Two years after Halyna Hutchins was killed on the set of Alec Baldwin’s movie Rust, her family is still fighting for justice.
“The notion that an actor is not responsible if that actor holds a gun, points it at someone on a movie set, and discharges the weapon flies in the face of common sense and the law,” the Hutchins family’s lawyer Gloria Allred said in a statement to Us Weekly on Friday, January 26. “Safety protocols may be considered at trial, but they are not the law.”
Allred’s statement comes after SAG-AFTRA publicly defended Baldwin, 65, who was recently indicted for a second time regarding his involvement in Hutchins’ death.
“To the extent that the charges filed on January 19 are based on an accusation of negligent use of a firearm predicated on this or any actor having a duty to inspect a firearm as part of its use, that is an incorrect assessment of the actual duties of an actor on set,” read a statement from the union, in part, on Thursday, noting that an actor is not “a firearms or weapons expert.”
Us Weekly confirmed Baldwin’s second involuntary manslaughter indictment earlier this month, more than two years after his prop gun was misfired on the Rust set in October 2021, killing Hutchins at age 42. If convicted, Baldwin faces up to 18 months in jail.
“We look forward to our day in court,” Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro, Baldwin’s attorneys, told Us in a statement following the indictment.
Allred noted in her response on Thursday: “This indictment was the result of a careful assessment by the grand jury of all the facts and the law. It is important to respect the grand jury’s decision to indict, and to allow the criminal justice system to proceed to trial where the case will be decided on its merits.”
Baldwin was initially charged with involuntary manslaughter in January 2023. He pleaded guilty the following month and the charges were dropped by April 2023. (Baldwin was also named in a 2022 wrongful death suit filed by Hutchins’ family, which was settled for an undisclosed amount in October of that year.)
Months after the incident occurred, Baldwin insisted that he was not responsible for Hutchins’ death, despite holding the weapon that killed her. (The prop was loaded with real bullets.)
“The trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them. Never,” he told George Stephanopoulos during a December 2021 interview. “I have no idea [how a bullet got in there]. Someone put a live bullet in a gun. A bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property.”
Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed previously pleaded not guilty to her own set of involuntary manslaughter charges. She is set to stand trial next month.
