Movies

Alec Baldwin denies financial responsibility for ‘Rust’ shooting death

March 12, 2022

The filing also shifts the blame by stating that “someone is culpable for chambering the live round that led to this horrific tragedy, and it is someone other than Baldwin. Baldwin is an actor.”

The Washington Post has requested comment from both Rust Movie Productions LLC and Ryan Smith, the production company and individual producer named by Baldwin’s lawyers.

On Oct. 21, Baldwin was inside a church building on Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, NM, along with others working on “Rust,” including Hutchins and director Joel Souza. Detectives with the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office determined from numerous interviews that assistant director Dave Halls retrieved a .45 Long Colt revolver from armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed and announced it was a “cold gun” before handing it to Baldwin. The industry term is used to indicate there are no live rounds in a weapon. The gun eventually went off in Baldwin’s hands, killing Hutchins and injuring Souza.

(Halls has remained mostly quiet regarding the case, but in November issued a statement saying he was “shocked and saddened” by Hutchins’s death. Gutierrez-Reed sued ammunitions supplier Seth Kenney in January, alleging he introduced “dangerous products” to the set. In February, his lawyer redirected the blame back toward Gutierrez-Reed, saying it was his responsibility to safely handle and check the weapons.)

According to the filing, Baldwin was not ever instructed during safety training to check the gun himself. After he was handed the gun, he said, he worked with Hutchins to determine how they wanted to angle the camera for a specific scene. He said she directed him to point the gun toward her and agreed when he asked if she wanted to see him cock the gun, as the script noted. She said yes, and he pulled back the hammer.

When Baldwin let go of the hammer, according to the filing, the gun discharged.

Baldwin narrated a similar series of events in an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos that aired in December. He stated then that he did not feel responsible for what happened to Hutchins.

In February, attorneys representing Hutchins’s family named Baldwin, among numerous other producers and crew members, in a wrongful-death lawsuit. Matthew Hutchins told “Today” anchor Hoda Kotb soon afterward that he was “so angry” watching Baldwin deny culpability: “Hearing him blame Halyna in the interview, and shift responsibility to others, and seeing him cry about it,” Hutchins said, “ I just feel — are we really supposed to feel bad about you, Mr. Baldwin?”

Baldwin’s filing includes screen images of cordial text messages exchanged between Baldwin and Matthew Hutchins as early as the day after the fatal shooting. Weeks later, Baldwin texted Matthew saying that the latter’s attorney told Baldwin to stop contacting Matthew, but the two continued to reach out to each other about their respective families’ well-being. The filing states that “before Hutchins’s appearance on the ‘Today’ show, his interactions with Baldwin had only been polite, collaborative, and, at times, even warm.”

The filing also notes that Baldwin tried to propose a settlement with the Hutchins family that would have involved finishing “Rust” and compensating them from its profits.

Crew members including script supervisor Mamie Mitchell, medic Cherlyn Schaefer and chief lighting technician Serge Svetnoy have filed lawsuits over the “Rust” shooting, pointing to producers’ negligence and claiming emotional distress. After Hutchins’s death, Svetnoy wrote a scathing Facebook post accusing producers of hiring inexperienced workers to stick to a tight budget.

In the filing, Baldwin’s lawyers wrote that his only financial involvement on “Rust” was the $100,000 portion of his own fees that he “gave back to the production to enhance the budget.” The document states that his contract as a producer required Rust Movie Productions to “indemnify, defend, and hold harmless” Baldwin and his company, El Dorado Pictures, from “any loss, damage, liability, claim, demand, action, cost and expense ” arising from issues with the production.