Alec Baldwin calls TMZ "THE UPDATED RECEPTACLE OF TRASH!!!!!!!"

Alec Baldwin has had a long and interesting road since the infamous voicemail scandal with his then 11-year-old daughter Ireland. He’s long been a vocal advocate for father’s rights in the divorce system, and it was pretty clear he had reached his breaking point long before that call. Baldwin recently published a book called “A Promise to Ourselves,” talking about his divorce from ex-wife Kim Basinger and the frustrating struggle to maintain a relationship with his daughter Ireland.

Baldwin goes off on the tabloid media, specifically attacking TMZ, who he clearly still holds a significant grudge against. He said he was so depressed after the voicemail scandal that he was deeply suicidal for three weeks.

Baldwin had been trying to reach his daughter, then 11, but “she was off for spring break with her mother and her phone was turned off for 10 consecutive days … This had gone on for years now and … when the beep came, I snapped. [Harvey Levin, TMZ’s editor] seemed to be that breed of tabloid creature that realized an almost sexual level of pleasure from ruining other people’s lives.”

“He has created TMZ as the updated receptacle of … trash,” Baldwin writes. “He leads a cadre of self-satisfied twentysomethings who jump like rats from public relations sinking ship to sinking ship.” The release of the tape caused Baldwin to become suicidal, as he and the agoraphobic actress had been fighting in court over their daughter for six years.

“Driving up the Taconic Parkway, heading to an inn in the Berkshire Mountains, I began to think about what little town I would repair to in order to commit suicide. What semi-remote Massachusetts state park could I hike deep into and overdose there? When I returned to New York, the thought of jumping out the window of my apartment was with me every night for weeks.”

Thinking of Ireland, he resisted, thankfully. “I love my daughter with all my heart,” he writes.