A poison pen letter is a letter or note containing unpleasant, abusive or malicious statements or accusations about the recipient or a third party. It is usually sent anonymously. Poison pen letters are usually composed and sent to upset the recipient. They differ from blackmail, which is intended to obtain something, in that they are purely malicious.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation used poison pen letters as a tactic during their COINTELPRO projects, targeting people such as Martin Luther King Jr. Some politicians, such as Harvey Milk, as well as many celebrities, have often received poison pen letters.
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Famous quotes containing the words poison, pen and/or letter:
“You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church—
But let your poison be your cure.”
—Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)
“Traveling takes the ink out of one’s pen as well as the cash out of one’s purse.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)