When Alec Baldwin’s Voicemail to Daughter Ireland Went Viral
https://www.yahoo.com/celebrity/alec-baldwins-voicemail-daughter-ireland-went-viral-035812127.html
For all his charms and talent, Alec Baldwin has sometimes proved to be a divisive figure, due in large part to his periodic angry outbursts and combative nature. But most of his battles were mere blips on the radar… until he left a vitriolic voicemail for his daughter Ireland on April 22, 2007.share
The incident
At the time, Baldwin was in the middle of a contentious custody and visitation battle with his ex-wife, actress Kim Basinger, when he called Ireland — then 11 years old — as scheduled for a father-daughter chat. Everything exploded when Ireland didn’t pick up her phone, sending Baldwin on a tirade.
“Once again, I have made an ass of myself trying to get to a phone,” he vented in his message. “You have insulted me for the last time.” Baldwin also went in on Basinger, telling his daughter, “I don’t give a damn that you’re 12 years old or 11 years old, or a child, or that your mother is a thoughtless pain in the ass who doesn’t care about what you do.”
Baldwin also told Ireland she made him “feel like s***” and he was going to “straighten [her] ass out,” but of course, the most memorable line from his ragefest came when he called Ireland a “rude, thoughtless little pig.”
He also screamed at her, “This crap you pull on me with this goddamn phone situation that you would never dream of doing to your mother, and you do it to me constantly over and over again.”
The fallout was swift, with the full, unedited voicemail making its way to TMZ for the whole world to hear. Though Basinger has claimed that she wasn’t the culprit behind the leak, it seemed unlikely that anyone else could’ve given it to TMZ. After hearing the tape, Los Angeles County Superior Court commissioner Maren Nelson temporarily suspended Baldwin’s visitation rights until a new hearing could be scheduled that May.
The media ate it up in a frenzy, repeatedly recounting and analyzing the voicemail in intricate detail across websites, in newsmagazine shows, and in print publications. For his part, Baldwin’s lawyer decried the leak, while Basinger’s publicist said simply, “The voicemail speaks for itself.” Later, friends of Baldwin’s told TMZ that he’d apologized to Ireland and chalked up his outburst to the issues he had with Basinger, who had been allegedly sabotaging his relationship with his daughter for six years.
Baldwin’s publicist also released a statement to Extra, saying, “In the best interest of the child, Alec will do what the mother is pathologically incapable of doing … keeping his mouth shut and obeying the court order. The mother and her lawyer leaked this sealed material in violation of a court order. Although Alec acknowledges that he should have used different language in parenting his child, everyone who knows him privately knows what he has been put through for the past six years.”