English film actor Angelina Jolie said that she was hurt by her former husband Brad Pitt’s decision to work with former film producer Harvey Weinstein who has been convicted of rape and sexual assault.
In a lengthy interview with The Guardian on Saturday about her new book Know Your Rights: And Claim Them, she opened up about her marriage and her life.
Speaking about the incident, Jolie told the Guardian, “I really don’t want to derail the book into stories about Harvey… But that was an abuse of rights? It was. It was beyond a pass, it was something I had to escape. I stayed away and warned people about him.”
Elaborating on it she said, “I never associated or worked with him again. It was hard for me when Brad did.”
Brad Pitt starred in the 2009 action film Inglorious Basterds which was produced by Weinstein’s company Miramax Productions. Jolie also mentioned that Pitt approached Weinstein in 2012 to work as a producer on the film Killing Them Softly. “We fought about it. Of course it hurt,” she said, adding that she refused to attend the film’s promotional events.
Jolie and Pitt were married in 2014 and filed for divorce two years later. Despite the divorce being finalised in 2019, their custody battle is still ongoing. While Jolie remained tight-lipped about her divorce and custody battle during the interview, she mentioned that she feared for the safety of her whole family at one point. “I’m not the kind of person who makes decisions like the decisions I had to make lightly. It took a lot for me to be in a position where I felt I had to separate from the father of my children,” she said.
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Apart from this, the Lara Croft: Tomb Rider actor spent considerable time discussing activism and the purpose of her new book. Co-written by human rights lawyer Geraldine Van Bueren QC, the book, Jolie said, speaks about all the rights of children under the United Nations Convention of the rights of the child.
Speaking about the reason behind writing this book, she said, “I’ve met too many children who live with the effect of their rights being violated – displaced people, young rape victims. I couldn’t understand why they were still fighting for basic things that were their rights to begin with.”