Alec Baldwin lost control of his emotions on set, put others in danger and also changed his story in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of a movie in New Mexico in 2021, according to new court documents filed by prosecutors.
Baldwin was making “Rust” at Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe when a gun he was holding fired a live round and killed Hutchins, 42. He was indicted by a grand jury on a charge of manslaughter in January and pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors accused Baldwin of “frequently screaming and cursing at himself, at crew members” and of losing control.
“To watch Mr. Baldwin’s conduct on the set of ‘Rust’ is to witness a man who has absolutely no control of his emotions and absolutely no concern for how his conduct effects [sic] those around him,” said papers filed by prosecutors at the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe.
The Friday court filing was in response to Baldwin’s team’s request to have the charge dismissed over concerns that testimony in the case was “unfairly stacking the deck” against the actor.
“The defendant’s motion to dismiss is a predictably false, misleading and histrionic misrepresentation of the facts and circumstances of the history of the case,” the filing said.
The prosecutors accused Baldwin, the movie’s lead producer, of hiring Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, a “young and inexperienced armorer,” then age 24, to handle all the film’s guns.
They said other crew members noticed she was inexperienced and overwhelmed.
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“Curiously, Mr. Baldwin, the most experienced member of the cast and crew, seems to have missed what everyone else noticed — Hannah Gutierrez was not up to the job,” the court filing said.
Prosecutors allege in the filing that Baldwin arrived on set on Oct. 12, 2021, one week after filming had begun, causing him to miss initial firearms training offered to other actors. Instead he had a separate training session during which the actor was “inattentive” and spent time either on the phone to his family or making videos of himself with guns to send to them.
When Hutchins was shot, the cast were preparing for a scene in which Baldwin was expected to slowly pull his gun from its holster — not to fire it, the filing said — but prosecutors say he went against the instructions of director Joel Souza.
Baldwin has said he did not pull the gun’s trigger before it fired and that the firearm had been declared “cold,” meaning it had no live ammunition, by assistant director Dave Halls.
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But the prosecutors accused Baldwin of offering contradictory versions of events to law enforcement and in the media, as to whether he pulled the trigger and whether he was taking direction from Gutierrez-Reed or Souza.
“In sum, every time Mr. Baldwin spoke, a different version of events emerged from his mouth,” the court filing said.
Both parties, in their filings, raised issues with information that had been shared with NBC News.
Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter but cleared of tampering with evidence, at a trial in March. She is due to be sentenced next week and faces up to 18 months in a state prison.
Halls pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon and was handed a six-month unsupervised probation order.
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