the family court system

By Lorraine Smorol

Alec Baldwin is one angry dude. You can almost see the steam rising from the pages of his book A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce (St. Martin’s Press, New York City; 224 pages; $24.95/hardcover), a documentation of his nasty divorce from actress Kim Basinger, with all the resulting fallout and backlash.

We like to think of Baldwin as the intense, handsome actor and senior member of the Baldwin clan of performers, which includes brothers Stephen, Daniel and William. He also has local ties. Baldwin’s mother Carol lives in Camillus; she is the founder and director of Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund; her oldest son, Alec, is a member of the advisory board. He also penned the forward to local restaurateur Joey DeCuffa’s new cookbook, Joey’s Italian (DeCuffa Publishing, 2008). 

Baldwin is one of the best-known, most successful actors in the world, currently most visible for his comedic stints on NBC’s Emmy Award-winning show 30 Rock. The actor has racked up nominations for Academy Awards and Tony Awards, and is a recipient of several Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild and Television Critics Association honors. Further, he has always had an opinion about the national political scene, and has considered entering the political arena himself. 

No one ever accused Baldwin of being a shrinking violet, so it comes as no surprise that he decided to vent his rage following his recent grueling divorce in A Promise to Ourselves. His take-no-prisoners account of a perilous journey through the system dealing with what he calls the “family law industry” has made him the poster boy for fathers who fight an uphill battle throughout the entire divorce process, especially when it comes to custody and visitation rights concerning their children.  

Along with fighting the legal system, Baldwin had to play out every nasty turn of events in front of the whole world, although he doesn’t delve into unfortunate divorce experiences with fellow actors. Throughout the book he refers to his ex-wife only as Kim, but he spares nothing in citing his hateful opinion of her.

Baldwin comments ruefully that divorcing couples with little income have an easier time of it since there is no incentive for lawyers to drain their scant resources through long, drawn-out procedures. By contrast, he argues that American family law is a system of attorneys and judges who prey upon wealthy divorcing couples, along with the cottage industries that the system has created, including forensic accountants, appraisers, custody evaluators, mental health professionals, law guardians and mediators. 

“When illness afflicts a marriage, however, the professionals who arrive on the scene often are there to prolong the bleeding, not to stop it,” writes Baldwin. “To be pulled into the American family law system in most states is like being tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged down a gravel road late at night. No one can hear your cries and complaints, and it is not over until they say it’s over.”

There were flags Baldwin didn’t address early on during his 12-year relationship with Basinger, namely his discovery that she rarely did anything without the advice of a team of highly paid professionals, which continued through the contentious divorce. Losing a breach-of-contract trial after dropping out of the 1993 movie Boxing Helena left Basinger financially and emotionally bankrupt, but she subsequently regained her financial status with a string of successful films, even winning an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress in 1997’s L.A. Confidential. (Incidentally, Alec was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor for 2003’s The Cooler.)

Baldwin and Basinger married in 1993 and starred together in the movies The Marrying Man (1991) and The Getaway (1994), but it was not an entirely happy union. At one point Kim appeared with her assistant and announced—in the bathroom of her Los Angeles home—that she was pregnant, according to Baldwin. “A cause for unprecedented joy was more like someone telling you that they had wrecked your car,” he remembers. Their daughter Ireland was born Oct. 23, 1995. Seven years after they married, Baldwin was served with separation papers and, in 2002, the couple divorced.  

The actor talks about filming the 2003 Mike Myers comedy The Cat in the Hat at the same time he was trying to fulfill his court-ordered obligation of shuttling back and forth to anger-management therapy, parenting classes and custody-evaluation sessions, as well as a court order mandating him to submit to humiliating videotaped depositions. Basinger’s lawyers “alternately tittered and snorted, out of the camera’s view, after most of my answers,” Baldwin recalls.  

The nasty phone message of 2007 in which Baldwin called his then 11-year-old daughter a “rude, thoughtless little pig” did not bode well for the actor. He claims that more often than not he was kept away from her by rigid visitation rules, but he would try to call his daughter during court-ordered access hours. On the night of the call in question, April 11, Baldwin ducked out of a Manhattan restaurant to call Ireland, only to find out that her phone was turned off. 

“I had dialed that phone for more than a week and only gotten a voice mail. This had happened for years now, and for no good reason,” he notes. “Finally, when the beep came, I snapped.” His defense was that the isolation from Ireland and a system that creates a situation where mothers encourage their children to dislike their father led to his emotional outburst. 

Baldwin dwells on what is called PAS, Parental Alienation Syndrome, a term coined by Columbia University clinical professor psychiatry Richard A. Gardner, who, before his death in 2003, was an advocate for fathers in custody battles. Gardner cited a psychological brainwashing by the parent with primary custody to alienate the relationship with the non-custodial parent, usually the father.  

“Since Gardner started the discussion on PAS, debate has swirled over whether it is a real syndrome or junk science.” The definition itself of the syndrome is fraught with pitfalls. According to Gardner, the term refers to a psychological disturbance “in which children are obsessed with deprecation and criticism of a parent—denigration that is unjustified and/or exaggerated.” PAS, Gardner contends, goes beyond what would be considered normal acting out and emotional responses to the trauma of divorce. In PAS, the child’s rejection or denigration of a parent reaches the level of a campaign.

From his longstanding wrenching experience through the divorce process, Baldwin’s deepest stab at the legal system is his claim that “most lawyers {are} men and women who were not sufficiently smart enough to become doctors or engineers.” Wow; maybe Baldwin should tell us how he really feels.