Oh, Alec, not again. One of Hollywood’s noted leftists, Alec Baldwin — affectionately known among media members as the gift that keeps on giving — waded back into controversy recently with a 500-plus-word penned letter to a local newspaper decrying the very industry that boosts his prestige, the paparazzi.
In a letter to The East Hampton Star, Mr. Baldwin, MSNBC’s newest show host, called out celebrity photographers in general, and one named Jason Gutterman in particular, dubbing them “vermin” who have no business trailing the stars.
An excerpt, from Breitbart: “Gutterman has been staked out in front of Mary’s Marvelous most weekends, beginning this summer, and has marauded up and down the village’s Main Street in search of photos of my wife and/or newborn child. … Gutterman secrets himself behind a tree or parked car, clicking away, hoping to catch someone in mid-bite or otherwise behaving in a way that pretty much everyone else going in or out of Mary’s behaves. When Gutterman is finished, he puts his equipment into a bag and strolls right into Mary’s gets in line with his son, and assumes the demeanor of any other neighbor seeking good coffee and a muffin.”
Mr. Baldwin then blasted Mr. Gutterman for “seeking to casually invade the privacy of people out in public and attempting to live their lives in peace by insisting that he has a job to do and that public figures are never, ever entitled to normal consideration.”
He likens Mr. Gutterman to “kidnappers and home invaders” who lie in wait for their opportunities, Breitbart reported.
“I have never seen this before,” Mr. Baldwin wrote, before complaining about another unnamed photographer — a “tall, middle-aged, slovenly” figure with “the unmistakable air of a grown man who still spends serious time of a couch watching ’South Park’ while his mother makes grilled-cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup.”
Mr. Baldwin said in the letter that he once asked the man to quit photographing him, but was told no. To that, Mr. Baldwin wrote, “I never got his name, but I suppose Sewerman will do for the time being.”
Mr. Baldwin then dropped all pretense at polite demeanor.
“What has gone wrong with our society that this vermin has spawned in East Hampton? These are not New Yorkers that have slithered out here. They are home grown. They are locals. And they obviously have no idea about how to live in a community like ours.”
Mr. Baldwin called on the “local government [to] address this issue,” which is more related to “criminal harassment, abuse and authorizing the intimidation and stalking of one group in our society while protecting the basic rights of all others” than any “freedom of the press,” he said.
And that, he wrapped, is “remarkably like a bill of attainder.” It’s just downright “unconstitutional,” he said.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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