Melissa Etheridge is throwing her support for Brad Pitt amid the actor’s divorce with Angelina Jolie. As a longtime friend of Pitt’s who performed at his wedding to Jennifer Aniston, the singer has some not-so-nice things to say about Jolie — particularly about the way the actress has been handling the custody battle of her six children with her estranged husband.
“It breaks my heart that anyone would take something as personal as your marriage and your relationship and your rights to your children and do it as purposefully as I see it’s being done,” she says on Andy Cohen’s Sirius XM radio show, Andy Cohen Live.
“There’s a way to be. I’ve gone through family courts,” Etheridge continues, explaining that she’s had her own custody disagreements when she split with Tammy Lynn Michaels in 2010. “I’ve been twice around this block, and I know it really well, and I know when there’s some forethought to just how mean [you can be] and just how you’re going to put disinformation out there first.”
She also claims she already saw some shady behavior from Jolie back when she was dating Billy Bob Thornton, who left Etheridge’s friend Laura Dern to be with the Maleficent actress.
“I was around when Angelina was not doing nice things with Billy Bob to Laura Dern,” she recalls, before trailing off, “I went through that on a personal level, and then to know the side of Jennifer [Aniston] and Brad…”
“I helped Laura move out of her house with Billy Bob — I like broke into their home to get their stuff out because it was so nasty.”
As for the allegations that Pitt had a physical altercation with one of his kids before the split, Etheridge calls the accusations “completely unfounded” and “heartbreaking.” Though she admits she hasn’t been in contact with Pitt for years, she believes he’s not the type of man who would hurt his children.
“I really hope that he reaches back out because there are a lot of us who haven’t seen him in 10 years,” Etheridge says. “And it was hard then. We all lost a friend.”
Jolie is said to have filed for divorce after Pitt got rough with his son during a flight aboard a private jet from France to the U.S. Currently under investigation by the FBI, Pitt has agreed to let Jolie have physical custody of their six kids for the time being.
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