On Oct. 21, actor Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun on a movie set in New Mexico, killing the film’s cinematographer and injuring its director, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the killing.
The fatal incident has drawn widespread news coverage, including by Variety, which has reported on the developing story and death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
A screenshot of what appears to be an excerpt from that story is being shared on social media, but with an addition that wasn’t in the original article.
“According to an on-set source, the director had called for another take when Baldwin (jokingly) remarked ‘Another take? How about I just f—— shoot the both of ya?’ before firing on the pair,” it looks like the story says in the screenshot shared on Instagram.
But that line, circled in red for emphasis, doesn’t actually appear in the story.
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Gene Maddaus, an enterprise reporter for Variety who co-wrote the story with deputy editor Pat Saperstein, told PolitiFact that the sentence “did not come from us.”
“We didn’t report it or write it and we have no reason to believe it is remotely true,” Maddaus said.
We reviewed archived snapshots of the story — 36 had been taken using the Wayback Machine as of about 5 p.m. on Oct. 22 — and none included the quote in the Instagram post. We also couldn’t find any credible source elsewhere online quoting Baldwin as saying this, though it did appear on the website 4chan, where disinformation is often shared.
Baldwin tweeted a statement on Oct. 22 saying he had “no words” to convey his shock and sadness about “the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours.”
We rate this post False.
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. It is republished here with permission. See the sources for this fact check here and more of their fact checks here.
