(New York Post) Alec Baldwin has always insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he didn’t pull that trigger.
The FBI now says that he did. That finding, released over the weekend, comes just after the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office announced they’re only waiting on Baldwin’s phone records before sending their investigative file to the DA’s office.
Are the walls closing in yet, Alec?
This FBI report is reason to cheer. Not since OJ Simpson have we seen someone so guilty act so aggrieved, entitled, put-upon and victimized, as if this whole tragedy has affected no one more than Baldwin himself — not Halyna Hutchins’s husband, not her little boy, so traumatized after her death he couldn’t speak for days, but Alec freaking Baldwin.
Think that’s overstatement? Let me count the ways: Gallivanting through the Hamptons and Vermont, just days after the shooting, Baldwin shopping at Ralph Lauren and preening before the paps — you know, the ones he otherwise hates and physically attacks — so they could get the perfect shot of Baldwin, inside a gleaming restaurant, holding his head in his hands. The bizarre roadside presser with his fake Spanish wife, the Rachel Dolezal of the Hamptons, in which he claimed the “Rust” set was run by “a very, very well-oiled crew” who just had the bad luck to suffer this “one in a trillion” tragedy.
An FBI report found that Alec Baldwin shot the fatal bullet on the “Rust” set.Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
The barrage of social media posts in the days after, Hilaria and Alec gloating over their family — that is, when Hilaria wasn’t getting in on the victim act herself, writing that “parenting through this has been an intense experience, to say the least.”
Know what else will be an intense experience? Criminal charges, jail time, and the loss of all his money in civil litigation. (On Monday, the New Mexico medical investigator ruled the shooting an accident; the district attorney has yet to decide whether or not to file charges.)
Alec Baldwin stands in his “Rust” costume and speaks with investigators following the October 2021 shooting.Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office via AP
Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office announced they’re waiting on Baldwin’s phone records before sending their investigative file to the DA’s office.
Santa Fe County Sheriff
A distraught Baldwin lingers in the parking lot outside the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s offices in Camino Justice after being questioned.Jim Weber/The New Mexican
Did I mention that the Baldwins thought there was no better time to buy a sprawling, historic Vermont farmhouse for $1.75 million?
That’s how delusional these two are. How surely they believe Alec to be above the law or any consequence.
As two firearms experts in on-set safety told me last year: Guns don’t shoot themselves. Alec Baldwin, for all his crocodile tears and caterwauling, pulled that trigger and killed Halyna Hutchins.
“I’m not aware of any gun firing itself,” veteran Hollywood firearms expert Steve Wolf told me last December, after Alec’s poor-me softball sit-down with ABC’s George Stephanopolous — his good pal from the Hamptons social scene, not that either disclosed that little conflict of interest.
Halyna Hutchins’ widow filed a civil suit against Baldwin.AP/Andres Leighton
“The trigger still must have been pressed,” Wolf said. “It’s really important to discredit anyone who claims that guns fire themselves. If this becomes an acceptable defense, there goes any accountability when it comes to shooting people. We can’t have this kind of ‘guns shoot themselves’ thing. They don’t.”
Former FBI agent turned Hollywood firearms consultant Bobby Chacon told me the same thing.
“The bullet striking and killing that woman came out of the barrel of the gun pointed directly at her,” Chacon said. “Bullets don’t curve. He isn’t in ‘The Matrix.’ The trigger would still have to be pulled.”
Alec, to Stephanopolous: “I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them. Never.” Also, he was brazen enough to say he felt no guilt.
The shooting happened inside the Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, N.M.AP/Jae C. Hong
Seven crew members walked off the set over safety concerns after Hucthins’ death.Facebook
Baldwin claimed the “Rust” set was run by “a very, very well-oiled crew.”Santa Fe County Sheriff/MEGA
This was the same interview in which Baldwin claimed Hutchins told him to point the gun at her. “Everything is at her direction,” he said. “I’m holding the gun where she told me to hold it, which ended up right below her armpit.”
So which is it, Alec? You’d never point a gun at anyone, or you pointed the gun at Hutchins because she told you to? And if it’s the latter, what are we to infer — that Hutchins is to blame for you pulling the trigger and shooting her to death?
It’s all so vile, but take heart: As a producer on “Rust,” Baldwin may also share blame for the rookie mistakes and cost-cutting that led up to this tragedy. Don’t forget that on the morning Hutchins was killed, seven crew members walked off the set over safety concerns.
At least one had sounded the alarm to the unit production manager, at one point texting, “We’ve now had three accidental discharges. This is super unsafe.
”It’s easy to see how such standard safety protocols went ignored and how dire warnings were shrugged off. As the old saying goes, the fish rots from the head, and Baldwin, as we’ve all seen over the past year, lives in a reality of his own making: His wife, née Hillary Thomas from Boston, is, through sheer force of make-believe and some bronzer, Spanish. His great friend Woody Allen is just misunderstood.
And, of course, it’s totally proper to brag about your happy family life incessantly on Instagram while ignoring your part in destroying another young family.
In Baldwin’s demented worldview, anyone who thinks he’s responsible for the death of a beautiful young wife and mother, her whole life and career ahead of her, must be motivated by animus or greed. Even the widower.
Baldwin recently bought a historic Vermont farmhouse for $1.75 million.Instagram
Hilaria Baldwin has defended her husband following the accident.Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
Hucthins died the day of the shooting.Santa Fe County Sheriff
“What you have is a certain group of people, litigants and whatever” — ! — “on whatever side, who, their attitude is, ‘Well, the people who likely seem negligent have no money, and the people who have money are not negligent.’ ”
This was Baldwin in March, weeks after Hutchins’ widower filed his civil suit against Baldwin and went on the Today show, calmly expressing his justifiable anger over Baldwin’s interview with Stephanopolous.
“Hearing him blame Halyna in the interview and shift responsibility to others and seeing him cry about it — I just feel, are we really supposed to feel bad about you, Mr. Baldwin?”
Hutchins went on to state the obvious, which again continues to elude Baldwin — Baldwin, who likes to pride himself on being smarter than the average Hollywood duck, what with his one-time NPR show and his bestselling memoir and his coverage in The New Yorker and telling the New York Times that he was qualified to be governor of New York. Oh, and his liberal bona fides with his “SNL” spoofs of Donald Trump, a man he has more in common with than he could ever admit.
