14 DAY TRIAL // Alec Baldwin’s highly flammable temper is costing him more than a few fans and plenty of negative media attention: it just cost him his Up Late show with MSNBC, which was first suspended for 2 weeks and then officially yanked from the network.
MSNBC calls it a “a mutual parting,” with a rep saying, “We wish Alec all the best.” Mutual parting it was not, the actor explains to The Gothamist, elaborating how extreme gays ripped him apart for something he didn’t even do, but for which he must take the fall nonetheless.
It all started with a heated exchange between Baldwin and one paparazzo that was trying to get his picture as he was leaving his NYC apartment. Video showed Baldwin apparently calling him two homophobic slurs, neither of which we can reproduce in writing, but he claims he’s guilty of uttering only the first.
Baldwin is now saying that, while he immediately explained what he’d said, gay advocates still went for him and got him fired from his job.
“There's nothing you can do when you get thrown in this washing machine, nothing. You know? Nothing. All you end up doing is just defending yourself all day long,” he laments.
He goes on to name one high-profile GLAAD advocate and one gay blogger who both went after him in the press for saying those 2 words, though Alec swears he didn’t say both, just one.
“Martin Bashir's on the air, and he made his comment on the air! I dispute half the comment I made... […] That I know. But you've got the fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy — Rich Ferraro and Andrew Sullivan — they're out there, they've got you. Rich Ferraro, this is probably one of his greatest triumphs. They killed my show. And I have to take some responsibility for that myself,” he says.
He also disputes claims made by the NY Post that he was a complete nightmare backstage on Up Late, even kicking a woman with cancer and an allergy to hairspray out of a makeup room, only because he thought he deserved it more than she did.