Brad Pitt's 'violent' past with Weinstein resurfaces amidst Angelina Jolie assault claims
In 2017, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, among others, spoke with the New York Times and said that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had harassed them. When Paltrow was 22, Weinstein hired her for the lead in the Jane Austen adaptation ‘Emma’. She said that before the shooting began, he summoned her to his suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for a work meeting. It ended with Weinstein placing his hands on her and suggesting they head to the bedroom for massages.
“I was a kid, I was signed up, I was petrified,” she said. She said she refused his advances and confided in Brad Pitt, her boyfriend at the time. After she told Pitt about the episode, he approached Weinstein at a theater premiere and told him never to touch Paltrow again.
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Soon after, Weinstein reportedly called Paltrow and berated her for discussing the episode. “He screamed at me for a long time,” she said, once again fearing she could lose the role in ‘Emma’. “It was brutal.” But she stood her ground, she said and insisted that he put the relationship back on a professional footing. “I was expected to keep the secret,” she said.
Paltrow later revealed on ‘The Howard Stern Show’ in May 2018 that Pitt approached Weinstein at the 1995 Broadway opening of ‘Hamlet’ and told him, “If you ever make her feel uncomfortable again, I’ll kill you.” She said, “It was the equivalent of throwing him against the wall, energetically. It was so fantastic because what he did was, he leveraged his fame and power to protect me at a time when I didn’t have fame or power yet. He’s the best.”
In 2019, Pitt opened up about confronting Weinstein. Pitt said that he was acting on pure instinct because of how he was raised as a child.
“At that moment, I was just a boy from the Ozarks on the playground and that’s how we confronted things,” Pitt said about standing up for Paltrow and confronting Weinstein. “I just wanted to make sure nothing was going to happen further because Paltrow was going to do two [more] films [with Weinstein]. I think the interesting thing is that we, Hollywood specifically, but the workplace, men and women’s dynamics is being recalibrated, recalibrated in a very good way that is long overdue. And I do think that’s an important story to tell.”
But Jolie’s new interview in the Guardian puts Pitt’s actions in question. In 2009, Pitt starred in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’, co-produced by the Weinstein Company. In 2012, she said that Pitt approached Weinstein to work as a producer for the noir thriller ‘Killing Them Softly’, which The Weinstein Company later distributed. In doing so, Jolie felt minimized the sexual assault she had endured. “We fought about it. Of course, it hurt,” Jolie said about Pitt being happy to work with Weinstein, despite knowing he had assaulted her. She avoided attending promotional events for the film.
In 2017, she said, “I had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did. This behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.”