Alec Baldwin: I Thought About Suicide

The "30 Rock" star discusses the ugly custody battle that drove him to plan his own death

A long and ugly custody battle last year drove Alec Baldwin to call his own daughter a "thoughtless little pig" on her voice mail. In the days that followed, the release of that message to the public had him planning his own death.

After the celebrity news site TMZ played the jarring recording of an enraged Baldwin for the world, the Emmy-winning actor sank into a deep depression, report Rush & Malloy in today's New York Daily News.

"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," he writes in his new book,  "A Promise to Ourselves." "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."

Only thoughts of his daughter Ireland kept him afloat. "I love my daughter with all my heart," he writes.

Baldwin's book was inspired by his frustrations with America's family-law system and they way it allowed his ex-wife Kin Basinger to keep him apart from Ireland.

"That's where the thing gets twisted around to where the persistence of the father to want to have enforcement of his parental rights is viewed as abusive and aggressive -- pathological behavior," he recently explained to the New Yorker. "'All of our problems would go away if you would just back off. Why can't you just back off? You'll see the kid when I tell you that you can see the kid.'" In his book Baldwin also directs some of his anger towards TMZ and its managing editor, Harvey Levin.

"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."

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