Angelina Jolie is addressing allegations of abuse she’s made in opposition to Brad Pitt amid their custody battle and is talking out about his determination to work with the convicted rapist and former film producer Harvey Weinstein following an encounter within the ’90s she now says was “past a go.”
In a Guardian interview about her new ebook Know Your Rights and Declare Them, which Jolie teamed with Amnesty Worldwide to publish, the actress touches on numerous points together with her work with displaced peoples in Syria, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan and divorce from Pitt, which she says, left her “damaged.”
However Jolie mentioned a part of her determination to work on the ebook got here after an expertise within the U.S. she had together with her personal youngsters, earlier than pivoting to speaking extra explicitly about her custody battle with Pitt, acknowledging that she is “nonetheless in my very own authorized state of affairs” and “can’t discuss that.”
“I’m not the type of one that makes selections like the choices I needed to make evenly. It took loads for me to be ready the place I felt I needed to separate from the daddy of my youngsters,” Jolie, at one level, says.
Stating she is sworn to silence in the case of the custody case, the actress ultimately “nods” [to the Guardian reporter over Zoom] confirming that a number of statements she’s made are alluding to her divorce and her allegations of home abuse earlier than sharing that she feared for the security of her youngsters. “Sure, for my household. My complete household,” Jolie responded.
Whereas she reportedly goes forwards and backwards on whether or not she’s snug speaking about this, Jolie finally says she desires her household to heal and for everybody to maneuver ahead, Pitt included. “It’s not that I need to discuss something actually, as a result of I simply need my household to heal. And I would like everybody to maneuver ahead – all of us, together with their dad. I would like us to heal and be peaceable. We’ll at all times be a household.”
In the course of the wide-ranging interview, Jolie additionally talks in regards to the expertise of working with Weinstein and the sexual harassment she confronted, going into extra element than her unique statements made in an October 2017 New York Times report, wherein the actress alleged that in the course of the launch of Enjoying by Coronary heart within the late ’90s, the disgraced former Hollywood producer “made undesirable advances on her in a resort room, which she rejected.”
“I had a foul expertise with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and in consequence, selected by no means to work with him once more and warn others after they did,” Jolie then-said in an emailed assertion to the Occasions.
In her Guardian interview, she mentioned ladies typically downplay assaults in the event that they escape them. “For those who get your self out of the room, you suppose he tried however didn’t, proper? The reality is that the try and the expertise of the try is an assault,” she said.
She went on to make clear that Weinstein’s “advances” went “past a go” and was a state of affairs she needed to bodily escape. It was additionally one thing that Pitt knew about, Jolie says. “I stayed away and warned folks about him. I keep in mind telling Jonny [Lee Miller], my first husband, who was nice about it, to unfold the phrase to different guys — don’t let ladies go alone with him. I used to be requested to do The Aviator, however I mentioned no as a result of he was concerned. I by no means related or labored with him once more. It was arduous for me when Brad did.”
Because the article notes, Pitt — who’s at present a producer on She Mentioned, the movie about New York Occasions reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor and their landmark 2017 exposé — starred in Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 movie that was distributed and co-financed by the Weinstein Firm. In line with Jolie, he additionally approached the producer, in opposition to her needs, to work on the thriller Killing Them Softly, which was distributed by the Weinstein Firm. In a September 2019 interview with CNN, he spoke about confronting Weinstein after the producer made advances in direction of Pitt’s then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow.
As for a way Jolie and Pitt — who finalized their divorce in 2019 — labored out the actor working with Weinstein, Jolie mentioned, “We fought about it. In fact it harm.”
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out Pitt’s reps for remark.
