poison pen

The film declares up front, “This is more true than you’d think,” and indeed, during the years after the World War I, a poison-pen scandal in an English seaside town turned filthy language into national news.

In the report, Ms. Waxman wrote that Mr. Penske had gotten fed up with Ms. Finke’s habit of sending “poison-pen emails berating sources over scoops she lost to competitors,” including The Wrap.

There’s something instructive in that failure, and it speaks to the raging confusion, verging on incoherence, at the heart of “Babylon” — namely, its insistence on being both a poison-pen letter and a valentine, a decadent celebration and a politically conscious corrective.

"I have found myself on the receiving end of the two types of behavior Donald Trump exhibits toward reporters: his relentless desire to hold the media's gaze, and his poison-pen notes and angry statements in response to coverage," Haberman wrote.

When the MacArthur Foundation was considering McPherson for the first of its “genius” grants, in 1981, Ellison wrote the foundation a poison-pen letter decrying McPherson’s “current restlessness,” and blaming his putative failures on “a condition of shock brought on by a long-delayed social mobility suddenly achieved,” while recommending others for the honor.