JAN MOIR: Their bodies pressed close, their heads together, the very private moment I witnessed in a quiet corridor that reveals how Alec Baldwin clung to his wife for support

If Alec Baldwin was looking for omens on the eve of his manslaughter trial, there were plenty to be found.

On the night before the State v Alexander Rae Baldwin case began in the Santa Fe courthouse, a thunderstorm swept through town, with heavy rain sluicing through the dusty streets and lightning flashing across an angry purple sky.

The following night, a power outage plunged the downtown area into darkness for over two hours. At this time of year in New Mexico, authorities warn everyone to be monsoon-aware and ready for what locals call downburst winds — but how could Alec Baldwin possibly prepare for the tornado that has barrelled through his life?

The Emmy award-winning actor had been charged with involuntary manslaughter over his role in the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of his western film, Rust. The incident happened in October 2021, when cast and crew were rehearsing on the Bonanza Creek movie ranch, about 20 miles south of Santa Fe.

A gun held by Baldwin went off — he claims he did not pull the trigger — and the live bullet, mistakenly loaded instead of a dummy or a blank, killed Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza.

Yesterday the case against him was sensationally dismissed midway through the trial after the judge said there had been errors by the prosecution in the handling of evidence that ‘impacted the fundamental fairness of the case’.

Prior to this bombshell, through a long week in court — during litigation, jury selection and finally opening statements on Wednesday — Baldwin had presented himself as the innocent accused, the earnest defendant in a smart suit and tie.

However, he’s not going to win any Emmys for this performance. Perhaps it is the 66-year-old actor’s bad luck that his resting face often folded into an unfortunate quasi-sneer and that his factory setting of tetchy diffidence was hard to disguise. Perhaps it was his lack of familiarity with court proceedings that made him get up on Thursday afternoon and just walk out of the courtroom in the middle of the trial — to the surprise of his own legal team — only to return a short while later with a cup of coffee.

Baldwin’s abrupt exit came as the prosecution were outlining evidence revealing that just hours after the fatal shooting, he told his wife Hilaria to carry on with arrangements to bring their young family to New Mexico for a holiday. In a FaceTime call made when he was being interviewed by police officers, he promised a ‘good time’ and added that they wouldn’t get their money back for the flights anyway.

It’s not every man who can be so pragmatic and fiscally aware in the middle of a tragedy. Especially a man who wrote in Nevertheless, his 2017 memoir: ‘I have an above average empathy for other people’s feelings.’

More eyebrows were raised this week when the couple and two of their children went shopping in downtown Santa Fe, where Alec cheerfully signed autographs for fans in a coffee shop. Was this appropriate behaviour for the accused in the middle of his criminal trial? Or would hiding away have been seen as an admission of shame and guilt?

It is no secret that the Baldwins have signed up to make a TLC reality television show with their seven young children. This gives rise to the suspicion that every public outing with the kids is now a strategic ploy, an orchestrated pageant designed to tickle interest and attract viewers — even if they really are just another family popping out for an ice cream.

The irony is, Alec and Hilaria are doing the show out of necessity — now that his job offers have dried up, they need the money. For a start, the top lawyers on his elite legal team charge at least £1,500 an hour — each.

And after years of being hounded by the paparazzi, it would be understandable if The Baldwins was a necessary evil for the Baldwins. Having cameras in the sanctity of their home must be the last thing on earth they wanted to do.

In the immediate aftermath of the Hutchins shooting, Alec took a precious moment to think only of himself and said: ‘I don’t want to do this any more, I don’t want to be a public person.’ And while Hilaria may be a celebrity mumfluencer with nearly a million followers on Instagram, a woman who once filmed herself wearing lacy lingerie to announce she’d just had a miscarriage, she needs her privacy, too.

Especially after publicly presenting herself as having Spanish heritage for years before it turned out she had nothing of the sort. Hilaria was really Hilary from Boston; not Spanish but Spanish ‘adjacent’.

In the trailers for the new reality show, she has even dropped her fake Spanish accent, ay caramba.

During the trial, the Baldwins were staying at the Eldorado hotel in Santa Fe, by no means the best or most expensive in town, but it does have a presidential suite, a rooftop pool and a spa offering a £175 Kansa Wand Facial, which promises to firm your complexion using a massage wand made from copper and zinc.

As the Alec and Hilaria show rolled on in Santa Fe before the case was dropped, they were both giving it all to convince the judge, jury and an entire town that they are good people.

Every day this week, Hilaria had climbed aboard her towering heels, slipped into a power suit and accompanied her husband to court. As the week progressed, she became increasingly tactile during breaks, walking across the court to rub her husband’s shoulders and stroke his face in a manner that can only be described as curdled Markle-esque — looking at Alec, with his eyes pouched with stress and his ravaged face sometimes making him look like a bulldog that’s been through a boil wash. He lapped it up. And he needed all the comfort he could get, because the truth is that there was scant sympathy for his plight here.

Take Bill Roney, who has been in the firearms trade for 52 years and owns The Outdoorsman gun shop in the DeVargas Center shopping mall. ‘That’s a bunch of baloney,’ he said, of Baldwin’s claim that the gun went off itself.

 

Roney sells guns of all shapes and sizes, including antique and modern rifles, revolvers and semi-automatics. When he started in the business, people would buy guns primarily for backcountry game hunting, now he says it’s mostly for personal protection. His store features stuffed stag trophies on the walls and a female assistant wearing a slogan T-shirt that reads: ‘I find Your Lack of Ammo Disturbing.’

As a Brit, I find this slightly odd — a gun shop opposite a boutique and near a nail bar — but it would not have seemed strange to the jury who were sworn in on Tuesday. All of them lived in a region with strong links to gun ownership, while Santa Fe itself (pop. 90,000) has four gun shops, a gun section in the local Walmart, one firearms academy and one gun coaching business called The Mindful Shooter.

During the jury selection process, the legal teams quizzed prospective jurors on their opinions about gun safety. ‘Treat every gun as a loaded gun,’ was the consensus.Don’t forget, we are deep in cowboy country here, in a former frontier land where the presence of the old Wild West is still keenly felt. Less than 200 years ago the Apache peace treaty was signed in town, while Billy the Kid was once held in Santa Fe jail for 90 days before going on trial himself for murder. There is a plaque in his honour opposite the Baldwins’ hotel, which is poignant because his was the first ever celebrity trial in New Mexico. One hundred and forty-three years later, Alec Baldwin’s was the second. Then and now the locals don’t take kindly to outsiders waving guns around, especially if they suspect they don’t know what they are doing.

And while some gun-savvy Santafeans see Baldwin’s behaviour on set as reckless, there are others who lay the blame for the death of Hutchins squarely on Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, 27, the armourer on the Rust set who is already serving an 18-month jail sentence for her role in the shooting.

She was responsible for gun safety and has never been able to explain how the live ammunition found its way into Baldwin’s gun, which she allegedly loaded before the fatal rehearsal. Whether he should have checked it himself before pointing it at Hutchins, or simply trusted Gutierrez-Reed to do her job, was one of the key questions at the heart of this case.

In an unrelated incident just before the tragedy, Gutierrez-Reed was cautioned by the police for taking a gun into the Matador, a punk music dive bar in Santa Fe.

‘She wasn’t a regular here,’ a barmaid with a 2ft Mohican hairstyle told me on Thursday.

In the dimly lit dump with its graffitied walls, you have to wonder why a young woman would risk so much to carry a loaded weapon into a place like this, where the only danger is an ear bleed from the deafening music.

Earlier yesterday, before the case was sensationally dropped, it was business as usual back in court. Baldwin’s defence lawyers had made yet another attempt to have the case dismissed, accusing the prosecution of burying evidence.

Prosecutor Kari Morrissey dismissed this as ‘a wild goose chase’ while Judge Sommer looked on, wearied. At the defence table, Baldwin made notes and consulted his iPad in a day of bitter recriminations and legal chaos.

Hannah Gutierrez-Reed herself was due, next week, to have been called by the prosecution to give evidence against her former boss It would have been an interesting moment, given that the last time they met was on the Rust set, in those far off days before the nightmare began.

Back then, Hutchins the cinematographer, Gutierrez-Reed the armourer and Baldwin the actor were all creative spirits united in the noble common purpose of making movie magic. Now Halyna is dead, Hannah is in prison and Alex was on trial.

From her seat in the public benches directly behind Baldwin, Hilaria’s support for her beleaguered husband never wavered.

In her grey trouser suit, hoop earrings and trademark vertiginous heels, she remained a one-woman perfect storm of positive energy, even if there were moments when she looks gaunt.

During a break in the trial earlier in the week, I watched Alec and Hilaria walk along a quiet corridor in the courthouse, their bodies pressed close, their heads together, for a moment oblivious to everything except each other.

She was making large circular pats on his back, the kind you give to a colicky baby, while talking soothingly in his ear. Then they walked back into the courtroom hand in hand. You can see what a tremendous tower of strength she is to him, how much he depended on her and how utterly resolute she has been in the face of this calamity visited upon her family.

She’s got seven children under the age of ten and a husband who has seen his income stream enter a period of drought, which is possibly terminal despite yesterday’s dismissal of the case. They’ve had to sell their big house, tailor their dreams and downsize their plans for the future.

You could argue they have not suffered as much as Halyna Hutchins’s family. Yet as Bill Roney from The Outdoorsman said: ‘Somebody really messed up. But this is a tragedy for everyone, including Alec Baldwin.’ However, come what may, Mrs Baldwin is not going to buckle. And you have to admire her for that.

n Additional reporting: Barbara McMahon