Billy Baldwin is defending his honor after Sharon Stone accused someone else entirely of misconduct surrounding their film Sliver. Stone recently revealed that it was Robert Evans who pressured her to have sex with Baldwin to improve Sliver. While Evans is the obvious villain of the tale, Baldwin caught a stray in the sense that the story basically labels him as bad at his job, and that has obviously made the less-famous Baldwin brother pretty sensitive.

First, Stone’s side of the story: she first told it in her 2021 memoir The Beauty Of Living Twice, but she left out the names of the film, producer, and co-star she was discussing. (A detail that the producer had starred in a movie with Ava Gardner was something of a giveaway.) On the latest episode of The Louis Theroux Podcast, Stone told the tale again, this time with the identities intact (via Variety):

“[Evans] is running around his office in sunglasses explaining to me that he slept with Ava Gardner and I should sleep with Billy Baldwin, because if I slept with Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin’s performance would get better. And we needed Billy to get better in the movie because that was the problem. If I could sleep with Billy then we’d have chemistry on screen, and if I would just have sex with him then that would save the movie.

“The real problem in the movie was me, because I was so uptight, and so not like a real actress who could just fuck him and get things back on track. The real problem was I was such a tight ass.”

Baldwin’s response to having his name associated with this story is outsized, creepy, and makes the whole thing about him despite the fact that he’s really only a footnote to the point she was trying to make. Nevertheless, “Not sure why Sharon Stone keep talking about me all these years later? Does she still have a crush on me or is she still hurt after all these years because I shunned her advances?” he posted on Twitter/X. “Did she say to her gal pal Janice Dickinson the day after I screen tested and ran into them on our MGM Grand flight back to New York… ‘I’m gonna make him fall so hard for me, it’s gonna make his head spin.’ ???”

Baldwin continued his bizarre and threatening screed, “I have so much dirt on her it would make her head spin but I’ve kept quiet. The story of the meeting I had with Bob Evans imploring him allow me to choreograph the final sex scene in the photo below so I wouldn’t have to kiss Sharon is absolute legend. Wonder if I should write a book and tell the many, many disturbing, kinky and unprofessional tales about Sharon? That might be fun.”

Stone hadn’t named Baldwin in her own book, and writes that of course she didn’t sleep with him (“he was baffled enough without me confusing him some more”). She notes that “he did make a few haphazard passes at me in the upcoming weeks,” though she attributes that to Evans’ influence. However, even anonymously, the book is harsh on Baldwin’s skills: “You guys insisted on this actor when he couldn’t get one whole scene out in the test.… Now you think if I fuck him, he will become a fine actor? Nobody’s that good in bed,” she writes. “I felt they could have just hired a costar with talent, someone who could deliver a scene and remember his lines. I also felt they could fuck him themselves and leave me out of it. It was my job to act and I said so. This was not a popular response. I was considered difficult.” (This section is excerpted over at Vanity Fair.)

Nevertheless, the focus here should be on Evans (whom Stone writes is not even the only producer to pressure her into sleeping with a co-star). In a 2023 episode of You Must Remember This, host Karina Longworth reports that Evans tricked Stone into signing on to Sliver by lying that Geena Davis was interested in the role. And in the memoir of Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of both Basic Instinct and Sliver, he says that Stone’s only condition in her contract was that Evans not be allowed to come to set, because a traumatized friend of hers had alleged that Evans “kept the young woman naked and in a dog collar for weeks at a time. Sharon said that her friend needed psychiatric care for months after leaving the Evans house.” Eszterhas writes that Evans denied the claim and raged about it, questioning, “Who the fuck does she think she is?”

In other words—there are bigger fish to fry here than Billy Baldwin, namely, an entire Hollywood structure that has too often encouraged the dehumanization of women to cater to the sexual interests of powerful men. And Sharon Stone is far from the only person who’s had criticisms of Baldwin’s talent, so he should consider chilling the fuck out.