Alec Baldwin and Halyna Hutchins’ Husband Sued by Rust Gun Supplier

Alec Baldwin’s years-long Rust shooting saga continued this week after the gun supplier for the doomed production sued him and other key figures on the film.

Seth Kenney, who owns PDQ Arm & Prop, filed a lawsuit on October 22 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, against Baldwin, the estate of the late Halyna Hutchins and her husband Matthew Hutchins, according to documents obtained by the Daily Mail.

Kenney’s lawsuit also names as defendants Rust’s production company, as well as the film’s armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed — who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison — and the film’s producers and other crew members.

In his complaint, Kenney claims that Baldwin, Hutchins and others made him a ‘scapegoat’ and destroyed his reputation in the wake of the accidental shooting that killed Hutchins and injured Rust director Joel Souza.

Representatives for Baldwin and Hannah Gutierrez-Reed declined to comment. 

The Daily Mail has also contacted representatives for Hutchins and Kenney seeking comment but has not yet received responses. 

Baldwin, who was holding the prop revolver that discharged during a rehearsal, has denied pulling the trigger and said he was told the weapon did not contain live rounds. 

Gutierrez-Reed, who was paroled in May, is currently appealing her conviction. 

Kenney’s shop supplied the Colt .45 revolver that eventually killed Hutchins. 

In an interview with Variety, Kenney said the shooting and its aftermath had been ‘devastating’ to his career.

‘It’s not a matter of saving face. There’s nothing left to lose,’ he said. ‘This whole thing has been s*** and I have been the scapegoat.’

He said in his lawsuit that studios have stopped hiring him for film projects in the wake of the Rust shooting. 

In his filing, Kenney lashed out at the ‘cutthroat industry Hollywood “fixers” and media,’ whom he accuses of causing him ‘significant loss of past, present and future financial income.’

He also claimed that the defendants teamed up with YouTubers and online trolls in hopes of harming his reputation, and Kenney told Variety that he hopes details of Baldwin’s alleged use of media fixers would come to light in the discovery phase of his lawsuit.

However, investigators have so far failed to determine exactly how the live rounds made their way into the firearm before it was handed to Baldwin. 

Kenney claimed that the defendants attempted to ‘to paint [him] in a nationwide false light scapegoat smear campaign’ in hopes of evading scrutiny and punishment for the shooting. 

He added that the defendants ‘chose to misuse’ his ‘firearm rental property for cost-cutting financial gain.’

Matthew Hutchins — who said ‘there were a number of industry standards that were not practiced’ on the Rust set after filing his own since-settled lawsuit against Baldwin and other producers of the film — was not initially connected to the production aside from his late wife’s work on the film before her death.

However, Hutchins was subsequently named an executive producer on the film as part of the terms of the settlement to his lawsuit. 

Kenney ultimately accuses Gutierrez-Reed of being responsible for introducing the live rounds into the revolver.

‘Hannah started this deadly snowball,’ Kenney told Variety. ‘Then the rest of them do everything they’re not supposed to do.’

Kenney claimed ‘upon information and belief’ that her dummy supply ‘had been mixed with live .45 Colt rounds that she had been shooting in her off hours while working as an Armorer on The Old Way,’ referencing the film starring Nicolas Cage.

At her trial, prosecutors shared evidence suggesting that Gutierrez-Reed may have brought over a supply of ‘contaminated’ dummy rounds that had live rounds dangerously mixed in from the earlier film to Rust after working as armorer on The Old Way. 

Gutierrez-Reed told police shortly after the shooting that she obtained the dummy rounds used on The Old Way from Kenney. 

She filed a lawsuit against the firearms supplier in 2022, but it was later withdrawn. 

Kenney initially told police that he ‘might have’ provided the box of ammo that Gutierrez-Reed first used on The Old Way, but he later testified in that the bullets were supplied by her father, the film armorer Thell Reed.

He told Variety that it ‘took [him] a while to realize’ that he had never owned that particular box of ammunition.

In December, the firearm supplier sued the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office for allegedly lying in order to obtain a warrant to search his business. 

The Sheriff’s Office declined to comment at the time, and the case is still ongoing. 

Kenney’s lawsuit against Baldwin comes in the wake of the actor’s 2022 lawsuit naming the gun supplier and other film crew members for failing to maintain safety on set.

Baldwin claimed that the shooting occurred because ‘because live bullets were delivered to the set and loaded into the gun,’ but the lawsuit was eventually settled. 

On October 21, 2021, a prop firearm held by Baldwin discharged on the New Mexico set of the Western film Rust, striking and killing Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza. 

Baldwin denied pulling the trigger and said he was told the revolver was unloaded, and an involuntary manslaughter charge against him was dismissed with prejudice in July 2024. 

On October 21, 2021, a revolver used as a prop that Baldwin was holding discharged on the set of Rust, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring the film’s director, Joel Souza. Baldwin said the deadly incident was an accident and claimed not to have pulled the trigger. 

Baldwin was subsequently charged with involuntary manslaughter in January 2023 in response to the death of Hutchins. 

The charges were dropped in April of that year, only for him to be indicted again in January 2024 for involuntary manslaughter.

Three days after the July 9, 2024, start of his trial, the judge overseeing it dismissed the charges against him with prejudice after determining that prosecutors had ‘shown signs of scorching prejudice’ by failing to turn over evidence of bullets discovered during the investigation that could have potentially been exculpatory.

‘Defendants, while acting under the color of law, conspired to procure a groundless indictment against Baldwin and to maliciously bring about or advance Baldwin’s trial and conviction, thus violating Baldwin’s constitutional rights by their improper use of the criminal process,’ the suit claimed.

‘Defendants sought at every turn to scapegoat Baldwin for the acts and omissions of others, regardless of the evidence or the law.’ 

The lawsuit named Special Prosecutor Kari Morrissey, Santa Fe District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies and investigators from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office as defendants. 

It came just weeks after the district attorney’s office announced it would not pursue an appeal of a court’s decision to dismiss the involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin.

Morrissey withdrew her appeal in December of a decision to dismiss the charge against Baldwin in Hutchins’ death.

‘Today’s decision to dismiss the appeal is the final vindication of what Alec Baldwin and his attorneys have said from the beginning — this was an unspeakable tragedy but Alec Baldwin committed no crime,’ Baldwin’s defense attorneys Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro said at the time. ‘The rule of law remains intact in New Mexico.’

The decision to drop the appeal solidified the decision by Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer halfway through trial to dismiss the case on allegations that police and prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense.

Prosecutors had said they deemed ammunition that was brought into the Santa Fe County sheriff’s office in March 2024 unrelated and unimportant to the case, but Baldwin’s defense team claimed in court that investigators ‘buried’ the evidence.

Judge Sommer said at the time that the dismissal was ‘the only warranted remedy’ amid the legal issues and that there was ‘no way for the court to right this wrong.’

‘The late discovery of this evidence has impacted the fundamental fairness of the proceedings,’ the judge said. 

‘As a result, the State’s efforts to continue to litigate the case in a fair and comprehensive manner have been met with multiple barriers that have compromised its ability to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law,’ local prosecutors said. 

Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer for Rust, was pointing a gun at Hutchins during a rehearsal on set when the revolver went off, killing Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza. 

Baldwin has said he pulled back the hammer — but not the trigger — and the revolver fired.

After the case was thrown out, Baldwin regained some of his position in Hollywood.

‘I do believe that by the communications I’ve had lately, that things are coming back my way to work, and I’m happy for that because I’ve got seven kids,’ he said in a candid conversation on David Duchovny’s podcast Fail Better.

‘But I’ve also enjoyed the fact that there’s so much of this case that is not known, because we didn’t have a full trial. The judge canceled the case. She ruled that it was dismissed with prejudice, which I’m very grateful for because it was, I think, a very, very informed decision on her part,’ he said. 

‘But if I’d gone all the way and gotten a verdict, that’s a little bit better because a bunch of people in a jury had considered the facts and we would’ve presented so much more. All that doesn’t get presented because the case is over.’

A judge, however, had previously sentenced Rust’s weapons supervisor Hannah Gutierrez-Reed to the maximum of one-and-a-half years at a state penitentiary on an involuntary manslaughter conviction in Hutchins’ death.

The district attorney’s office said that under state law the New Mexico attorney general would have carried forward the appeal but ‘did not intend to exhaustively pursue the appeal on behalf of the prosecution.’ 

Prosecutors blamed Gutierrez-Reed for unwittingly bringing live ammunition onto the set of Rust, where it was expressly prohibited, and for failing to follow basic gun-safety protocols.

She was released from prison in May on parole. 

Meanwhile, assistant director and safety coordinator David Halls pleaded no contest to the negligent use of a deadly weapon and was sentenced to six months of unsupervised probation. A no contest plea isn’t an admission of guilt but is treated as such for sentencing purposes.