Alec Baldwin smacks phone of harasser demanding he say 'Free Palestine'
Alec Baldwin was confronted by an anti-Israel agitator at a cafe and the post has since gone viral. Credit: Getty Images / John Lamparski
In a tweeted video posted Monday evening, Long Island native Alec Baldwin appears to smack a cellphone from the hand of an agitated woman screaming antisemitic and personal comments at him for nearly a minute.
"Alec, can you please say ‘Free Palestine’ one time?” says the off-screen woman — an online ambush-interview performer known pseudonymously as Crackhead Barney — in a video showing the actor, 66, at the counter of the Maman cafe chain’s location on University Place in Manhattan.
When Baldwin ignores the woman, she shifts to a personal attack: “Why did you kill that lady? You killed that lady and got no jail time” — a reference to the accidental shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set of the Western movie “Rust” in October 2021. Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, under whose watch a live round rather than a blank found its way into a prop gun Baldwin fired upon assurances it was safe, was sentenced earlier this month to 18 months in prison for involuntary manslaughter. Baldwin in January pleaded not guilty to a similar charge.
As the woman continues haranguing the Amityville-born and Massapequa-raised Baldwin, the actor tells a staff person, “I’m so sorry,” and then opens the shop’s door as the woman yells, “Just say, ‘Free Palestine’ one time. One time! One time!”
Baldwin, standing in the open doorway, beckons her to leave, and finally asks the staff to “call the police.”
The woman begins cursing at him, and then escalates to cursing Israel. Three-time Emmy Award-winner Baldwin sighs and comes back in. “Can you do me one quick favor?” he asks an off-screen staffer. He then looks at the person shooting video, and with a smacking sound the phone image goes visibly askew.
“ . . . Alec Baldwin attacked me While I was trying to get coffeee [sic],” read the tweet, which had garnered more than 8 million views in less than a day. X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, posted a contextual statement with it reading: “The person filming this video was not ‘trying to get coffee’. They repeatedly and viciously harassed Alec Baldwin and refused to leave the establishment when asked to by the staff. There is also no evidence they were attacked.”
Baldwin’s representative had no comment.
Despite the video’s viral reach, the thousands of comments appeared overwhelmingly negative toward the woman. “I don’t even like him and I would’ve helped HIM not you,” one person wrote.
“You’re not an activist, you’re a narcissist,” commented another.
“Was this your final assignment for clown college?” said one more.
Perhaps the most quintessentially New York comment: “Don’t hassle some guy trying to buy a coffee.”
