Melissa Etheridge is speaking out about some comments she made when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie announced their divorce, which later came back to haunt her.
At the time, when the famous couple announced their split, Etheridge told Andy Cohen on his show that she was “heartbroken” that Pitt was accused of child abuse in the wake of the divorce, maintaining that the accusations were “completely unfounded” unaware of how much of a firestorm her comments would create, according to Us Weekly.
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“It was really tense there for a day … getting kind of threatened,” Etheridge recalled on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen. “And you know what? It all just — poof! — went away.”
Etheridge’s oldest two children were conceived with the help of David Crosby, who was the sperm donor for both of those pregnancies (with Etheridge’s ex, Julie Cypher), but Etheridge admits she thought about asking Pitt instead.
“Brad was considered,” said the 57-year-old. “He was a very good friend of mine, and then that just seemed really complicated. Like, super complicated. My children are like, ‘I could have had Brad Pitt as a father!’”
Jolie’s decision to divorce Pitt, after an alleged incident in an airplane with their oldest son, Maddox, isn’t the first time Etheridge has criticized the actress. In 2013, Etheridge, a breast cancer survivor, criticized Jolie’s choice to have a pre-emptive double mastectomy, after Jolie found out she was a carrier of the defective BRCA1 gene, which gave her a much greater likelihood of developing cancer.
“I wouldn’t call it the brave choice,” Etheridge told the Washington Blade at the time. “I actually think it’s the most fearful choice you can make when confronting anything with cancer. My belief is that cancer comes from inside you and so much of it has to do with the environment of your body. It’s the stress that will turn that gene on or not. Plenty of people have the gene mutation and everything but it never comes to cancer, so I would say to anybody faced with that, that choice is way down the line on the spectrum of what you can do and to really consider the advancements we’ve made in things like nutrition and stress levels.
“I’ve been cancer free for nine years now and looking back, I completely understand why I got cancer,” she added. “There was so much acidity in everything. I really encourage people to go a lot longer and further before coming to that conclusion.”
Photo Credit: Getty images/Jeff Kravitz
