elected to point it at a woman and pull the trigger…
If he had blown through a stop sign without bothering to check that the crossroad had been closed, he would be criminally liable for the damages he caused. The fact that cameras were rolling when he did it would not excuse him of his dangerous act.
He failed to take the basic safety precautions expected of anyone handling a firearm, and he failed to introduce alternative measures for achieving the same degree of safety.
