e-mail trails
A similar thing can happen with e-mail. I was once copied in on an e-mail epic that had something like 30 messages in it. Early messages in the chain referred to the customer's competence/intelligence in very unflatterring terms. By the time I was copied in the whole chain had already been sent to the customer with some form of explanation/resolution.
The person who sent said explanation to the customer was the one who had been most abusive/uncomplimentary in the early e-mails.
Unbelievable.