Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger’s daughter, Ireland Baldwin, was 7 when they divorced, meaning they had to reach an agreement regarding custody. But Baldwin accused Basinger of failing to stick to it, leading to a contentious custody battle over their daughter that made headlines for years on end. Throughout the ordeal, Baldwin said his ex-wife kept him from seeing Ireland, resulting in estrangement between father and daughter, which he detailed in his 2008 book, “A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce.” Baldwin wrote, “Both parties had spent nearly a million dollars in legal fees by this point [2005], money that might easily have been better spent, perhaps on my daughter herself.”
Money, though, was nothing compared to the frustration of not being in Ireland’s life. “You could not put a price, however, on the time I would eventually spend trying to get my daughter on the phone in the coming years,” he wrote. That is why, Baldwin seemed to suggest, he went off on Ireland in the infamous 2007 voice message leaked by TMZ, in which he called the then-11-year-old a “thoughtless little pig” when she failed to answer. The report didn’t need social media to go viral, with repercussions that led Baldwin to contemplate suicide, he told ABC News‘ Diane Sawyer in 2008. “I would get in bed, and I would say [to God], please, don’t let me wake up in the morning,” he said.
