During a recent appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show, comedian Adam Carolla weighed in on the ongoing public estrangement between Brad Pitt and his children.
The conversation was prompted by reports that two more of Pitt’s children, Zahara and Maddox, have moved to drop the Pitt surname and go exclusively by Jolie. Combined with Shiloh doing the same on her 18th birthday in 2024, the trend suggests a pattern that has reportedly left the actor devastated.
California law requires that name changes be published, which is how the decisions became public knowledge.
Talking about the incident, Carolla stated, “If my dad roughed up my mom, but I still got to fly private, I would probably look the other way and just go on that Learjet,” he said. He followed it by clarifying he was speaking hypothetically about a non-closed-fist, “1950s style” incident, and acknowledged his sister would likely have gone along with it too.
Beyond the joke, Carolla offered a more substantive theory. He argued that Angelina Jolie, whom he described as someone who has had a difficult relationship with her own father, may have transferred longstanding resentment onto Pitt.
“When a woman h*tes her dad, she will oftentimes transfer that onto whatever male figure is closest to her,” he said. He added that in his observation, women going through difficult divorces frequently demand that people in their lives choose sides, and that children are rarely exempt from that pressure.
Carolla drew a parallel to the Mia Farrow and Woody Allen situation, noting that he believes Dylan Farrow was “mind poisoned” by her mother, while being careful to separate that claim from the facts of Farrow’s affair. His point was not to excuse bad behavior in relationships, but to raise the possibility that children can be weaponized in custody and post-divorce conflicts, sometimes genuinely coming to believe things that were planted rather than experienced.
Kelly noted that Pitt’s team has denied the allegations about the private plane incident, and that much of what the public knows comes from competing narratives put out by high-powered publicists.
Carolla’s conclusion was that he would be “over the moon” to have Brad Pitt as a father, that he finds Angelina Jolie’s behavior erratic, and that without corroborating accounts from other people in Pitt’s life, it is difficult to take the children’s public distancing entirely at face value.
“I think she’s nuts and kind of poisoned the kids on him,” he said.
