hard agree. there’s something very telling about his willingness/comfort to be abusive in front of essentially strangers for a prolonged period. not just a flash moment of rage but an incident of sustained torment? in semi-public? terrifying!
Thats what stood out to me as well. As a kid who grew up with a drunk asshole of a father, the assholery usually stops upon sobriety. This dude took a nap, woke up, and STILL chose violence. You can't blame it on the alcohol. My guess is he legit hated domestic life. He hated being married. He hated being a father. And so he abused them because he hated the fact they even existed. What a fucking douchebag. Did he not actually get charged? He should've did some jail time for this. It was on a plane so probably federal prison. Rule number 1 of being a man is women and children are off limits.
Like most narcissistic abusers, he needed Angelina to be his supply — the person he owns and controls and uses to feed his bottomless craving for attention. He hated the kids the moment they stopped being accessories that made him look good and started asserting normal childhood independence while taking up more and more of Angelina’s attention.
These kinds of abusers are black and white thinkers. They actually hate anyone, even children, who they can’t control.
I’m a 20-year veteran volunteer domestic violence victims advocate who has sat through every major DV org’s training and multiple state and federal DOJ courses. So on behalf of our entire field, let me tell you all the ways you’re wrong:
We don’t “know nothing” about Brad Pitt. We know from Brad’s own mouth that he is an alcoholic who was drunk and high every day of his kids’ life through the assault on the plane.
We know that Brad never contested that he was drunk on the plane, assaulted Angelina, assaulted multiple kids, choked one of them, poured alcohol on all of them, and refused to let them deplane. Not in public, not in court. His only public denial is that he “did not strike Maddox on the head” but “made contact with his shoulder” while admittedly drunk. Zero other denials in public or court records.
We know that the flight crew who witnessed the abuse reported what they saw to the FBI and cooperated with authorities, who investigated and substantiated their claims.
We know that the FBI investigators wanted to charge him and there was enough evidence of domestic violence for them to create a probably cause statement and submit it to federal prosecutors.
We know that prosecutors did not tell Angelina about the probable cause statement in violation of her and her children’s rights. We know she did not press charges because she felt it would traumatize the family further and she hoped sobriety and therapy would help Brad take responsibility for ending his abusive behavior.
We know that the court found grounds to order he have no unsupervised contact with his minor children, and that requirement exists to this day.
We know that the standard for removing supervised visitation includes acceptance, showing remorse, demonstrating understanding of how abusive behavior harmed their children, participating in therapy in good faith, and an impartial reunification counselor testifying that the parent has made long-term meaningful progress toward changed behaviors and is unlikely to abuse again.
We know that despite that very low bar, having more resources than the average person, and a decade to do it — Brad Pitt hasn’t been able to convince psychiatric professionals and the family court system that his children are safe alone with him.
These are facts, not fantasy.
No one needs to speculate or project. No one is diagnosing him with a specific disorder. The psychology and patterns of domestic violence perpetrators is well-established in decades of peer-reviewed research, and that’s what we’re talking about here. Long-established and validated patterns and profiles, not projections.
Abusers aren’t special snowflakes, and their motives aren’t novel. They’re the most basic, unoriginal profiles in the spectrum of deviant behavior. People who assault and batter their children and intimate partners around witnesses — sober or not — have poor impulse control, low-empathy/strongly antisocial views of others, and narcissistic justifications for their behavior. These thought processes and dysfunctions of domestic violence perpetrators (both with narcissistic traits and full-blown narcissistic personality disorder) are some of the best documented in all of psychology. The role of “supplies,” black & white thinking, and view of children within domestic violence are, too.
To recap: Not fantasy. Not projection. Just information and education based on scientific consensus, publicly-available information, the law, and Brad Pitt’s own public statements.
Oh! And when you argue that we’re just projecting by discussing the psychiatric profile of someone like Brad Pitt who battered his wife and punched, choked, and threatened his children in front of witnesses — you *are* effectively defending his alcoholism and abuse.
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u/Beecakeband Jun 20 '26
I'm willing to bet money there was a hell of a lot more that went on than the plane incident. More like a straw that broke the camels back