Just in time for 2025, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie turned the page.
On at least one thing.
Though not “that major of a thing,” Pitt remarked recently to GQ. “Just something coming to fruition. Legally.”
Perhaps after eight-plus years in and out of court, finally setting his divorce did not feel all that momentous to the Oscar winner.
And attention had long since turned to the fallout from the lawsuit Pitt filed against Jolie over the French winery they once shared by the time her legal team confirmed that the parents of six (including four kids who are no longer minors) had signed off on a divorce settlement Dec. 30.
“More than eight years ago, Angelina filed for divorce from Mr. Pitt,” Jolie’s attorney James Simon told NBC News in a statement Dec. 31. “She and the children left all of the properties they had shared with Mr. Pitt, and since that time she has focused on finding peace and healing for their family. This is just one part of a long ongoing process that started eight years ago. Frankly, Angelina is exhausted, but she is relieved this one part is over.”
Pending litigation aside, it was still the end of an era, if not the one where Pitt and Jolie made for one of the most lyrical celebrity couple portmanteaus.
That ship sailed more than eight years ago, too.
Jolie’s divorce filing on Sept. 19, 2016—in which she asked for primary custody of Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax and twins Knox and Vivienne—wasn’t a harbinger of anything good.
But few would have guessed just how wrong it had all gone for the family behind the scenes.
It was soon obvious that something more complicated than an allegedly toxic altercation aboard a private jet had prompted Jolie—who cited their separation date as Sept. 15, 2016—to leave Pitt.
The Fight Club star was “terrified that the public will learn the truth,” Jolie’s legal team alleged in a January 2017 court filing responding to a motion from Pitt’s camp to seal the documents pertaining to their custody case, charging that Jolie’s filings were revealing too much private information, such as the identities of their kids’ therapists.
After this inauspicious beginning to their uncoupling, Jolie and Pitt did reach a custody agreement in November 2018, days before they would’ve had to go to trial if they hadn’t settled their differences.
“Brad is hoping the worst is behind them and that they can move on from the fighting and painful past,” a source told E! News at the time. “He knows in the long run the kids are best with both their mom and dad in the picture. He can now move forward and try be a stable and constant positive influence in their lives.”
Another source said that Jolie was “pleased to be entering the next stage and [was] relieved with the progress for the health of the family.”
But a quiet tension always simmered beneath Jolie’s reflections on what went wrong and, sporadically over the ensuing six years, their court filings spoke volumes.
Though Jolie eventually relented on her original 2016 request for primary custody, in May 2021 she pushed back on a judge’s tentative ruling that granted Pitt joint custody, arguing in a filing at the time that she had been denied “a fair trial, improperly excluding her evidence relevant to the children’s health, safety, and welfare, evidence critical to making her case.”
From the beginning, Jolie has maintained that she filed for divorce in the first place because it was in her kids’ best interest and she’s never wavered from that undescriptive-yet-pointed explanation.
While she has never openly discussed, outside of legal filings, her harrowing allegations about what took place aboard that fateful flight in 2016, she told Vanity Fair for its September 2017 cover story—her first in-depth personal post-split interview—that “things got bad” in the summer of 2016.
Calling her kids “six very strong-minded, thoughtful, worldly individuals,” she added, “I’m very proud of them…They’ve been very brave.”
She reiterated to Vogue in 2020, “I separated for the well-being of my family. It was the right decision. I continue to focus on their healing. Some have taken advantage of my silence, and the children see lies about themselves in the media, but I remind them that they know their own truth and their own minds. In fact, they are six very brave, very strong young people.”
Back in 2016, authorities confirmed that child services and the FBI investigated Pitt over an alleged altercation he had with then-15-year-old Maddox aboard a private jet en route from France to Los Angeles days before Jolie filed for divorce. Both investigations were closed that November without further action being taken against Pitt.
The now 61-year-old actor has never commented publicly on the matter, but he did file for joint custody before either investigation was resolved. His first response to the divorce filing was to say he was “very saddened, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids.”
Pitt first sat down with GQ Style in the spring of 2017, candidly discussing therapy (new to it, loved it), sobriety (six months in, tough but necessary) and how his habit of not processing his emotions had contributed to the demise of his 12-year relationship with Jolie, barely two years after they got married at their chateau in France.
“A breakup of a family is certainly an eye-opener that as one—and I’m speaking in general again—but as one needs to understand, I had to understand my own culpability in that, and what can I do better. Because I don’t want to go on like this,” Pitt reflected to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday in 2019, his turn in Ad Astra as an emotionally adrift astronaut haunted by the end of his marriage while on an interstellar mission almost impossible to separate from his real-life saga.
“I had family stuff going on,” he told the New York Times when asked if his own experiences helped shape the character. “We’ll leave it at that.”
Accountability was a good look for the actor, and his stock proceeded to skyrocket, culminating in his pre-pandemic Best Supporting Actor Oscar win for Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. And what a view through rose-colored glasses it was for old-school fans when he and first wife Jennifer Aniston warmly interacted at the 2020 SAG Awards.
“I got friends, I got lovely kids, I like my coffee, I like my dogs,” Pitt told PeopleTV on the red carpet that night. “I’ve got no complaints.”
At the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, a source close to the Jolie-Pitt family told E! News, “All the kids are home with Angelina but they have continued seeing Brad and go over for their regular visits.”
Fast-forward to now, however, past the roller-coaster period of image rehabilitation that included Pitt’s 2020 Oscar win and Jolie’s purposeful break from Hollywood, and at least four of their kids—all Jolie-Pitts at one point—are no longer using their father’s surname, while Shiloh legally changed her last name to just Jolie.
Meanwhile, after making the promotional rounds in 2017 for First They Killed My Father, the based-on-a-true-story film she directed (and Maddox produced) about Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia, Jolie took a more extensive break from work, more likely to be spotted at Whole Foods, Toys R Us or Target than on a set.
“I don’t enjoy being single,” Jolie told London’s Sunday Telegraph in September 2017 during her press tour. “It’s not something I wanted. There’s nothing nice about it. It’s just hard.”
“Sometimes maybe it appears I am pulling it all together, but really I am just trying to get through my days,” she continued. “Emotionally, it’s been a very difficult year and I have had some other health issues. So my health is something I have to monitor.” (She told Vanity Fair she had a bout with Bell’s palsy, which caused temporary facial paralysis, and developed hypertension in 2016.)
She returned to acting in 2019’s Maleficent: Mistress ofEvil, which made almost $492 million worldwide, and—after starring in the old-school action thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead and Marvel’s The Eternals—was nominated for a Golden Globe for her portrayal of opera legend Maria Callas in 2024’s Maria.
Jolie attended the Globes with Zahara just days after signing her divorce settlement.
The 49-year-old had previously acknowledged that she felt she had no choice but to alter her career priorities in the wake of the breakdown of her marriage.
“I love directing, but I had a change in my family situation that’s not made it possible for me to direct for a few years,” Jolie told Entertainment Weekly in April 2021. “I needed to just do shorter jobs and be home more, so I kind of went back to doing a few acting jobs. That’s really the truth of it.”
Her kids are used to being on the go, their globetrotting mom having always been intent on her children being true citizens of the world. Yet having to stay close to home for most of 2020 was much more of a challenge for their mother than for them.
“Well, I was never very good at sitting still,” Jolie told British Vogue in November 2020. “Even though I wanted to have many children and be a mom, I always imagined it kind of like Jane Goodall, travelling in the middle of the jungle somewhere. I didn’t imagine it in that true, traditional sense. I feel like I’m lacking in all the skills to be a traditional stay-at-home mom.
“I’m managing through it because the children are quite resilient, and they’re helping me, but I’m not good at it at all.”
Asked where she felt she was at in life, Jolie replied, “I’m feeling that I’ve come through a few things. I’m trying to be hopeful. I think this is something we’ve all discovered through the pandemic.” As to whether she was at a happy stage, she said, “The past few years have been pretty hard. I’ve been focusing on healing our family. It’s slowly coming back, like the ice melting and the blood returning to my body.”
And as her ongoing fight to do what she thinks is right for her kids has demonstrated, that blood runs hot when it has to.
After Pitt sued her for selling her half of their Château Miraval winery, accusing her in a 2023 court filing of agreeing to a “vindictive and unlawful sale” to a subsidiary of the Stoli Group without his knowledge in a quest to “inflict harm” on the actor, she countered that her ex was trying to silence her with litigation and sought to have him turn over his records from the aforementioned 2016 investigation into his conduct.
“Pitt’s narrative is that this case is just about a ‘business dispute,'” read an court filing from Jolie’s team obtained by E! News in August. “But that is Pitt’s theory. Jolie’s theory is that this case is about Pitt’s attempt to use Miraval as leverage to control and enforce her silence. The jury will decide what the evidence shows, but for now, Jolie is entitled to gather the evidence she needs to support her theory.”
His attorneys previously called her efforts a “sensationalist fishing expedition” in a July court filing.
Jolie dropped a lawsuit against the Department of Justice and FBI seeking documents pertaining to the federal investigation in September.
Pitt, who recently reteamed with George Clooney for the caper flick Wolfs and has the racing drama F1 coming out in June, notched a legal win in November when a judge ruled he had a valid claim regarding their implied contract in the winery lawsuit that merited going to trial.
But as 2025 approached, Jolie was back in the spotlight for a preferable reason—her work—and while promoting Maria she cracked a window into what she was going through during her break from making movies, when she “just needed to be home more.”
“I went very dark for reasons I’d rather not explain, but I didn’t have a lot of light and life within me,” she told Vanity Fair in an interview published Dec. 19. “Your light’s dim.”
Jolie explained, “I wasn’t myself for a while, so I wasn’t able to give as much to my work for a few years. To feel like I could work again and communicate and to be with nice people—so much of what I do is collaboration with other artists. When it goes well, you’re creating together. When you’re with nice people and creative people, you learn so much about yourself and about life.”
Learn more about Jolie and Pitt’s six kids right here:
Maddox
Having fallen in love with the country of Cambodia while filming 2001’s Tomb Raider, Angelina Jolie paid a visit to an orphanage in the provincial town of Battambang in the hopes of finding her first child.
Walking through, “I didn’t feel a connection with any of them,” she later told Vanity Fair, until she saw Maddox—born Aug. 5, 2001—lying in a box suspended from the ceiling. Feeling that bond in an instant, she said, “I cried and cried.”
Though the then-26-year-old adopted her eldest son as a single mother, after she began dating future husband Brad Pitt, he started the process to adopt him as well.
Thanks to an interest in his mom’s work, when Angelina directed 2017’s First They Killed My Father, the film adaptation of her friend Loung Ung‘s book about the Cambodian genocide by the Khmer Rouge regime, Maddox signed on as executive producer. “I was trying to help wherever I could,”” he told People of the role. As for his boss, aka mom, she’s “fun, funny, and easy to work with,” he said. “She’s a wonder.”
After studying biochemistry at South Korea’s Yonsei University (a choice his mom said she “could not be happier about”), Maddox attended a state dinner at the White House in April 2023 when President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden hosted South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and First Lady Kim Keon Hee.
Pax
Born on Nov. 29, 2003, “He spent three-and-a-half years of his life in one place, in one room, in this one little iron bed with 20 other kids, and having no choice for himself to do things, having no freedom,” Angelina told MSN in 2007 of Pax’s early years in an orphange outside Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Living with Maddox and sisters Zahara and Shiloh, “suddenly, here he is in a very free situation with new brothers and sisters and a mom and dad,” Angelina continued. “He’s learning English and he’s so loving and he’s wild and free ’cause he suddenly has freedom so he’s a little wild and crazy. But what a tough, remarkable little person.”
With an interest in the family business, Pax voiced the character Yoo in Angelina’s animated 2016 film Kung Fu Panda 3 and served as set photographer on First They Killed My Father before attending the 2018 Golden Globes with his mom.
He also helped decorate Atelier Jolie, a creative fashion collective and alteration company Angelina opened in NYC, and worked in the assistant director department on the Italian set of her upcoming film Without Blood.
As Angelina told People of working with both Pax and Maddox, “When a film crew is at its best, it feels like a big family, so it felt natural.”
Zahara
Then-3-year-old Maddox accompanied Angelina to the Hawassa, Ethiopia orphanage where she met eldest daughter Zahara, born Jan. 8, 2005. “Mad loves her,” the actress later told Anderson Cooper. “When Z came home she was older, she was seven months old, so for Mad it’s like having this tiny pet he can just hold and look at.”
Like her siblings, Zahara has expressed interest in all facets of her mother’s work, attending red carpets, launching her charitable Zahara Collection jewelry line in collaboration with jeweler Robert Procop in 2019 and making trips to Syrian refugee camps as part of her mom’s efforts with the UNHCR.
In August 2022, Angelina grew emotional while dropping Zahara off at Atlanta’s Spelman College (“I haven’t started crying yet so…hopefully I can hold it together,” she shared in an Instagram video), later returning for the HBCU’s homecoming festivities.
Zahara—who joined the school’s Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in 2023—has also accompanied the actress on several trips to Washington, D.C. She was by Angelina’s side when she gave a tearful speech promoting the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act in February 2022 and a year later when they met with lawmakers to advocate for the passage of the Justice for All Reauthorization Act of 2022.
Shiloh
Months after announcing her pregnancy, Angelina and Brad welcomed Shiloh at Cottage Hospital in Swakopmund, Namibia on May 27, 2006. “Shi’s so full of light and love, she’s just a little honey, and very, very funny,” Angelina said in her MSN interview. “I think I’m recognizing some of myself in that one—she’s going to be a little bit of trouble!”
Making her red carpet debut at the Unbroken premiere in 2014, Shiloh went on to appear at events for Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, The Breadwinner and Dumbo, the 2018 National Board of Review Awards Gala and the 2021 Eternals red carpet, where she wore Mom’s Dior gown.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my god, wear it and wear it better than me!” Angelina told E!’s Daily Pop of encouraging her kids to raid her closet. “And take it, and it’s your turn, anything.’ I’m that mom.”
In addition to showing interest in Angelina’s humanitarian efforts, Shiloh seems to have taken a few steps into the entertainment industry, spending time at L.A.’s Millennium Dance Complex.
On her 18th birthday in 2024, the teen submitted a petition at a Los Angeles Court to remove the hyphenated “Pitt” part of her surname to be known as Shiloh Nouvel Jolie. A source close to the matter told E! News Shiloh had hired her own lawyer and paid for it on her own.
Knox
Debuting her baby bump at the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards, Angelina later gave birth to Knox and then his twin sister Vivienne in Nice, France, on July 12, 2008. Settling in at their Château Miraval, “It is chaos, but we are managing it and having a wonderful time,” Angelina told People soon after, adding that Shiloh and Zahara liked to choose the twins’ clothes “and help change and hold them.”
Named for Brad’s grandfather, Hal Knox Hillhouse, Angelina noted that “Knox is a lot like Brad, emotionally and physically.” And, indeed, the pair did bear a striking resemblance while attending the 2015 British motorcycle Grand Prix.
Like older siblings Pax, Zahara and Shiloh, Knox took on a small role in 2016’s Kung Fu Panda 3, voicing the part of Ku Ku. “They were kind of shy,” Jolie told ET. “They don’t really want to be actors, but I didn’t want them to miss the opportunity. They came in, and they had a lot of fun with it.”
Vivienne
Knox’s younger-by-a-minute fraternal twin “reminds me of my mother in that she isn’t focused on being the center of attention but in being a support to other creatives,” Angelina told E! News in a statement, referring to her late mom Marcheline Bertrand. “She’s very thoughtful and serious about theatre and working hard to best understand how to contribute.”
Though she nailed her role as the younger version of Elle Fanning‘s Aurora in 2014’s Maleficent (“I was actually shocked that she was doing so well she went back and hit her mark! It’s frightening,” Angelina said at the time), the high schooler has since gravitated toward behind-the-scenes roles.
Angelina said that Vivienne was the one to encourage her to help bring an adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film The Outsiders to Broadway, so the teen ended up serving as a volunteer assistant to her producer mom on the Tony winner.
“She’ll correct me,” Angelina told People of Vivienne, who’s credited in the playbill as Vivienne Jolie. “She’ll say, ‘Didn’t you read the memo? We have to do this, we have to go through this,’ ” Jolie said. “She’s been a really tough assistant. She takes it very, very seriously.”
(Originally published June 4, 2021, at 4 a.m. PT)
