Alec Baldwin
Image Source: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
What Was the Accusation?
Alec Baldwin was accused of verbally abusing his then-11-year-old daughter, Ireland Baldwin, after a private voicemail he left for her became public in April 2007. The message was reportedly recorded on April 11, 2007, after Ireland did not answer a scheduled phone call from Baldwin while he was in New York and she was in California with her mother, Kim Basinger. In the voicemail, Baldwin angrily insulted Ireland, criticized Basinger, and used threatening language about confronting Ireland in person. TMZ posted the audio online, and major news outlets quickly picked up the story, turning a private family conflict into a public scandal. The controversy unfolded during Baldwin and Basinger’s long-running custody dispute, which had continued after their 2002 divorce. Reporting at the time said a Los Angeles court temporarily suspended Baldwin’s visitation rights after hearing the tape. Baldwin apologized publicly, saying he had lost his temper and had taken his frustration out on the wrong person, while also arguing that the leak violated sealed court material and harmed his child further. Years later, Baldwin acknowledged that the incident had caused lasting pain for Ireland, though later coverage also noted that the two appeared to have repaired parts of their relationship and even publicly joked about the voicemail in adulthood.
Key Apologia Strategies:
Mortification, Defeasibility, Bolstering, Corrective Action
Video
Transcript
Alec Baldwin’s Interview on The View:
Barbara Walters: In 2002, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger’s seven-year marriage officially ended. But the custody battle over their 11-year-old daughter, Ireland, rages on six years later. This battle made headlines again last week after a blistering voicemail from Alec to Ireland found its way to media outlets. And he’s here for the first time, and he says his only interview, to tell us what he says drove him to the edge and let us understand what about the story. Please welcome Alec Baldwin.
Alec Baldwin: First of all, I want to say to you both know better than I do how this business works. I got a huge bouquet of flowers from Don Imus.
Walters: Did you really?
Baldwin: And, uh…no.
Walters: Well he doesn’t know. You haven’t lost your sense of humor.
Rosie O’Donnell: Exactly. But how are you? How are you doing?
Baldwin: I want to just say, because I thought a lot about this, and there are limitations on what you can say and what you should say under these circumstances, and that’s a part of the problem, I think. And I want to say that I’ve learned three things. I’ve learned many things, but I’ve learned three things as a result of this first situation. One is that my deep, deep, deep, and seemingly endless frustration about this situation, which is complicated, led me to end up saying something to someone that I really meant to say to someone else. And I’ve learned that to be angry, there’s nothing wrong with being that.
Walters: You didn’t mean to say it to your child?
Baldwin: Well, there’s nothing wrong with being frustrated or angry about something. It’s the way you do it, and as people often do in this world, I took it out on the wrong person because I’m unable, under the current dynamic, to address the other person. Right. And I realize that, you know, that was wrong, that I…
Walters: Can we say who it is? Or we’re not allowed to?
O’Donnell: Well, everyone knows, but it’s just, you know…
Walters: So, you said it to your daughter and you meant it for your ex-wife?
Baldwin: Well, I think that goes without saying it, but the other thing is that another thing that I learned, which was really amazing to me and I really learned this on a deepest level, is how many people in the world, and how many people out there that communicate to you through the internet and through other situations, feel themselves to be abused by a parent or wounded by a parent or hurt by their parent. And you can’t imagine how many people would enter- would email me on my website. I have a website, alecbaldwin.com, you know, like a lot of people in the business, and they would email me and they would tear into me in a very, very kind of corrosive way. But I understood that they were people who they themselves had been attacked, berated, abused, so forth. In my own case, this message, I had never done that before in my life. I want to say, I yelled at my daughter to watch out, you might get hit by a car on Central Park West. You know what I mean? You’re going to get out in the riptide in the ocean. But I had never done this before in my life. And I realized that a lot of the response that I get from people is them feeling their own pain. But I just want to finish this one thing. And the third thing I learned, which has also been really unbelievable to me, is how much the people, and I think both of you know this and you in particular in your career, is how much the people in the tabloid media are themselves, people who are abused, and are people who live with shameful secrets, and they make it their career to humiliate you and expose your secrets. Like the guy that’s responsible for this tape coming out, we don’t need to say his name, there doesn’t really make…It doesn’t matter. The guy that’s responsible. I called some friends of mine in LA, and I said, what’s his story? And they told me his story, what he’s all about, where he’s coming from, what are his secrets? You know what I mean? And you find out that everybody who works in tabloid media are people who are filled with self hatred and shame. And the way that they manage those feelings is that they destroy the lives of other people and reveal your secrets. And I thought to myself, you know, it’s like I couldn’t get over how, you know, they could be…all day long, you know.
Walters: After this happened, because, you know, you do love your child and people know that. Have you talked to Ireland? Where do things stand now?
Baldwin: Well, that falls into the category of something that I can’t talk about because there’s going to be, you know, ongoing procedures and so forth, and things like that. You know, I’m writing this book because…
Walters: Can you tell us if you talk to her since…
Baldwin: I can’t discuss any of that, no no no no. I either can’t or I prefer not to. But the thing is…is that the…uh…you know, my friends, my close friends, and my family, and my colleagues, they all know what’s been done to me. My own mother doesn’t have a phone number to call my daughter. My ex-wife would take my daughter to her hometown and take my daughter all around to see all of her mother’s family, except her own mother, because my ex-wife has a ceaseless feud with her mother, and my ex-mother-in-law, who I’m still friendly with, would call me on the phone and starting sobbing and say, “What do you think you and I have done to deserve to be treated like this?” My ex-mother-in-law just called me the other day because the child went just this spring to the area. And the mother took the kid on a tour to meet every single relative except the child’s maternal grandmother. So the parental alienation that I’ve been experiencing has a ripple affect that affects countless other people.
O’Donnell: Surely you know that when people heard the message, which was really never supposed to be leaked. It was a private conversation between you and the message machine and your daughter was leaked to the press. The problem that most people had was the use of the word “pig.”
Baldwin: Yeah, I think what had happened at that point was that I had reached a point and I think…you’re gonna take a break pretty soon?
O’Donnell: Uh, in like 2 minutes.
Baldwin: Here’s what happens. In divorce litigation, there’s a thing called the right of first refusal. And in that, if you and I are divorced and you have primary custody and you travel to go to work, you are obligated to give me the child.
Walters: You have joint custody. Yes, no?
Baldwin: We have joint legal custody. The terms you’re using…I’m gonna explain to you…
Walters: Because there are two sides to this. To every story, there are always two sides. Go ahead.
Baldwin: I’m not discussing that one. What I’m saying is that in the right of first refusal, those were the orders that were given to me by a judge, if she goes away she has to give me the child. And we knew that she didn’t do that three consecutive times. And so we went to the court and the judges do nothing to protect your rights if you’re a man in California. Nothing. And the judge in this case said…we said that we think that she has violated this order and the judge was like, “So what do you want me to do about it? You file a contempt suit…they always want you to be the bad guy to humiliate the other person. To keep the litigation going. So we pressed a contempt charge because the judge forced us to. We had no other outlet for enforcement. And then they finally said, “We will acquiesce and obey the order.” I was given my daughter…I had two blissful weeks with my daughter. And I’m not talking about the Disney dad syndrome where it’s taking her shopping and going to dinner. I mean, I’m makin’ the kid toast and helping her with her homework. I’m standing in a room and the phone rings and she says, “I forgot my ballet shoes, will you go get the ballet shoes for me?” And I’m sittin’ there goin’, “Will I go get the ballet shoes for you? You bet I’ll go get the ballet shoes for you. That’s why I’m here.” It was just great. The mother comes home. And the phone gets turned off and I don’t speak to the child for 10 days. And what you learn in parental alienation is that affection for the alienated parent or loyalty to the alienated parent is portrayed as betrayal of the custodial parent. And that parent communicates in very subtle and not so subtle terms that this person is not a part of my life and I don’t want anything to do with them and I don’t want you to either. And they violate court orders and they force you to keep this thing going. And this is why and…this is the last thing I’ll say about this. This is why I would sit in rooms years ago when this process began for me and men would look at me and the tears would well up in their eyes and they were men who loved their children. But prior to their divorce, no one had doubted that they loved their children. But once these lawyers dragged them into this process, they went through this thing and they wrote off their children and they wrote off that family. I’d look at a guy and say, “Bob, where are you now?” and he’d say “I’m remarried, I have a wonderful wife, I have two kids, and I never see my kids from my first marriage. I had to write it off.”
O’Donnell: That’s a tragic thing.
Baldwin: But that’s what happens to a lot of people…But let me finish answering your question. Obviously calling your child a pig or anything else is improper and inappropriate, and I apologize to my daughter for that. I can’t tell you how many people who are like amazing. I mean, you and I, but all of us know the most famous and privileged people in the world, and some of them would call me on the phone and say, “God, if they taped some of the things I said to my kid.”
O’Donnell: I’ve said that on this show.
Baldwin: And I’ve had a lot of other people say to me, if all of us were to lose our custody rights because you had a…we would have a parentless society, basically, so…
Walters: The sad thing is, you know, what everybody has opinions on it and it’s really something between the family. You and this child, but you also have a very big career. How is this affecting your…
Baldwin: Well, I used to…
Walters: You used to? What about 30 Rock? What happens to your future?
Baldwin: I’ll tell you. I see where… I was telling somebody how, you know, things have changed so much since I was a child, and things like this would happen, and a woman might go and have lunch with her friends or go see her family, or she might go to the Country Club where there’s some…a group she was involved with and tell people what she was feeling about, what was going on, and share with them. And that was public?
Walters: What are you going to do?
Baldwin: But I want to finish…
Walters: Okay, but I want to make sure we get this because we’re a live show…
Baldwin: Well, but I think this is very important. And that is that… Because it’s connected. And that is that now in the world we live in, as you know, a person presses one button and the whole world knows what’s happened to you. Literally. Literally. Some man took this tape and construed that that was in the child’s interest to do that, and pressed a button, and it went over the entire world. And that was the result of that. I think that, you know, listen, I don’t want the show to get hurt. In our business, as you both know, when you do a program like that or a film or what have you, there are 250 or 300 people who go to work every day on the show.
O’Donnell: 30 rock?
Baldwin: Right. Or any enterprise. And I don’t want those people to be negatively impacted and for them to be hurt by the situation. So I’ve asked NBC to let me out of my contract and let me leave the show.
Walters: Have they said yes?
Baldwin: No. Wait a second. I have said to them, I really, really, really don’t want to do it anymore because I would like to take a specific piece of my life, whether it’s three years or five years, it doesn’t matter. And devote myself. I have my book coming out in, in, hopefully, in September for St. Martin’s press.
O’Donnell: And your book is not about your specific relationship with him. It is about parental alienation in general.
Baldwin: It’s about, it’s about divorce litigation. And I would like to take a portion of my, the next coming years and devote myself to the cause. If I never acted again, I couldn’t care less. I would like to devote myself to the cause of parental alienation and changing in state houses. There were bills that were proposed in Sacramento that were killed, which were about equality and co-parenting and divorce litigation. And, and this is a work that I’ve been creeping up on now, but I’ve been busy. But now, I mean, I’ve been begging these people to please let me go.
O’Donnell: Will they let you out of your contract?
Baldwin: I have no idea, I mean, I, I hope they will because I want to go do something else. But the, the point is, is that, you know, because the other thing is, it’s not like my career is something that we’re nipping in the bud. I’ve been doing this for 27 years. I mean, I’ve had enough of this quite frankly to last me a lifetime, especially in the modern tabloid world. And, and I, is a bigger thing I want to do. There’s a more important thing I want to do that I have so much feeling for. And, and you know, the person who’s been the greatest to me, I say this to you. And I don’t want to get emotional about this, but, you know, my mom is someone who I’ve had a very kind of on and again, off of a relationship, you know, I mean, when my dad was alive and my parents were getting separated. And my mom has gone on to be reborn as this breast cancer advocate. And you know, my mom, who’s had a bypass and she had a stroke and she has diabetes and she had breast cancer. She’s very, she’s been very ill, but she’s 78 years old and my mother who suffered all these things, I wish I could play you that voicemail that she left me yesterday. And my mom called me on the phone. And she said to me, I’m going to go outside today and I’m going to plant pumpkin seeds because I want to grow the biggest pumpkin for us to have at the house and I mean, she just talked about all this nonsense, but the point was is that she wasn’t talking about this. She was talking about life and what do we do with the rest of our lives and how do you go out the door and enjoy your life. And what I want to do is I want to leave this interview with you. I want to thank both of you for giving me this opportunity and you especially because I think you both, you and I both know that whenever we have personal missteps in our lives, there’s a lot of people that are out there that are ready to kind of lend their voice to the chorus to, to, to tear us down. I want to say that I’m sorry to anyone that was offended by what happened, I’m, I’m sad about the way it all played out and I have a dream in my heart, deep in my heart to go out this door today and do something else with my life and to do this work, which is very meaningful to me. I have, I want you to know, I have tens of thousands of men contact me over the months who are victims of parental alienation and if you think they’re angry, you should hear the voices of the women in their lives now. I get mail all the time from a woman who will say, my husband Bob is the most loving dad and his ex-wife is a bleepin, bleepin, bleepin, bleep bleep bleep and she keeps Bob away from his kids and I said to myself, this is what I want to do with my life now. Let’s just hope the most important thing is that you’re a child. Yes, I, and that’s the part of it. I mean, I want, I want to, I want to protect my relationship with my daughter who I thought up until this, this moment and everyone in my life who knows me knows I have a great relationship with my daughter. You know, my daughter used to come into me and I’d say, I said to her once I go, I go, we were relying on bed and I was waking her up, I’d come into her room and I was rubbing her hair. And she laughed at me and I go, what’s so funny? She goes, the way you wake me up in the morning, where you rub my hair and you, what do I want for breakfast? And she goes, it’s so funny with me. I go, why? She goes, ’cause my mom opens the door and says, get the hell out of that bed right now. You’re late. We got to happen.’ And I think into myself, you know, when women do a certain thing and if it’s the mother, it’s perceived one way and when men do it, it’s perceived another way. I want to say another thing for people who are going through this or who are divorced. You know, I watched a lot of people on TV say, why can’t these two people get their act together and they go, on our side, we reached out to these folks and said to the other party, shall we say, and her lawyers, we should get together. Let’s try this. Let’s stop this. Let’s stop it. They never responded. Yeah. And as a fact, they never, we would try to have conciliation and they never responded. And I say to everyone out there who is contemplating divorce or who is getting divorced, the quicker you can get to peace and just dignity for the sake of your choice, there’s a place you’re going to want to get to. I promise you, for the bottom of my heart, the quicker you get there, the better of everybody’s going to be. Alex, thank you very much. You’re, I love you. I love you. And I think you’re a great guy. And we’ll hang in, because not one phone call, thanks for holding on.
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