Did you really not pull the trigger?: Alec Baldwin charges at reporter who questions his – Daily Mail

An umbrella-wielding Alec Baldwin was filmed rushing towards a reporter who confronted him outside Woody Allen’s Manhattan townhouse.

Baldwin launched at New York Post journalist Jon Levine, but did not make contact with him, while being confronted over his latest claims about his fatal shooting of a cinematographer on his western.  Levine grilled Alec about claims made in his first sit-down interview since he accidentally killed Halyna Hutchins.

That saw Baldwin claim that he didn’t pull the trigger and fire the shot that killed Hutchins, despite cops saying he did so. 

The encounter, filmed outside Allen’s Upper East Side home Monday night, began with 63 year-old Baldwin’s wife Hilaria, 37, scolding the reporter while brandishing her phone’s camera and apparently filming him. 

‘Mr. Baldwin, I have to ask you, what brings you to New York City,’ asked New York Post journalist Jon Levine, sidestepping Baldwin’s wife to film the actor waiting at the ornate entranceway of Allen’s home.

‘I asked you to leave,’ Hilaria snapped. 

When Levine asked who lived at the property, peering around the other side of the actor’s wife as she asked him again to ‘please go away,’ Baldwin turned on his heels and sprang toward the reporter. 

 Scroll down for video

‘You’re not allowed to photograph onto someone’s private home,’ Baldwin shouted, gesturing with the umbrella gripped tightly in his hand and sending Levine backing up onto the sidewalk. 

Hilaria grabbed her husband, holding Baldwin back as he repeated the statement before the actor turned back toward the door. 

‘This is not… this is public property,’ Levine stuttered back, regaining his composure. 

‘Go away, stop it,’ Hilaria said as a man in a white dress shirt and tie opened the door to Allen’s home and Baldwin stepped inside, gesturing for her to join him. 

‘Did you really not pull the trigger? Do you believe it went off without you pulling the trigger? Was it a malfunction?’ Levine asked from the sidewalk as the door closed behind the Baldwins.   

Last Thursday, Baldwin tearfully maintained that he didn’t pull the trigger and that the gun just ‘went off’ while in his hands on the set of the movie in New Mexico on October 21, killing Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza.

‘I let go of the hammer, bang. The gun goes off. Everyone is horrified. They’re shocked. It’s loud,’ he said in an interview with ABC. 

‘Someone is responsible for what happened, and I can’t say who it is, but it’s not me.’

Baldwin has starred in a number of Allen’s films, including ‘To Rome with Love’ in 2012 and ‘Blue Jasmine’ in 2013. 

The outspoken actor has been a staunch defender of his director friend through claims that the 85-year-old molested his daughter Dylan Farrow, which were made public in 1992 and brought back into the public eye with the 2021 Netflix documentary, ‘Allen v. Farrow.’

Now, as Baldwin faces national scrutiny for his actions on the Rust set, Allen invited the disgraced actor to his family home, assessed at over $17 million, where he lives with wife Soon-Yi and youngest daughter, Manzie.

Baldwin said he ‘would have killed [himself]’ if he felt responsible for shooting Hutchins in the Thursday ABC interview, where he discussed the aftermath of the fatal shooting for the first time since it took place.   

‘She’s getting me to position the gun – everything is at her direction. I draw the gun, to her marker. I’m not shooting to the camera lens, I’m shooting just off. In her direction. This was a completely incidental shot, that may not have ended up in the film.’

Baldwin says he cocked the gun, and was discussing with Hutchins how it looked on camera. 

‘I’m just showing. I go, ‘How ’bout that? Does that work? You see that? Do you see that?’  And then she goes, “Yeah, that’s good.”

‘I let go of the hammer, bang. The gun goes off. Everyone is horrified. They’re shocked. It’s loud. They don’t have their earplugs in. 

 ‘No one was – the gun was supposed to be empty. I was told I was handed an empty gun. If they were cosmetic rounds, nothing with a charge at all, a flash round, nothing. 

‘She goes down, I thought to myself, “Did she faint?” The notion that there was a live round in that gun did not dawn on me ’till probably 45 minutes to an hour later.’

He added: ‘Well, she’s laying there and I go, “Did she hit by wadding? Was there a blank?” Sometimes those blank rounds have a wadding inside that packs, it’s like a cloth that packs the gunpowder in. Sometimes wadding comes out, it can hit people, and it could feel like a little bit of a poke. 

‘But no one could understand. Did she have a heart attack? Because remember the idea that someone put a live bullet in the gun was not even in reality.” 

‘I never pulled the trigger. No, no, no. You would never do that.’

 But many have continued to question Alec Baldwin’s version of events since the interview aired on Thursday. 

Bryan W. Carpenter, a weapons armorer who works for Dark Thirty Film Services, said he was skeptical that Baldwin never pulled the trigger.

‘In order to make it fire, you have to put your thumb up onto the hammer, cock the hammer all the way back, and then as the hammer is completely cocked back, then you pull the trigger and then the gun fires,’ Carpenter told Fox News. ‘So that’s very important because that gun had to have two step process to fire. It had to be cocked and the trigger pulled to fire.’

Carpenter continued: ‘Once you cock the hammer back on one of those old west guns, it doesn’t take a lot to set that trigger off.’

His comments come after Santa Fe Sheriff Adan Mendoza told the outlet that ‘guns don’t just go off. So whatever needs to happen to manipulate the firearm, [Baldwin] did that and it was in his hands.’ 

Some on social media were also skeptical of Baldwin’s claim that he didn’t pull the trigger. 

‘The only way any firearm is going to fire is if the trigger mechanism is pulled or jolted hard on older weapons. I.E. dropped, banged hard,’ tweeted one user. ‘Do you truly believe people are so stupid to believe your nonsense?’

‘Good grief his “acting” is horrendous,’ tweeted another. ‘Western style handguns either require the shooter cock the weapon first or don’t. Either way, this weapon had the trigger pulled. It wasn’t dropped.

‘@AlecBaldwin had it in his hands and killed Halyna and wounded another. Man up, already.’

Detectives are now investigating whether Seth Kenney, a 51-year-old Hollywood veteran who was supposed to provide the film with dummy rounds and blanks, may have sent recycled bullets from a previous set, according to an affidavit filed by the Sante Fe County Sheriff’s Office.

Investigators there continue to probe Hutchins’ death, and have yet to file any criminal charges.