Following reports that the actor Alec Baldwin’s cellphone had not yet been turned over to officials investigating the fatal shooting on the “Rust” film set — weeks after a search warrant was granted — Mr. Baldwin said on Saturday that any suggestion that he was not complying with law enforcement was a “lie.”
The police in Santa Fe, N.M., obtained a search warrant more than three weeks ago granting it access to information on Mr. Baldwin’s phone related to the October shooting, during which a gun that Mr. Baldwin was rehearsing with fired a live round, killing the movie’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding its director, Joel Souza.
The sheriff’s office and district attorney of Santa Fe County investigating how a live round got into the gun told media outlets this week that the authorities did not yet have Mr. Baldwin’s phone, prompting the actor to respond in a video posted to his Instagram page.
Filming himself from the driver’s seat of a parked car, Mr. Baldwin said the process for recovering information from his phone “takes time” and involved the authorities in New Mexico coordinating with the authorities where he lives.
“Someone from another state can’t come to you and say, ‘Give me your phone,’” Mr. Baldwin said in the video, adding: “They have to specify what exactly they want. They can’t just go through your phone and take, you know, your photos or your love letters to your wife or what have you.”
What Happened on the Set of ‘Rust’
He added, in reference to the process and the warrant, “We are 1,000 percent going to comply with all that.”
According to an affidavit filed in the application for the search warrant, granted by a judge in New Mexico on Dec. 16, Detective Alexandria Hancock asked Mr. Baldwin and his lawyer on the day of the fatal shooting to hand over his phone but was told to obtain a warrant.
That month, a lawyer for Mr. Baldwin, Aaron Dyer, said they “proactively requested that the authorities obtain a warrant so that we could take steps to protect Mr. Baldwin’s family and personal information that is clearly unrelated to the investigation.”
When the search warrant for Mr. Baldwin’s phone was granted, officials in Santa Fe requested help from the sheriff’s office in Suffolk County in New York, where Mr. Baldwin has a home. Paul Spinella, a spokesman for the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office, said the request had been forwarded to the county’s district attorney’s office to “work out the differences in laws” between the two states.
Juan Rios, a spokesman for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, said on Friday that once the authorities received the results of the search warrant, they would be considered public record.
In a television interview last month, Mr. Baldwin fiercely insisted that he was not to blame in the fatal shooting of Ms. Hutchins, 42, and said that he did not pull the trigger when he was practicing with the old-fashioned Colt revolver on the set of “Rust.” He added that he did not cock the hammer of the gun, but pulled it back as far as he could and let it go in an action that might have set it off.
For more than two months, detectives have been working to figure out how live bullets, which are not typically allowed, ended up on the film set and whether they could have come from the supplier of blanks and dummy rounds for the production.
“The best way — the only way — we can honor the death of Halyna Hutchins is to find out the truth,” Mr. Baldwin said in the Instagram video.
