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A LAWYER’S OFFICE in Los Angeles was the venue for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s first public sighting since announcing their sudden split in September 2016. The meeting last month – the final stages of their divorce to discuss financial affairs – followed more than two years of public acrimony, a difficult custody battle over their six children, a child abuse investigation (swiftly dropped) and news that Brad was seeing Charlize Theron.
You’d be forgiven, therefore, for thinking that it would be yet another testing moment in a break-up that has routinely been dubbed the most acrimonious in Hollywood history (the couple were once only able to communicate through others following Angelina’s shock decision to file for divorce). But, to the surprise of many, the three-hour meeting, in which they discussed the formal version of the custody deal they struck before Christmas, was said to be emotional, with a markedly
more ‘harmonious’ atmosphere between the two actors.
Only now have pictures from the meeting emerged ( Grazia is unable to publish them for legal reasons). They show the couple deep in conversation and looking at each other as they sit side-by-side on a sofa. In another image, Brad is seen sitting at Angelina’s feet while she sits on a sofa. Surprisingly, the animosity is over.
Just after the pictures surfaced, news broke that Brad and Angelina were launching a new wine together through their joint brand Miraval, produced at their Château Miraval estate in France. (Before Angelina filed for divorce in September 2016, the couple had launched an award-winning Miraval rosé and a few other vintages.) The rosé, named Studio by Miraval, will be produced in their vineyard and is an ‘ode’ to art, cinema and music.
The launch was widely seen as a clear sign that Brad and Angelina are putting their difficulties behind them. ‘Angelina is still very passionate about the château, as is Brad. Neither of them wanted to give up the vineyard,’ a source told Grazia. ‘So they’ve been drawing up plans on how to keep it going together.
‘ There was a time when Angelina didn’t even want Brad around the kids, but they’re looking at the bigger picture now. It seems Angelina is happy to continue being in business with him. The atmosphere is definitely less hostile than it has been before.’
So what’s behind the U-turn? According to the source, Brad, 55, and Angelina, 43, are apparently now painfully aware of the ‘damage that their divorce has caused’, and want to ‘repair their reputations’. ‘ They’re quickly realising that this has been a huge embarrassment that will haunt them for the rest of their careers if they can’t find a way to change the narrative themselves.’
The news comes after Grazia reported last month that Brad and Angelina were working hard to create a ‘war-free zone’ for the sake of their six children – Maddox, 17, Pax, 15, Zahara, 14, Shiloh, 12, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 10 – too. The couple are said to have realised the ‘harm’ the divorce had caused their children, with Angelina working ‘overtime’ to repair their relationship with their father.
Conscious uncoupling – never too far away in Hollywood divorces – may have also played a part. ‘Brad and Angelina have acknowledged how well other celebrities have dealt with their divorces,’ added our source. ‘ That’s why they decided just before Christmas to press pause on their bitter proceedings and work together to be more harmonious. They want to get to a place where they can walk away from this with their heads held high. They’ve come such a long way in the past year and are spending more time together in the same room than ever before. It seemed as if this divorce would go on for eternity, but now it appears they’re on the home stretch.’
After links were found between teenager Molly Russell’s suicide and her exposure to self-harm material on Instagram, the Government announced last week it was considering ways to regulate social media companies. Here, Annie Sibary, 18, a student from Chichester who blames Instagram for triggering her bulimia, says tech firms need to take more responsibility for people’s mental health
Sitting on my bed, the happy noises of my family finishing their evening meal floated up from downstairs. Claiming to be full, I’d left the table after eating a couple of slices of pizza and gone upstairs to ‘do my homework’. Once safely in my bedroom, I grabbed my phone and started scrolling through images of emaciated girls and going into accounts I knew would contain messages to help me stay focused, such as ‘purging means you get to taste your meal twice!’ It wasn’t difficult to find them; they were waiting for me in ‘suggested content’.
Desperate to be rid of the feelings of guilt and failure that tortured me every time I caved into hunger, I got up, stuck my fingers down my throat and vomited into the sink – turning the tap on to mask the sounds, as the familiar mixture of relief and revulsion swept over me.
Between the ages of 13 and 16, I went through phases where I threw up like this after every meal. What started out as restricting my food intake quickly turned into full-blown bulimia, and by the end I was extremely ill – unable to keep food down and coughing up blood because acid had caused ulceration and eroded the lining of my stomach.
When I look back at the person I was then, I don’t even recognise myself. The
behaviour, the secrecy, the obsessive single-mindedness – it was so out of character. In my family, I’ve always been known as ‘the sensible one’, but I became totally consumed by the idea that I needed to be thin and I believed the only way to do this was to vomit up anything and everything I ate. It’s only now, having come through this terrible time, that I can ask myself what caused my descent into bulimia – and I honestly believe that the answer lies in the material I viewed on social media.
Most girls struggle with self-image during puberty and that was definitely the case for me. I was a sporty kid and had never had weight issues but, at 13, my body began developing bumps and curves and I no longer felt happy in my skin. These feelings of insecurity coincided with me having access to social media sites, in particular Instagram.
I loved the bright mosaics of pictures – a snapshot of the best life had to offer. At that point, the photos I liked were mainly of girls with what I saw as the ‘perfect’ figure: tiny waists, impossibly long legs and the elusive thigh gap. The more pictures I saw like that, the more I felt like a physical oddity. Of course, generations of impressionable teenage girls have been subjected to airbrushed models on magazine covers and tiny celebrities on TV, but with Instagram, the fact the site is so interactive and there are thousands of pictures of ‘real’ people makes you feel that this is the norm and it’s you who doesn’t fit with these images of perfection.
Being on Instagram felt a bit like falling down a rabbit hole. Doors to other worlds opened up left, right and centre and enticing images beckoned. Before long, the material I was viewing became more extreme; sunny pictures of skinny girls on holiday gave way to gritty close-ups showcasing jutting collar or pelvic bones or a scarily protruding spine. These were accompanied by comments such as: ‘No supper – no belly.’
The algorithms involved in the site meant that once I’d viewed a few images like this, similar and related content ‘tailored’ to my viewing began popping up in suggested content. I no longer had to search, it was there, waiting for me. Soon I was clicking on photos with hashtags like #Iloveana, #promia and #thinspiration, which introduced me to the world of anorexia and bulimia. I’d see clips of friends laughing while discussing how to throw up efficiently. It was all so normalised.
What had started, for me, as extreme dieting became obsessive food limitation and I became rundown and exhausted. I then decided that a more workable solution would be to eat – albeit tiny portions – and then throw up.
Making this happen became the focus of my life. At first I enjoyed the sense of control it gave me over at least one area of my life, but the tables quickly turned and the bulimia started controlling me. I missed my best friend’s birthday because I just couldn’t cope with trying to sit in a restaurant. My family went skiing and as soon as we arrived I wanted to leave – the bathroom had a glass door and I was
BEFORE LONG, THE MATERIAL I WAS VIEWING BECAME EXTREME