Not knowing the context of the rant, I studiously avoided commenting on the Baldwin Controversy last week. But I think there's one aspect that seems to have been ignored, and that is the fact that Alec Baldwin didn't say any of the things on that recording to his eleven-year old daughter. He said it to an answering machine on a telephone that "belonged" to his daughter, but was really under the custody and control of his ex-wife.

It's a big difference. People often feel liberated when they reach an answering service or voicemail rather than the intended recipient of their phone call, more free to vent their frustrations, talk smack or yell things that they would never say to the other party during a phone call, much less say face-to-face. Among my friends, this is known as the Tessmer Effect, after a mutual friend with a tendency for leaving long, often barely coherent messages on our voicemails replete with rage and poetry. Our friend can often go up to ten minutes without seeming to catch his breath on one of these messages, and I've always wondered why he didn't direct that energy into stand-up. Or blogging, for that matter.

Of course, we're middle-aged adults rather than eleven-year olds; whatever psychological scars we may have received from abusive language was generated years before. But it does lead to the other aspect of this controversy that hasn't received play, which is that there's no persuasive evidence yet that the little girl ever heard any of this message until it was leaked by her mom to the tabloids. She's eleven. She doesn't "own" anything, much less a cellphone.

The attack on Baldwin (and it's a fair one) is that you normally don't say those things to a grown woman, much less a pre-teen, but the context of the phone call (him not being able to have contact with his daughter in the middle of a bitter divorce) makes it seem like he was directing his comments at his ex, and not necessarily his little girl. And considering that Kim Basinger's first response to the message was not to go to court to get a restraining order against this madman, but to leak the recording to TMZ, his rage at that target might be understandable.

UPDATE: Maybe he should have taken these words of wisdom to heart: