Brad and Angie go to war and six young casualties are left to watch
The passion between this movie star couple drained away and now poison is all that’s left of their love, writes Sarah Caden
LAST Tuesday, almost two years after her separation from Brad Pitt in September 2016, Angelina Jolie filed court papers alleging he hadn’t paid any “meaningful” child support in almost all that time.
She not only wants him to amend this, it seems, but also to pay retroactive payments for the time they have been apart.
“[Pitt] has a duty to pay child support,” Jolie’s attorney, Samantha Bley DeJean, wrote in the court papers, of the actor’s responsibility to his six children with Jolie, who age from 17 down to 10. And nobody could dispute that.
Except that Brad Pitt does dispute it, and did so later in the week. He doesn’t dispute that he has a duty to support the children, but he insists that he’s been doing his bit.
According to Pitt’s lawyers, who responded to Jolie’s claims, he has contributed $1.3m towards the children’s expenses since the separation. Further, he gave Jolie an $8m loan to buy a house on the same LA estate as his, in which she lives with the children.
When you look at the claims and counter-claims of last week, you have to wonder if both parties have really lost perspective in a split that has yet to conclude in a clean divorce.
Part of what is interesting from Jolie’s side is use of the word “meaningful”. This could suggest that what he has contributed to the family is paltry in comparison with his worth, a reported $240m. And, yes, she might have a point there.
Alternatively, Jolie might mean that what he has contributed, as a signifier of love and affection and commitment to the children, falls seriously short. And that is the more damaging suggestion.
It doesn’t only damage Pitt, though, which is something often forgotten when splits get messy and nasty. If she’s sending a message to Pitt that his actions don’t demonstrate paternal love, then that’s the message the children are receiving, too.
But it’s so easy to cast Jolie as the bad guy in this particular broken relationship. She’s always been on a loser in this one. She was the wench who broke up Pitt’s marriage to that lovely Jennifer Aniston — even though that has always been denied. She has always been portrayed as some sort of sex bomb turned child-collector, and when things went wrong, as they have now in a prolonged and painful way, she’s easy to cast as the villain.
This is despite the fact that Pitt, in an interview with GQ magazine last year, admitted to difficulties with alcohol and anger.
He made that admission, however, in a manner that might have driven his ex mad. The struggles were past; he was a reformed character. He’d done wrong and he’d lost it all.
The accompanying photo-shoot bolstered this impression. Brad was sad. Poor Brad.
Last week, however, Pitt’s defence of his record of duty to the six children included mention of that house loan to Jolie. A loan. Does that not seem weird?
Allegedly, Pitt refused to vacate the house that he and Jolie and the children lived in as a family when the separation occurred. Therefore, she had to find somewhere else.
Now, let’s not forget that Jolie has a reported $160m net worth herself, which would obviously have allowed her to buy a house without any assistance from Pitt.
That is not the point, though. It comes back to duty and maybe making a meaningful gesture. They’re his kids too, she’s entitled to expect that he’d contribute to putting a roof over their heads.
But a loan? Really? Are we talking meaningful or mean here?
And Pitt’s lawyers also challenged Jolie’s side’s contention that she wants a quickie divorce, countering that it’s their client who actually wants it all done and dusted and quiet.
Jolie, they suggested, is stringing it out, and last week filing for child support was, on her part, a “thinly-veiled effort to manipulate media coverage”.
She wants to look like the good guy, is what they seem to be saying. Whether she’s playing to an audience of the public or her children is the question.
What seems plausible is that Angelina Jolie is really angry with Brad Pitt and she may well have good reason. He has said himself that he had a problem with his temper and his drinking. That can’t have been pleasant for those who lived with him.
The final straw that broke their marriage was, apparently, an incident on a private jet in 2016. There were reports of a physical altercation with their eldest child, Maddox, then 15, which were investigated by LA child protection authorities.
Pitt was cleared of any allegation of child abuse and while Jolie has said that she never accused him of abuse, she has also said that the outcome “doesn’t mean that nothing happened on the plane”.
She has also always con- tended that the “health” of the family was her motivation to separate, and the only meaning that can be taken from this is that they are all better off away from Pitt.
Certainly, the six Jolie-Pitt children have been stuck in the middle of this split in a very ugly way.
As recently as June, a judge ordered that Pitt should be permitted to see his children up to 10 hours per day, with the actor relocating to London while Jolie worked on the sequel to Maleficent.
Late last week, there were reports that family pressures had forced Jolie to remove herself from the film.
Previously, another court order stated that Jolie was preventing contact with Pitt in a way that was “harmful” to the children.
It also instructed that he should be allowed to contact the children whenever he wanted, and without any monitoring from their mother.
These things hardly seem much to ask. Though you could say the same about a few more quid to the kids from his pot of extensive wealth.
Perspective gets lost in situations such as these, though. After a certain point, it’s not about the money or visitation or who’s doing their duty. It’s war. But it has casualties.
In this case, there are six of them.
‘Is Jolie playing to the public or to her children?’