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    Alec Baldwin’s Role as a Producer Ruled Not Relevant to ‘Rust’ Trial

    The ruling was a victory for the actor, who is set to stand trial this week on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer. He has pleaded not guilty.A judge in New Mexico ruled on Monday that Alec Baldwin’s role as a producer of the film “Rust” was not relevant to his upcoming trial for involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of its cinematographer in 2021, dealing a setback to the prosecution.Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer of the First Judicial District in New Mexico ruled that prosecutors could not argue that Mr. Baldwin’s role as a member of the film’s production team — he was one of its producers in addition to being its leading man — had made him more culpable for the death of the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.It was a blow to the prosecution, which had sought to make Mr. Baldwin’s role as a producer part of their case. “As the producer he has the power to control safety on set, and there was a tremendous lack of safety on this set,” one of the prosecutors, Erlinda O. Johnson, argued in court earlier on Monday.Mr. Baldwin’s defense has disputed that, saying that as a member of the production team he was involved in creative matters, but that others had authority over hiring and budgets.The judge ruled that the prosecution could not present evidence about Mr. Baldwin’s position as one of the film’s producers.“I’m having real difficulty with the state’s position that they want to show that, as a producer, he didn’t follow guidelines and therefore, as an actor, Mr. Baldwin did all of these things wrong resulting in the death of Ms. Hutchins because as a producer he allowed these things to happen,” Judge Marlowe Sommer said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Alec Baldwin Heads to Trial in ‘Rust’ Movie Shooting: Here’s What to Know

    The trial, scheduled to start with jury selection on Tuesday, will examine whether the actor committed involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of the movie’s cinematographer.The winding prosecution of Alec Baldwin over the fatal shooting on the “Rust” film set is set to arrive at a trial this week in New Mexico, where a jury will be asked to decide whether his role in the death of the movie’s cinematographer amounts to involuntary manslaughter.The case revolves around the events of Oct. 21, 2021, when the gun Mr. Baldwin was rehearsing with discharged a live bullet that killed the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounded the movie’s director. The weapon was supposed to have been loaded with inert rounds that could not fire.The initial announcement that prosecutors were bringing a criminal case against Mr. Baldwin was met with shock from Hollywood, where many consider on-set gun safety the responsibility of a production’s weapons experts and safety coordinators, not its actors. (The movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, has already been convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison.)The movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and is not expected to be a cooperative witness in Mr. Baldwin’s trial.Pool photo by Luis Sanchez Saturno/EPA, via ShutterstockThe case has put those Hollywood norms to the test and the conduct of Mr. Baldwin, a fixture of the television and movie industry for decades, under a microscope. The proceedings are expected to be highly contested by his lawyers, who have argued for months that the prosecution is a misguided bid to secure a high-profile conviction of a celebrity.The trial is expected to last about two weeks at the Santa Fe County District Courthouse, where the proceedings will be livestreamed. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Tuesday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Alec Baldwin’s Long Journey to Court After ‘Rust’ Shooting

    It’s been a challenge to follow the case. Here are its many twists and turns. The actor Alec Baldwin is scheduled to go on trial next month for involuntary manslaughter in Santa Fe, N.M.Baldwin’s long journey to the courtroom started on Oct. 21, 2021, on the set of the western movie “Rust,” when the gun he was holding while blocking out a shot discharged, firing a live round that injured the movie’s director, Joel Souza, and killed its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.It was an almost unimaginable tragedy, but Baldwin soon found himself in legal jeopardy, too. The subsequent saga has amounted to a high-stakes version of a familiar Baldwin ritual: He does or says something controversial; then, in an attempt to be understood, he doubles down on whatever he said or did, inviting further scrutiny; finally, feeling victimized and aggrieved, he vows to stop engaging with the media. He was in this third stage by the time I started reporting a few months ago. To trace the improbable arc of his prosecution, I interviewed more than 30 people in New York and Santa Fe, reviewed numerous public court filings, police records and videos, and obtained additional documents under New Mexico’s freedom-of-information act.It’s been a challenge to follow the case through all of its many twists and turns. Here’s what you need to know as the trial approaches.Troubling details quickly emerged about the film’s set.The shooting occurred at 1:46 p.m. at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, a family-owned Old West movie set about 20 miles southeast of Santa Fe. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Long, Strange Road to Alec Baldwin’s Manslaughter Trial

    On the afternoon of Oct. 21, 2021, Mary Carmack-Altwies, the district attorney for New Mexico’s First Judicial District, was driving along a lonely stretch of the mountain highway connecting Santa Fe and Taos when her cell service abruptly returned and her phone started pinging — message after message. She pulled over to the side of the road and began scrolling: Alec Baldwin had accidentally shot two people on a movie set in her jurisdiction. Carmack-Altwies had planned to spend the next couple of days alone in the mountains before celebrating her 43rd birthday with her wife, a retired investigator for the state, and their two children. Clearly that was not going to happen.Listen to this article, read by Pete SimonelliThe shooting occurred at 1:46 p.m. that day at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, a family-owned Old West movie set about 20 miles southeast of Santa Fe that had been rented out by “Rust,” an independent film that Baldwin was both starring in and producing. The bullet he inadvertently fired passed through the upper body of the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and lodged near the spine of Joel Souza, the director. Souza was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Santa Fe; Hutchins was airlifted to a trauma center in Albuquerque and died a short time later.Carmack-Altwies was nearing the end of her first year in office. She had been an assistant district attorney specializing in violent crimes when her boss made a bid for Congress. She ran to succeed him — her first foray into electoral politics — and won easily, inheriting a jurisdiction that covers three counties: Los Alamos, Rio Arriba and Santa Fe. She’s a Democrat in a Democratic district, though the label connotes something very different in New Mexico, a rural hunting state whose voters tend to place a high value on the Second Amendment, than it does in, say, New York or California. Carmack-Altwies turned around and went back to her office in Santa Fe, where she spent most of the night on the phone with the local police, trying to make sure that the movie set, now a potential crime scene, was properly secured. In the days that followed, reporters from all over the world descended on Santa Fe. Carmack-Altwies held her first news conference about the incident six days later outside the Sheriff’s Department. She was asked if she intended to prosecute anyone. “I do not make rash decisions, and I do not rush to judgment,” she said. “All options are on the table at this point.”Bonanza Creek Ranch, the movie set where Alec Baldwin fatally shot the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins with a prop gun in October 2021, leading to his indictment on charges of involuntary manslaughter.Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal, via ZUMA/AlamyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Judge to Rule Next Week on Whether to Dismiss Alec Baldwin Case

    During a heated hearing, Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers claimed prosecutors had improperly presented evidence to the grand jury considering the fatal shooting on the set of “Rust.”A judge in New Mexico will rule next week on whether to dismiss the involuntary manslaughter indictment against Alec Baldwin in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the “Rust” film set, after she closely questioned the lead prosecutor on Friday about her handling of grand jury proceedings.Lawyers for Mr. Baldwin — who was rehearsing with an old-fashioned revolver on the set in 2021 when it fired a live bullet, killing the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins — had lodged numerous objections to how the case has been handled, calling the prosecution “an abuse of an innocent person whose rights have been trampled to the extreme.”The defense claimed at a hearing on Friday that the prosecution had not sufficiently shown the jurors evidence that could have supported Mr. Baldwin’s case. That included presenting witnesses who could have bolstered the defense’s contention that Mr. Baldwin had no reason to think that the gun was loaded with live ammunition and that actors are not responsible for gun safety on film sets.“The court can have no comfort in this indictment; it can have no comfort in the way it was procured,” a lawyer representing Mr. Baldwin, Alex Spiro, argued at the hearing, which took place virtually. “It cannot possibly believe it was fair and impartial.”Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers have assigned blame to the movie’s weapons specialist, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in a trial this year and sentenced to 18 months in prison, and to the movie’s first assistant director, Dave Halls, who has acknowledged that he failed to properly inspect the gun that day and took a plea deal.Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer of the First Judicial District Courthouse in Santa Fe, N.M., questioned the lead prosecutor in the case, Kari T. Morrissey, on the defense’s complaints about how she had presented the case to the grand jury. The judge pressed Ms. Morrissey on the defense’s claim that she had “steered grand jurors away” from their proposed witnesses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Nickelodeon and Disney Stars Find a Second Act on Podcasts

    The cast of the Nickelodeon series “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide” are among the stars of 2000s teen sitcoms who are using podcasts to connect with their Gen Z and millennial fan bases.For three years starting when he was just 12 years old, Devon Werkheiser dispensed advice for bearing the indignities of middle school as the title character in the Nickelodeon series “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide.” Two decades later, he said, people still recognize him as Ned Bigby.“There was a time when I wanted to transcend ‘Ned’s,’” Werkheiser said, “but maybe it’s the answer in getting me where I want to go.”Now 33, he’s made peace with his past and is still giving tips to his peers, only he is using a more modern medium. In “Ned’s Declassified Podcast Survival Guide,” he and his former “Ned’s” castmates Lindsey Shaw and Daniel Curtis Lee dish about the show, which aired from 2004 to 2007, and open up about past personal and career struggles.The three are among a cohort of former stars, many from Nickelodeon and Disney Channel shows from the 2000s, who have started podcasts as a way of connecting with a nostalgic Gen Z and millennial fan base. In doing so, they are embracing roles that they played as children and teenagers — characters that some had spent years trying to move beyond, with mixed success.“Part of the truth is, if any of our careers were maybe further along, maybe we wouldn’t be doing podcasts,” Werkheiser said in an interview. “There are comments that speak to that as if we don’t know.”Since the “Ned’s” podcast debuted in February 2023, several exchanges have caused a stir among its 717,000 TikTok followers. Shaw, who played Moze on the show, spoke about her past struggles with substance abuse. Werkheiser gave an emotional account of his time on the set of the troubled Alec Baldwin western “Rust.” And he and Shaw punctured the innocent image of their old show with an awkward exchange about their fumbling offscreen sexual encounters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What the ‘Rust’ Jury Heard About How Live Rounds Got on a Film Set

    The prosecution pointed to a photo of the film’s armorer, arguing she had brought the live rounds. Her lawyers tried to focus attention on the movie’s primary ammunition supplier.Ever since a real, live bullet discharged from the gun that Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on the set of the film “Rust” in 2021, killing the cinematographer and wounding the director, one question has vexed everyone involved: How did live ammunition end up on a film set, where — all agree — it absolutely should never have been?The film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was found guilty on Wednesday of involuntary manslaughter in the death of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and faces up to 18 months in prison. The jury found that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, 26, had behaved negligently by failing to check that all of the rounds she loaded into Mr. Baldwin’s revolver were dummies, which are inert rounds that look real but cannot be fired.The question of where the live ammunition came from in the first place has hung over the case from the start. The original investigation by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office did not reach a conclusion on where the live rounds had come from.During the trial, prosecutors sought to convince jurors that it was Ms. Gutierrez-Reed who was responsible for bringing the rounds onto the set. The defense asserted that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, who did not testify, was not at fault, and tried to focus attention on the movie’s primary weapons and ammunition supplier, Seth Kenney, who took the stand and denied responsibility.Here is what emerged during the trial about the live ammunition, and where it may have come from.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed during the trial.Pool photo by Eddie MooreProsecutors zeroed in on a box of rounds from the set.When investigators arrived at the chaotic scene shortly after the shooting, on Oct. 21, 2021, Ms. Gutierrez-Reed showed a lieutenant from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office a cart where she kept guns and ammunition and drew his attention to a box of ammunition where she said that she had retrieved the rounds she put in Mr. Baldwin’s revolver.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Manslaughter Trial Begins of ‘Rust’ Armorer in Alec Baldwin Shooting

    Prosecutors said the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was responsible for the presence of live ammunition on the set and for failing to check the gun; the defense said she was a scapegoat.The involuntary manslaughter trial of the armorer who loaded the gun Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on the set of “Rust” when it fired, killing the movie’s cinematographer, began on Thursday with prosecutors accusing her of performing “sloppy and incomplete” safety checks of the weapon and of being responsible for the presence of live rounds on the set.During opening arguments one of the prosecutors told the jury that the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, had treated gun safety protocols on the film set “as if they were optional,” leading her to miss the fact that she had loaded a live round into an old-fashioned revolver she was preparing for Mr. Baldwin.The gun went off as he practiced drawing it at a blocking rehearsal, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.“We believe that it was the negligent acts and failures of the defendant, Ms. Gutierrez, that resulted in both the acts that contributed to Ms. Hutchins’s death and to the live rounds being brought onto the set,” the prosecutor, Jason J. Lewis, said in the First Judicial District Courthouse in Santa Fe, N.M., as the trial began.Mr. Baldwin is being tried separately on an involuntary manslaughter charge. He has pleaded not guilty.On the day of the fatal shooting — Oct. 21, 2021 — the crew was setting up a tight frame of Mr. Baldwin drawing a revolver ahead of a gunfight when the weapon fired a live round, striking Ms. Hutchins and then hitting the movie’s director, Joel Souza, who survived.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More