Four years after the “Rust” movie shooting, New Mexico officials have moved Alec Baldwin’s lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution to federal court.
This week’s filing is the latest twist in the long legal saga after the October 2021 on-set death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Baldwin, the 67-year-old star and a producer of the western film, had been facing a felony involuntary manslaughter charge for his role in Hutchins’ accidental shooting. But the judge overseeing Baldwin’s case abruptly dismissed the charge against him during his July 2024 trial after concluding that prosecutors withheld evidence that may have been helpful to his legal team.
Six months later, Baldwin sued New Mexico’s district attorney and special prosecutors, asserting malicious prosecution. The actor claimed he had been made a celebrity scapegoat because of the intense media pressure on local authorities to solve the high-profile case.
His lawsuit targeted New Mexico special prosecutor Kari T. Morrissey, 1st Judicial Dist. Atty. Mary Carmack-Altwies and Santa Fe County sheriff’s deputies, who led the investigation into Hutchins’ death.
The defendants have denied Baldwin’s allegations.
Baldwin’s wrongful prosecution suit was first filed in New Mexico court in Santa Fe.
On Tuesday, the defendants, including Morrissey, exercised their legal right to shift the case to federal court. The decision was made, in part, because “Mr. Baldwin brought federal civil rights claims in his lawsuit,” said Albuquerque attorney Luis Robles, who represents the defendants.
In addition, Baldwin does not live in New Mexico, where the case was filed.
Baldwin could object to the move and petition for it to be brought back to state court. On Wednesday, his team was not immediately available for comment.
A New Mexico judge had dismissed Baldwin’s malicious prosecution claims in July, citing 90 days of inactivity in the case. Baldwin’s legal team petitioned to get the case reinstated and the judge agreed to the request.
That prompted the defendants’ move to shift the case to the higher court.
During his Santa Fe trial last year, Baldwin’s lawyers had sought to turn the focus away from whether Baldwin pulled his gun’s trigger in the accidental shooting to where the lethal bullet came from.
Baldwin’s attorneys repeatedly accused law enforcement officers and prosecutors of bungling the case, including by allegedly hiding potential evidence — a batch of bullets that they said may have been related to the one that killed Hutchins.
Holly Willoughbymarried TV exec Daniel “Dan” Baldwin in Amberley, West Sussex in 2007 and the couple, who have three children together, have recently moved house
00:22, 09 Sep 2025Updated 02:01, 09 Sep 2025
Holly Willoughby has been married to Dan Baldwin for 18 years(Image: Getty Images Europe)
TV power couple Holly Willoughby and husband Dan Baldwin have moved into “an amazing” mansion, it is reported.
Holly, 44, recently bought the “an insanely beautiful forever home” with her 50-year-old partner whose media company, it is said, struck a deal with America’s National Football League (NFL), Channel 5 (which now wants to be known as 5) and US media giant Paramount to bring live coverage of American football to UK viewers.
As the consortium has even bagged the rights to broadcast the Super Bowl in this country, it is thought Dan and Holly have been eager to explore opportunities to relocate. It is understood they’ve now snapped up a six-bedroom mansion, said to be worth millions of pounds.
A source who knows the couple, who married in 2007, said: “Together, Dan and Holly make a smashing pairing. They have the whole industry covered between them.”
The TV power couple have recently moved home(Image: @hollywilloughby/Instagram)
The Super Bowl is the most-watched annual sporting event in America and the second most popular around the world after the FIFA World Cup – with nearly 200million people worldwide tuning in each year.
And so television sources suggest the deal could be worth “well over £2million” for Baldwin and his consortium. The new American football show, which started last week, is presented by one of Dan’s best friends, Dermot O’Leary, 52, along with former NFL player Osi Umenyiora, 43, and hockey player-turned-sports-presenter Sam Quek, 36.
Presenters: Dermot O’Leary, Sam Quek & Osi Umenyiora can’t wait to get started with new NFL show
An industry insider told Mail Online: “It is the deal of the year. Dan pulled it off. It’s lovely, actually, as it means the pressure is off Holly to wait for the right job to come up… She has been to hell and back in the past two years. It has been awful for her.”
They referred to Holly’s ordeal at the hands of former security guard Gavin Plumb, who planned to kidnap and murder the star. He was jailed for life in July last year for the sinister plot, which a court was told was “life-changing for the victim.. both in private and personal terms”.
This came after Holly’s This Morning career ended abruptly in 2023 after a distressing fallout with her best friend Phillip Schofield over his brother Timothy’s sex offences trial. These episodes “knocked the wind out of Holly,” a source told Mail Online.
But Dan’s recent success has reportedly brought new vigour into both Holly and Dan’s lives, as mum-of-three Holly now has “some time to decompress”. The star, originally from Brighton, East Sussex, did co-host You Bet! last year with pal Stephen Mulhern, a revival of the game show after 27 years. The programme, though, was largely panned by viewers and critics.
By Nicholas Boggs Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 720 pages, $36 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores
In Nicholas Boggs’ lively and vigorously researched biography of James Baldwin, the great writer’s search for the source of his art dovetails with his lifelong search for meaningful relationships. Black, gay, born without the benefit of money or guidance, repeatedly harassed and beaten in his New York City hometown, Baldwin physically removed himself from the turmoil of America, living abroad for long stretches to find proper distance and see his country plain. In “The Fire Next Time,” “Another Country” and “Giovanni’s Room,” among other works, Baldwin gleaned hard truths about the ways in which white people, white men in particular, deny their own sexual confusions to lash out at those who they feel may pose a grave threat their own machismo codes and their absolute dominion over Black Americans. In his novels and essays, Baldwin became a sharp beacon of hard truths.
Baldwin was reared in an oppressive atmosphere of religious doctrine and physical violence; his stepfather David, a laborer and preacher, adhered to an quasi-Calvinist approach to child-rearing that forbade art’s graven images in the home and encouraged austerity and renunciation. Books, according to Baldwin’s father, were “written by white devils.” As a child, Baldwin was beaten and verbally lashed by his father; his brief tenure as a religious orator in the church was, according to Boggs, a way to “usurp his father at his own game.” At the same time, Boggs notes, Baldwin used the church “to mask the deep confusion caused by his burgeoning sexual desires.”
As a child, Baldwin is marginalized for being too sensitive, too bookish, a “sissy.” At school, he finds mentors like Orilla “Bill” Miller and the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who introduced him to Dickens and the 18th century Russian novelists. When his stepfather loses his job, it is down to Baldwin to support his mother and eight siblings. Taking a job at a local army base, he is confronted with virulent race-baiting from his white supervisor and co-workers.
Baldwin leaves Harlem behind shortly thereafter and falls into the artistic ferment of Greenwich Village in the ‘40s. He shares ideas about art, music and literature with a fellow budding aesthete named Eugene Worth until he jumps to his death from the George Washington Bridge in the winter of 1946. His death “cast a pall over Baldwin’s life,” Boggs writes, “but it would also play a major and enduring role in his development as a writer.” Baldwin, who had developed strong romantic feelings for Worth but never made them plain to his friend, makes a promise to himself, vowing to adjoin his private life as a gay Black man to the public life of an artist, so that “my infirmities might be forged into weapons.”
Beauford Delaney, a respected painter and Village fixture, becomes Baldwin’s lodestar and encourages him to confront his sexuality head-on in his art. What that art might entail, Baldwin doesn’t yet know, but it would have something to do with writing. Delaney would become a lifelong friend, even after he began suffering from mental deterioration, dying after years of hospitalization in 1979.
Baldwin’s life as a transatlantic nomad begins in 1948, when he arrives in Paris after winning a scholarship to study there. More importantly, he meets 17-year-old Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss painter, and a relationship blossoms. Happersberger shares deep artistic and sexual affinities with Baldwin, but Lucien is also attracted to women and becomes a kind of template for Baldwin’s future partners, most notably the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, that he would pursue until his death in 1987.
Baldwin held these romantic relationships in tantalizing suspension, his love affairs caught between the poles of desire and intimacy, the heat of passion and long-term commitment. The love triangles these relationships engendered became a rich source for his fiction. Boggs asserts that many of the author’s most enduring works, including “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and his breakthrough novel about gay love “Giovanni’s Room,” sprang from these early, formative encounters. “The structure of a not fully requited love was a familiar and even eroticized one for Baldwin,” Boggs writes, “and would come to fuel his art.”
Away from the States, Baldwin was freed “from the trap of color,” but he was pulled ever deeper into the racial unrest in America, taking on journalism assignments to see for himself how systemic racial oppression worked in the Jim Crow South. In Atlanta, Baldwin meets Martin Luther King Jr., who invites him to Montgomery to witness the impact of the bus boycott. Entering a local restaurant, he is greeted with stony stares; a white woman points toward the colored entrance. In Mississippi, he interviews NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, who is busy investigating a lynching. Baldwin notes the climate of fear among Black citizens in the city, speaking to him like “ the German Jews must have talked when Hitler came to power.”
Nicholas Boggs tracked down a previously unwritten-about lover of James Baldwin for his new biography.
(Noah Loof)
These eyewitness accounts would feed into Baldwin’s impassioned essays on race such as “Down at the Cross” and his 1972 nonfiction book “No Name in the Street.” For Boggs, Baldwin’s nonfiction informed his fiction; there are “continuities and confluences between and across his work in both genres.” The throughline across all of the work was Baldwin’s ire at America’s failure to recognize that the “so-called Negro” was “trapped, disinherited and despised, in a nation that … is still unable to recognize him as a human being.”
Baldwin would spend the rest of his life toggling between journalism and fiction, addressing racism in the States in articles for Esquire, Harper’s and other publications while spending most of his time in Turkey and France, where a growing circle of friends and lovers nourished his muse and satisfied his need for constant social interaction when he wasn’t wrestling with his work, sometimes torturously so. Boggs’ book finds Baldwin in middle age poised between creative fecundity and despair, growing frustrated with America’s failure of nerve regarding race and homosexuality as well as his own thwarted partnerships. Despite a powerful bond with Engin Cezarr and, later, the French painter Yoran Cazac, who flitted in and out of Baldwin’s Istanbul life across the 1970s, the picture of Baldwin that emerges in Boggs’ biography is that of an artist who treasures emotional continuity but creatively feeds on inconstancy.
In fact, Cazac had never been cited in any previous Baldwin biography. Boggs discovered him when he came across an out-of-print children’s book called “Little Man, Little Man,” a collaboration between Cazac and Baldwin that prompted Boggs’ search. After following a number of flimsy leads, he finally finds Cazac in a rural French village, and they talk.
The novels that Baldwin penned during his last great burst of productivity, most notably “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Just Above My Head,” have been maligned by many Baldwin fans as noble failures lacking the fire and dramatic power of his early work. Yet Boggs makes a strong case for these books as successful formal experiments in which Baldwin once again transmuted the storms of his personal life into eloquent indictments of systemic racism. The contours of Baldwin’s romantic engagement with Cazac, in particular, would find their way into “Beale Street,” the first time Baldwin used a female narrator to tell the story of a budding young romance doomed by a gross miscarriage of justice. Boldly experimental in both form and content, “Beale Street” and “Just Above My Head” were, in Boggs’ view, unjustly criticized, coming at a time when Baldwin’s reputation was on the decline. Only novelist Edmund White gleaned something special in his review of “Just Above My Head,” Baldwin’s final novel, finding in his depictions of familial love a Dickensian warmth which “glow with the steadiness and clarity of a flame within a glass globe.”
A literary biography needn’t be an artful accretion of facts, nor should it traffic in salacious gossip and cheapen the subject at hand. Boggs’ even-handed and critically rigorous biography of James Baldwin is guilty of none of these things, mostly because Boggs never strays from the path toward understanding why Baldwin wrote what he did and how his private and public lives were inextricably wound up in his work. Boggs has dug much deeper than his predecessors, including Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming, whose book has been the standard bearer since its 1994 publication. “Baldwin: A Love Story” is superlative, and it should become the new gold standard for Baldwin studies.
Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”
Alec Baldwin and additional “Rust” movie producers have agreed to settle a negligence lawsuit brought by three New Mexico crew members who witnessed the 2021 fatal shooting of the film’s cinematographer.
Crew members Ross Addiego, Doran Curtin and Reese Price filed the lawsuit in 2023, seeking compensation for the trauma they said they suffered after Baldwin accidentally shot Halyna Hutchins. The crew members were setting up their gear in a small wooden church on the movie set when the shooting occurred.
In the lawsuit, the crew members blamed the tragedy on “dangerous cost-cutting” and a “failure to follow industry safety rules.” The movie’s star, Baldwin, also served as a producer on the low-budget western.
The plaintiffs sued Baldwin, his El Dorado Pictures company and Rust Movie Productions LLC, alleging negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. In the suit, the crew members argued that Baldwin and other producers “cut corners, ignored reports of multiple, unscripted firearms discharges, and persisted, rushed and understaffed, to finish the film.”
Baldwin and fellow producers have long denied such allegations.
Last week, the two sides asked a New Mexico civil court judge to dismiss the case.
“All claims have been settled and compromised,” attorneys for both sides wrote in a joint June 25 motion.
Terms of the proposed settlement were not disclosed. Representatives for the two sides declined to comment.
“Each party has agreed to bear its own costs and fees,” the lawyers wrote.
The film was running behind schedule the day of the shooting after camera crew members had walked off the set. The camera technicians have said they were frustrated by inaction over their complaints of a lack of nearby housing, rushed conditions and safety violations, including accidental gun discharges.
The shooting claimed the life of Hutchins, 42. She died that day, leaving behind her husband, their son and her family in Ukraine. The producers previously settled a wrongful death lawsuit brought on behalf of her husband, Matthew Hutchins.
Addiego was the film’s dolly operator, responsible for operating the mechanisms for camera movement. Curtin was the set costumer, overseeing costumes and accessories. Price was the key grip, who handled the nonelectric support gear.
New Mexico authorities brought three criminal prosecutions, including against Baldwin, who pointed the gun at Hutchins during a setup shot for a close-up of Baldwin’s prop revolver.
Baldwin pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter and his high-profile trial ended abruptly last July after former New Mexico 1st Judicial District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the charge.
The judge found the special prosecutor and Santa Fe County sheriff’s deputies had concealed evidence from Baldwin’s legal team, which the judge said prejudiced the case against Baldwin.
At the time, the actor-producer’s team was exploring whether prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies botched the investigation into how the bullets made their way onto the desert set.
The weapons handler Hannah Gutierrez was convicted of involuntary manslaughter following a two-week trial last year. The Arizona woman was released from prison last month after serving 14 months.
Tears flowed from Freddie Freeman as he sat in a Dodger Stadium interview room Aug. 5 and described the arduous recovery his 3-year-old son Max was making from a rare neurological condition in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves.
Max had returned home from a five-night stay at Children’s Hospital Orange County, and Freeman was back in the Dodgers lineup after missing eight games to be with his family during the ordeal.
Two months later, the Dodgers were playing host to the New York Mets in the National League Championship Series. A police officer approached Freeman’s wife, Chelsea, to ask how Max was doing.
A photograph of Officer Samuel Riveros provided by the Baldwin Police Department.
(Baldwin Police Department.)
The officer, Samuel Riveros of the Baldwin Park Police Dept., smiled and handed her a police patch to give to Max.
Riveros was killed Saturday in Baldwin Park when a gunman fatally shot him in the head while Riveros was rushing to the aid of a fellow officer who also had been shot, a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation told The Times.
Chelsea Freeman related meeting Riveros on her Instagram Stories and offered her family’s condolences.
“Our hearts are heavy hearing of his passing this week,” she posted. “We met during the Dodgers/Mets playoffs. He came up to me, asked how my son Max was doing and handed me his police patch to give to him.
“A small gesture that meant so much.”
Freddie Freeman was a World Series hero for the Dodgers in 2024, hitting a walk-off grand slam to win Game 1 against the New York Yankees. He is off to a hot start in 2025, currently leading the NL with a .368 batting average.
Riveros had been a Baldwin Park officer since 2016, joined the agency’s SWAT team in 2019, and had recently become a field training officer, which in a statement the agency called a “testament to his leadership and mentorship.”
Riveros was known for his devotion to the Dodgers, even traveling to the stadiums of opposing teams to watch them play, according to Baldwin Park Police Chief Robert A. López.
“Officer Riveros gave his life in service to others, a profound testament to his unwavering dedication to duty and selfless courage,” the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Dept. wrote in a statement. “His loss is profoundly felt — not only by his family and colleagues, but by the entire Baldwin Park community and law enforcement family.”
Eduardo Roberto Medina-Berumen, 22, was arrested on suspicion of murder and is being held in lieu of $4 million bail, according to the Sheriff’s Department. He lives with his mother at the Baldwin Park address on Filhurst Avenue, where gunfire erupted Saturday night, a source said.
“This tragic shooting is a sobering reminder of the danger our first responders face when they answer the call,” Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said in a statement.
Hannah Gutierrez, the weapons handler in the ill-fated Alec Baldwin western movie “Rust,” has been released from prison after serving 14 months for her conviction last year of involuntary manslaughter.
New Mexico prosecutors faulted the Arizona woman for reckless handling of firearms and ammunition in violation of gun safety rules.
The special prosecutor also argued that Gutierrez had unwittingly brought the live bullets with her to the popular western film location, Bonanza Creek Ranch, and mingled them with inert “dummy” bullets used on film sets.
The New Mexico judge overseeing the “Rust” criminal prosecutions, New Mexico 1st Judicial District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer, dismissed the charge against Baldwin three days into his high-profile trial last July.
Marlowe Sommer found the prosecutor and Santa Fe County sheriff’s deputies had concealed evidence from Baldwin’s legal team, which the judge said prejudiced the case against Baldwin. At the time, the actor-producer’s team was exploring whether prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies botched the investigation into how the bullets made their way onto the set.
Halls pleaded no contest to negligent use of a deadly weapon and received a suspended six-month sentence, which ended in October 2023. Halls, who has since retired from the industry, agreed to pay a $500 fine, participate in a firearms safety class, refrain from taking drugs or alcohol and complete 24 hours of community service.
She was released on parole. She also is being supervised under terms of probation after pleading guilty to a separate charge of unlawfully carrying a gun into a Santa Fe bar that prohibited firearms a few days before the fatal shooting, according to the Associated Press.
Terms of her parole include mental health assessments and a ban on firearms possession.
Gutierrez, through her attorney, declined an interview request Sunday.
“When I took on ‘Rust,’ I was young and I was naive but I took my job as seriously as I knew how to,” Gutierrez told the judge during her April 2024 sentencing hearing.
Marlowe Sommer, who also presided over the armorer’s case, gave Gutierrez the maximum sentence, saying: “You were the armorer, the one that stood between a safe weapon and a weapon that could kill someone. .. You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon.”
With Gutierrez’s release, the criminal phase of the “Rust” saga has concluded.
Baldwin and other actors and crew members finished filming in Montana, 18 months after the fatal shooting in New Mexico. The movie was finally released in the U.S. this month on just a handful of screens.
“Rust” was racked with problems, including allegations of safety rules and hiring inexperienced crew members such as Gutierrez. “Rust” was just her second job as head armorer. She also was tasked with the job of prop assistant.
Hours before the fatal shooting, “Rust” camera crew members had walked off the job to protest safety concerns and a lack of housing near the film’s set. Crew members complained about earlier accidental gun discharges.
