Alec Baldwin Continues To Point Fingers In Rust Shooting Tragedy
In October 2021, a live bullet came out of a prop gun during a rehearsal for the movie "Rust," resulting in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, per USA Today. The gun was pointed at the camera, which Hutchins and director Joel Souza were standing behind. The bullet hit both of them, and the cinematographer died in the hospital. Actor Alec Baldwin was the one holding the gun when the incident happened, but he claims that he's not responsible.
"The trigger wasn't pulled," the "30 Rock" actor told George Stephanopoulos during a December 2021 interview on ABC News. "I didn't pull the trigger. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them. Never." Baldwin then claimed that someone must have put a live bullet in the gun, unbeknownst to him and potentially anyone else on set.
The actor and producer continued to claim that he never pulled the trigger, explaining to Chris Cuomo on an August 17 episode of "The Chris Cuomo Project" how fanning the hammer of the gun can make it fire without pulling the trigger. But in recent FBI reports acquired by ABC News, forensic analysis determined that somebody had to have pulled the trigger in order for the gun to have fired. With this new evidence, it seems that Baldwin is eager to place the blame on someone else.
Alec Baldwin thinks armorer and assistant director are to blame
While no one seems to know how a live bullet ended up in the gun, FBI reports say that the revolver was in "working order," and Alec Baldwin would have had to cock the gun and pull the trigger in order to fire it, per Newsweek. Now, the actor is focusing on who he thinks is responsible for the incident, and the finger points to the armorer and props assistant, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, and the assistant director, Dave Halls.
"Someone put a live bullet in the gun who should have known better," Baldwin told CNN on August 19. "That was [Gutierrez Reed's] job. Her job was to look at the ammunition and put in the dummy round or the blank round, and there wasn't supposed to be any live rounds on the set." He continued, "There are two people who didn't do what they were supposed to do. I'm not sitting there saying I want them to, you know, go to prison, or I want their lives to be hell... but I want everybody to know that those are the two people that are responsible for what happened."
Gutierrez Reed, however, believes that she was sabotaged. "I believe that somebody who would do that would want to sabotage the set, want to prove a point, want to say that they're disgruntled, they're unhappy," Gutierrez-Reed's attorney Jason Bowles told "Today" in November 2021.