Actor Alec Baldwin has receded from the spotlight since a gun he was holding killed a crew member on the set of a movie he was supposed to be in.
He maintains he didn’t pull the trigger and that the gun simply fired spontaneously while he happened to be pointing it at the crew member.
And now Alec Baldwin is sweating bullets after this Judge handed down one life-altering ruling.
Alec Baldwin is still not out of the woods regarding the horrifying shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during the filming of the western Rust.
While he maintains his innocence, he’s been charged with involuntary manslaughter for his role in Hutchins’ death, and forensic analysts have testified that his story of not pulling the trigger is impossible.
Conviction
Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the armorer on the project in charge of gun safety, has already been charged and convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
Gutierrez Reed was given the maximum sentence of 18 months, which does not bode well for Baldwin’s upcoming trial on the same charges.
Baldwin was both the star and producer on the film, so his responsibility was twofold.
After Gutierrez Reed was sentenced, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer admonished the armorer, saying that if it wasn’t for her actions, “Mrs. Hutchins would be alive.”
“I find that what you did constitutes a serious, violent offense,’ Judge Sommer said. “It was committed in a physically violent manner. A fatal gunshot done with your recklessness in the face of knowledge that your acts were reasonably likely to result in serious harm. You were the armorer, the one that’s to be between a safe weapon and a weapon that could kill someone. You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon. But for you, Mrs. Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner, and a little boy would have his mother. Please take her.”
Sommer also ripped Gutierrez Reed for insensitive jailhouse calls in which she complained that the trial “is messing up her modeling career.”
Why it happened
For her part, Gutierrez Reed spoke on her own behalf and blamed the media for sensationalizing “our traumatic tragedy,” as well as not having “proper time, resources, and staffing.”
“I am saddened by the way the media sensationalized our traumatic tragedy and portrayed me as a complete monster, which has actually been the total opposite of what’s been in my heart,” she said. “Your Honor, when I took on ‘Rust,’ I was young, and I was naive, but I took my job as seriously as I knew how to. . . Despite not having proper time, resources, and staffing when things got tough, I just did my best to handle it.”
Reed pleaded for probation, but she was denied.
Her comments established a pretext for what will assuredly be used against Baldwin at his trial.
She claimed that she did not have “proper time, resources, and staffing,” which would have been at least partly Baldwin’s responsibility as the film’s producer.
Needless to say, things aren’t looking good for Alec Baldwin.
