You're listening to a MoMA Mea podcast.
Mamma Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on Hello and welcome to MoMA Mia out Loud. It's what women are actually talking about. On Monday, the third of June. I'm Holly Wainwright, I'm.
MEA Friedman and I'm Jemma Bath filling in for Jesse Stevens.
I usually host one of our other podcasts.
Through Crime Conversations. Welcome Jane you, thanks for having me. We're going to be hearing you a few times while Jesse's away. Yes on the show today, the uninvited guests at Britney Higgins's.
Wedding were the paparazzi helicopters.
Also why you're seeing embarrassing teen photos of very famous Australians all over your Instagram and why we love women supporting women until that.
Woman is Angelina Jolie. But first, mea Friedman. In case you missed it, on this podcast, we like to stay across what's happening with very old men, and in the past few days there is some exciting breaking old news, both happy and sad for the old men in question. First of all, ninety three year old Rupert Murdoch got married for the fifth time, and seventy seven year old Donald Trump is officially a criminal, having been found guilty on all thirty four charges in one of several criminal
cases that could send him to prison. Thank God, Jemma Barth is here to break this down, because jam you are also the news editor at Mama Mia. Who is the lucky lady who will get to be stepmother to children almost her own age? And will Donald Trump go to jail? Please God say yes? And can he still become president? Please God say no.
Elena Zukhova is the lucky lady who has married into the Murdoch family. She is sixty seven. She is a retired Russian molecular biologist, which I think is pretty damn cool.
Well, that's impressive, but I'm not buying that she's lucky to be marrying into the has nobody watched succession around this date.
She met Murdoch at a party hosted by one of his ex wives and they've been together since last year, short engagement, happily married.
Why does he have a better social life than me? And he's ninety three? I can't remember the last time I went to a party, i'd met someone new and excited. I met a new spouse.
The number one question or people always ask is what's with the weddings? Group like, we're all very happy that you still have a vital and interesting love life.
We're fine with.
That, but what's with the weddings?
The kids must be all the time just being like, dad, do you have to put a ring on it?
Don't you think? I was quite shocked by the photos in how old he looked. He went through a phase when a couple of wives ago with Wendy Deng where she made him dye his hair like mahogany, that funny color that men dye their hair sometimes a hole. You were the one that suggested a few wives ago also that the reason he keeps getting engaged and getting married is because it means that you can put really clear
parameters around the money. So no doubt there's a strict prenuptial whereas if he's just you know, having one night stands and having a complication situationship, it can get very complicated financially.
I think that's probably exactly it, and it would be keeping lawyers very busy.
I just think the man likes a party.
He loves love guys, he loves love. What about that Trump man? H Trump?
Okay, so last week we found out that Trump was guilty of thirty four counts of so many, so many counts of falsifying business records.
What that actually means.
Is he covered up the affair he had.
With Stormy Daniels. It wasn't that he had an affair. It wasn't that he gave her hush money. It was the fact that he hid the hush money and falsified records.
We had an affair, paid her off to be quiet, and then tried to cover it up.
And then it was to cover up that got him exactly because he only paid her off when he was running for president. It's not like after they slept together. If your eyes are glazing about all these court cases and convictions and charges, the other time he was found guilty was a few months ago, and that was in a case about being a rapist, a civil case brought by Jen Carroll, who she says Trump raped.
Her in a change room at Bergdoff's. I think it was.
Many years ago. So it's quite interesting when you think about of all the things he's done wrong. The two cases where he's been convicted, Stormy Daniels and Agene Carroll, Like it's two women who have I would love to say brought him down, But he's not going to go Is he going to go to jail? No, I mean they're saying he could. With each count, you can face up to four years in prison. I highly doubt that's going to happen.
Everybody says it's not there, so that if he wasn't Donald Trump, he wouldn't be going to jail because it's, you know, it's his first conviction. Ironic as that might seem. He's got the best lawyers in the world. It's a nonviolent offense. He's not going to go to jail. And disappointingly because on Friday when this news came through, for a while there was this sort of euphoria almost for a moment.
Of like ding Dong l Witch's day, guilty. Guilty.
There's never been a convicted felon running for president before. But as has been shown in the days since, I mean, Trump always overturns political norms, like he can prove a thing wrong, and his popularity is in fact searched and so he probably is not going to prison and is still going to run, and he probably will win.
And I in fact think that if he went to prison, his followers would quite like that because it would make him look really good in there.
Off well, it buys into the conspiracy theory. So he says it's a fix.
This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupted. There's a riged trial and disgrace. They wouldn't give us a venue change. We were at five percent or six percent in this district, in this area.
This was a.
Rigged, disgraceful trial. That the real verdict is going to be November fifth by the people, and they know what happened here, and everybody knows what happened here.
It plays very clearly into the people who believe that this is all part of a conspiracy claim.
If you from the Quickie did a brilliant episode on the Trump verdict, you can listen to that via the link in the show notes.
There was another wedding over the weekend.
Britney Higgins got married on the Gold Coast to her partner David Schiraz. She wore ature gown by an Australian designer. She said, I do at a loveliest station in the Corimbin Valley. She had everything you can imagine at a beautiful Australian wedding except perhaps paparazzi photos. She basically got the celebrity treatment. There were photos in the papers over the weekend of her vendors coming in, her cake being delivered. She was using umbrellas to shield her dress. To jog
your memory. Britney Higgins is famous in quotation marks in Australia because she alleges that she was raped in Parliament House in twenty nineteen by a colleague. That is her claim to fame.
Yeah. I was reading about how the Daily Mail paid fifteen hundred dollars to hire a helicopter to get aerial shots of the wedding, and I was like, that's a pretty interesting thing that we are but sending tabloid and paparazzi photographers to photograph the wedding of a rape victim. I understand that she is now for better and worse worse, she would say, a public figure, and that there is interest.
What I'm interested to understand is do you think that interest is everybody wants a good thing to happen to her, and everybody wants to cheer on hopefully this new chapter in her life. Or do you think there's something a bit more malevolent about the interest.
I think it's a bit of column a bit of colum b. I mean, I know, I was excited to see her name in a headline for a good reason, for a change. I was like, oh, lovely, Britney got married, and that's honestly all I thought about it. Then I looked at the headlines a bit closer, and I noticed that there seems to be a bit of snark behind the way some people are covering this news in their headlines and in their articles themselves.
The snark that I noticed because agreed, I saw the picture shed on her official channels, and then by as is obviously traditional millennial weddings, everybody waits for her to post and then they can all post it. So Brittany and David posted her husband David beautiful pictures, and then various people who are at the wedding posted too.
And I was like, oh, who was there? I married my best friend. She did and it was glorious.
But one of the things that I noticed immediately in all the coverage, and it's obviously clicking really well if you ever want to see, Like obviously we work in digital media, we understand this, but I'm sure you all do too. If Britney Higgins's wedding is still at the top of the Daily Mail and still at the top of all the news sites a couple of days after it's happened, it means that people are interested and they're clicking.
And one of the things that you'll see in particularly the Mail and the Australian coverage, I have to say, is a lot of mention of how much everything costs. So there's lots of use of the word lavish in everything. There are quotes about how much the dress must have been. There are quotes about how much it costs to hire that vineyard, there are quotes about how much it costs to hire you know, the cars and the secure.
Because every wedding is expensive, and every celebrity wedding.
Is well she is it a celebrity, That's the question. I think that the people who are big supporters of Brittany and let's not pretend that this news story and all its various twists and turns and court cases and countercourt cases and libel actions and defamation trials and civil suits. Has not consumed the news media for the past or five years. Almost she has become a public figure, and I think that those who have always supported and rooted for her, like you Jem, were like, this is gorgeous.
She's just living a life, getting on with her life. This is an important milestone, Hurrah. I hate to give credence to the commenters, but you can see the tone that's leading to the snark about the money.
The dog whistle is about. What it is about the fact.
That she famously got settlements from the Australian government after her trial collapsed, and that she's spending this money on this lavish wedding and this lavish lifestyle that she and David are leading. And I think that is what's behind the snarky tone out.
Like she's this incredibly rich woman that has taken millions upon millions from the Australian government.
I want to just tell you what she received. She had a two.
Point four million dollar settlement, which does sound like a lot of money, but when you actually break that down, it's four hundred thousand dollars for hurt distress, humiliation. It's one point four to eight million in earning capacity.
Two hundred lost earning.
Capacity, earning capacity, a bunch of money for medical, past and future domestic assistance, and then two hundred and forty five thousand in legal costs. So when you actually break it all down, like, yes, she received a big payment, but why shouldn't.
She have well, And also it's worth noting that this is still going on. There's a claim from Linda Reynolds, her former boss, to try and get some of that money back as far as I understand it, right, so it's still not settled. What's interesting is I was examining my own response to this, right, and I was, as I say, it was all over my feed from these
beautiful pictures, and I thought, how lovely. But there was a bit of me when I then saw the pap shots of them having to shield themselves under umbrellas, which is very what soap stars and movie stars do.
Interestingly, though, whole we are very familiar with seeing those pictures from the days when women's magazines like Women's Day and Women's Weekly or People magazine would get exclusives. So I think we need to just check our muscle memory, because it used to be that those umbrellas signified was and fair enough that they have been paid and they need to protect the exclusive of the media channel that they've sold their wedding to. Now that's not as far
as we know, No, it could be. I don't think that's what's happening here. This is more just about literally the privacy of a woman whose privacy has been I mean, my god, not only the things that we've heard in court and heard her have to recount under evidence, but also the leaking of text messages, phone records. It's quite extraordinary what's happened to her.
You're write me that when I see the black umbrellas and I see all that stuff, I think, oh, celebrity treatment. You're absolutely right, it's not that. But there was a bit of me examining my own reaction that was like, I wonder, why, when you've been subject to all of that scrutiny that you just explained, you might not choose to sneak off in inverted commas and have some kind of very private, quiet wedding, because surely the last thing you'd want was all that attention.
But then I kind of had to check myself and I the same thing.
But I had to check myself, which I often do when I feel myself feeling, you know, one of those kind of judgy little knots that you get sometimes when you're scrolling social media, And I was like, why the fuck should she Why shouldn't she get what every young woman who wants that kind of wedding wants, which is to be able to celebrate it with everybody and exactly the way she wants it to do, and celebrate her
love publicly. And in a way it's a radical act because we'd like to define Britney Higgins and maybe other rape victims too, by their worst day, by the worst thing that happened to them, by what we used to love to shame women for. You know that there's some kind of shame attached to what she should hide away happened to her. So when I was examining my reaction, I was like, this is actually brilliant that she's She's
just living her life. And it's the same with this move to France, which is also weaponized by the press that don't like her as being like.
They've run away to a lavish chateau. If you say the word chateau. It always sounds very lavish.
Actually looks more like a crumbling farmhouse in the country, but still chateau. And she, you know, has posted about that and about their life and what it looks like now. And it's such a positive thing really to be able to go, you know what, I survived all that shit. I survived it and now I'm living my life and I will not be defined by it.
She has lived the last few years.
Only doing things like.
Cork cases, appearing in the media, doing all this stuff. Why on earth would she not have a big wedding. I actually think it would have been a bit sad or if she had a small wedding in heat Away, because this is her moment.
To actually celebrate herself.
Why wouldn't Shell.
Thirty six months now? If you've seen this number on your socials this week shared by a lot of influential parents like Zoe Foster, Blake, Guy Sbastian, Kate Richie, Steph, Claire Smith, and Megan Gail, which I haven't to be honest, which shows that my algorithm knows I don't consume much parenting content. But after our conversation this morning, a lot of people were talking about it, so we wanted to
cover it on the show today. You might, like me, be wondering what it's all about, And there was a Muma Mere story about this over the weekend which explained it. All of these people are sharing throwback photos of themselves around the age of thirteen to throw their support behind a new campaign to raise the age at which kids can legally access social media. At the moment, the age that you can get social media is thirteen, although it's not like applying for a driver's license or trying to
get into a pub. You don't need any proof of your age. You just have to say when your birthday is. So that seems a little problematic and a little bit porous as far as boundaries go. But the campaign aims to buy teens thirty six months or three more years away from social media to help safeguard their digital future. So it would raise the minimum age to have a social media account up to sixteen, which is interestingly the
same age that you can legally start having sex. The new movement is called thirty six months, as I said, and it believes that kids need more time to develop healthy and secure identities before they're exposed to the minefield of social media. I've signed this petition. I saw it of you, yeah, I did. My kids are out the other side of it. Like for me, the horse has bolted very much. And my kids are you know, twenty six,
eighteen and almost sixteen. But my eldest children were not on social when they were really young, and they really benefited from not is that because you stopped them or they weren't interesting. It just didn't really exist. I was more I mean, as anyone, but obviously not Luca because he's twenty six. He wasn't very interested because he was a boy and he was twenty six, and it was pre Instagram pretty much, or Instagram was just kind of
starting back then. Certainly Instagram wasn't a very interesting place for boys anyway. And then my daughter there's also Snapchat, and of course there is Instagram. She's definitely been affected by Instagram and the people who are most passionate about
the need for the age to be lifted. Interestingly, as a lot of teenagers who are older and who've said, oh, yeah, you know, it's really bad because it's not just the imagery that you're exposed to, it's also the you know, every time you put a photo up or someone puts a photo up of you, it's all the commentary that happens underneath that. And for girls, it's this incredible emphasis on appearance. It's the use of face tune and what that does, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and looking at
images of people that don't exist. And then there's really insidious things like on Snapchat there's a feature called snapmaps, which I've talked about lots of times, which a lot of parents would have no idea about, because most teenagers use Snapchat as just their form of messaging. The way snap maps works, everybody that you follow you can see where they are on a map of your area. So you can see when everybody's at someone's house and you
didn't get invited. You can see when everybody's at a party. You've got situations where girls will be like, oh no, I can't come over. Mom says I've got to stay at home, and then you see everybody's over at Sophie's house on snap maps. And the idea of this campaign is that kids at age thirteen just aren't equipped to deal with all of that. I mean, adults aren't equipped to deal with it. Holly you've got kids in the crosshairs of this age. Why are you surprised that I
signed the petition and will use it. I thought that you were on my team. Maybe I've switched teams. Tell me.
A bit facetious, because so my daughter's fourteen. She got her first phone when she went to high school. I was relatively proud of myself for holding out to high school because in the particularly when we lived in Sydney, it was certainly the case. There are lots of primary school kids who had phones. And where all this is coming from, well not where it's coming from. But part of the movement for this change is to do with
that Jonathan Hype book. He's written a book called The Anxious Generation, and we talked about an essay that he'd written in The Atlantic called end the Phone based Childhood Now, which was about how basically smartphones of ruined degeneration right, and one of his calls to action in there is that parents need to band together. That's a lot of
what this campaign is about. It's about normalizing and mobilizing parental groups to be able to go because what happens is your kid says I want a phone, I want snapchat, whatever, and you say no, and they say everybody's got it, and if I don't have it, I'll be ostracized. And
in often cases that's relatively true. But what Height argues is the only way to change that apart from these systemic changes that we're talking about, like proper age gating and raising the age and tech companies taking responsibility for their irresponsible algorithms and all those things. But he's saying, at a grassroots level, you have to convince other parents to get on board with you and be like, Okay, none.
Of us will buy a phone. It's not fair. And that's why i'm parents.
And that's interesting because when I joke and say I thought you're on my team, it's not because I don't agree. I think smartphones have ruined all of us to be honest and politics and democracy and social discourse and many many things. There's a bit of me that riles against the parent pressure. And maybe that's because I gave in. I guess, if we want to look at it that way. But also I think it's hard to generalize about what everybody eats.
That's what this is about, and that's why I signed it. Because I agree with you. I don't think it's fair to ask parents to do this. And you know, Jim all I can compare this to is imagine if there was no age restrict on alcohol and people said, oh, parents, you just decide, And same with driving a car. You know the age restriction, but you don't have to prove that you're a certain age. It's just really a guideline and we all know it's kind of just a loose recommendation.
So what parents asking for is for there to be legislation that we don't have to be responsible for deciding whether our children can drink, whether they can be on social media. And some people might say that's outsourcing to the government and to big tech, but we do this with other important things like sex and alcohol and voting. We don't just say here's a loose guideline, what do you think.
But with something like sex you can say that there's a legal limit, it doesn't mean that kids are going to.
Actually abide by it. With alcohol, you.
To walk into a liquor store, show them a fake ID and they can go, yeah, no out you go and yeah, buy it.
But this is the internet. You can do whatever you want on me.
Yeah, but it's true that you can circumnavigate any rule or law if you want to, but there is no doubt that that law is a terror right. So yeah, of course it's true that thirteen year olds will still find a way onto social media. But if tech companies were really serious about it, they could make their age getting really sophisticated. I mean, AARI is supposed to be able to do anything, but apparently it can't tell how old somebody is is looking at their phone. I'm like, really,
but what I'd love to it? Yeah, exactly. I'd love to know from you, Jem. So you're a relatively new parent, your little boys one one.
And a half.
I'd love to know if your generation of parents, like Jesse obviously to watching all this, have a very different attitude to technology.
You like, my child will never see a screen. What do you think.
There's no doubt.
It's at the forefront of my mind because I'm addicted to my phone, and my son knows that if he sees my phone unattended in my house, he goes and.
Gets it and gives it to me.
Yeah, he doesn't want to use it, he gives it to me because he knows my mom's phone.
So I know that it's bad.
I think part of me feels and no, no, this is horrible, but a little bit protected because I have a boy, and I know that he's probably not going to be as obsessed as I want, or as a lot of the young girls I see are. I don't think I will be stopping him from having a phone at a certain age. Obviously I'm not at that point. Just have a little micro chap hovocrafts. But for the safety reasons, I like the idea of him having a phone. For the stranger danger, for the being on the buses.
It's the phone. It's the social media and social media. That's the lie that we were sold that giving your child a phone means giving them social media and access
to a completely unregulated internet. And that's where I think we are learning through trial and error, And unfortunately, there's a generation that is going to be error and we're seeing shocking things in terms of mental health and body image and all of that bullying and all of these issues that we couldn't have well maybe we could have foreseen, but that nobody did foresee the long term effects of social media.
Well, lots of people argue that the tech companies, you know, they did foresee it, and that they encourage it because their number one and only priority is to keep you on your phone as long as possible, however old you are. And I mean I'm being a bit facetious when I say I'm being defensive about it. I do support the idea of social media and having the age limit raise.
I really do, so I may well go and sign.
But I find the pressure to make parents group together to push on these things like phone ages and stuff hard because different families have really different circumstances. And you'll often know that some of the kids who will get phones earlier than others, and phones are the start of it, all right, But what's a whole what's the.
User case for a kid having social media at thirteen? The only one is that all my friends do exactly. Yes, So if that was taken out of the parents' hands in terms of having to push against the tide of peer pressure, great peer pressure, that would be great, right, yeah, one hundred percent. Let's give that responsibility back to the technology.
I know.
I like that.
So what I'm saying is I like this push to raise the age. But the thing that irks me a little bit is the idea that all parents need to get together and to agree on these things when our situation is really different. If you are a single parent, you have very different reasons for needing your kid to have a phone and be able to be contactable than some other parents. If your kid has to travel a
long way to school, you have different reasons. If you work funny hours and your shifts might change at any time, you have different reasons. So I guess what I'm saying is I agree with this campaign, but there's a bit of me that's like, we have to stop saying that parents have to deal with it.
You know, do you think that thirty six months will actually have an impact on children?
Yes, because the age difference between thirteen and sixteen is huge. It's so funny how quickly social norms have shifted that I cannot actually imagine kids not being allowed to be on social media till they're sixteen. But that's just like I used to never be able to imagine that you weren't allowed to smoke in a restaurant, you know what
I mean? Like very quickly if and when, and I think it probably is a when these kind of age gating rules come in, will probably very quickly, as you said me are about alcohol be I can't believe that my fourteen year old was on Instagram.
I really do think that we need more in schools, though I always think with this stuff it's about education. I think what this thirty six month campaign recognizes is that those ages between thirteen and sixteen are absolutely unlike any other three years of a person's life in terms of how vulnerable you are, how much you're changing, how much your body's changing, how much understanding where you are in the world changes, how much your friendship groups change.
You know, they say to you when you start high school, it's when as a parent you go from being your child's manager to being a consultant around the age of thirteen, and so suddenly we're going away from being our child's manager to handing that over to the unregulated Internet, and that I think we're only really realizing now the consequences of that. I think that the idea of oh, the journey's out of theottle.
It's too late. I'm glad that people are thinking it's not too late.
My son obviously has gone to high school in January. Of the rules that we had for my daughter, which was that she got her phone when she went high school. That's exactly what everyone is expecting to happen, and in large part because of Jonathan Ate and these campaigns, I'm like having a lot of angxety conversations about whether or not that's going to happen, and should it be a dumb phone? Should it only have texting on it? Like it's changing everybody's opinion.
Out Louders, We'll put a link if you're interested to that petition in the show notes. Of course, like any petition, read a bit about it before you sign. Out Louders.
If you want to listen to us every day of the week, and why wouldn't you, you can get access to exclusive segments on Tuesdays and Thursdays by becoming a MoMA mea subscriber. Follow the link in the show notes to subscribe, and a big thank you to all our current subscribers. On May the twenty seventh, one of the
most famous of all celebrity offspring changed her name. Now it might be because I worked in gossip magazines at the time and we were literally on the phone to a photographer who was dressed in camo and hiding behind a sand dune in the Namibian desert when it happened.
But I remember very.
Clearly the day that Shiloh Jolly Pitt, as she was then called, was born. Now she's eighteen, which makes me one hundred and five. But funnily enough, the way that Shiloh marked that day was not to send me a thank you card for my creepy and unethical interest in her life, but by filing a court order to drop the word pit from her name. Shiloh is now Shiloh Jolly, or at least she will be if this court order goes through, like her sister before her, Zahara, who introduced
herself recently in a recent college video as Zahara Marley Jolie. Now, if you, unlike me, are not deeply steeped in the mythology and law of this family, just very very quick top line, because jem, you're probably a little bit young to be as obsessed with the Joy Pitt situation.
As I am. I have the basics, you have the basics.
Yeah, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie for almost fifteen years were the pinnacle of fabulous celebrity couples. We were obsessed with them in a way that seems yes creepy indeed. And during that time they had six kids, three adopted kids, three biological kids, and they were very famous for traveling
the world as a big, gorgeous group, right. They were always off running humanitarian missions for the UN and making movies and living in a gorgeous French chateau that really was a chateau andlke Britney Higgins's farmhouse on a vineyard called Miraval, which makes really nice rose but is now one of their many battlefields. Not allowed to buy it anymore.
They've been separated for almost ten years, which is wild, right, But all that time, that whole time, the most bitter of court battles has been going on about money, about custody, about divorce settlement, and most of this hangs on the fact that Jolie says that when she knew that marriage was over, it was after an incident on a private jet that was flying from France to the US where brad It drunkenly assaulted her and the children, and ever since then she and the children have had very little
to do with him, even though he officially has shared custody, any statement that he's ever made about it publicly, he said that he immediately went to rehab, that he's completely cleaned himself up, and he and his camp deny all the Jolly allegations, or most of them anyway.
Right, But it's clear that.
Obviously the kids are team Angelina so much so they probably have the sort of T shirts that we used to wear back in the naughties when it was Team
gener or Team An. They're definitely team n But here's the thing, right, after all that Pitt is not canceled, despite those allegations that he's an abusive alcoholic or he was an abusive alcoholic during their marriage, and the fact that none of his children want anything to do with him, and some of them have spoken out about that relatively publicly. He is still the one who is in a multimillion dollar body movie with George Clooney that's coming to a cinema.
Near us soon.
And every time you write about this story or talk about this story, the vitriol that comes from it is directed at Angelina Jolly always, always so, even on Mama Mia. And we have a very you know, female inclusive, wonderful audience, many of whom obviously they want to read about this stuff, But they'll often say, well, it's Angelina, you know, it's Angelina.
That's she's She's turned the kids against him. She's just turned the kids against him.
Certainly in other parts of the mainstream media, that's very much the vibe is it's kind of poor Brad. He was wrestling with demons, but that piece of work has taken him down. Why do women love to hate Angelina Jolly because of Jennifer?
Do you think really? Still? I do? I think that stuff sticks, which is so strange given how much longer
Brad and Angelina were married. I think so much of it comes down to, you know, going back to the sort of nineties celebrity canon, Jennifer Aniston going out with Brad Pitt with such a big deal in our culture because she was incredibly famous, but she was very girl next door, whereas he was like heart throb, whole other level, and it was seen that him choosing to date her was a victory for every girl who wasn't a sexy bombshell. And then along came Angelina and that relationship clearly did
start while he was still married to Jennifer Andiston. They were co starring in that movie Mister and Missus Smith together and look, that kind of thing happens all the time. It's not the first relationship or marriage that's been ended by an affair. But there was something about it that people turned against. I think because Jennifer Inniston's heartbreak was so public, everybody identified with her, and even though Brad
Pitt was forgiven, Angelina kind of never was. That's the thing that's wild about it.
I bet your generation thinks it's wild gem in particular because Brad Pitt got through all that Team gen t managed stuff scott free, even though he was the one who cheated on America's sweetheart, and the villain of the piece was Angelina. And it's interesting that all these years later and in the interim, let's be clear about it. Angelina Jolie is a humanitarian who is often recognized by international organizations as having really moved the dial on a
whole lot of causes, particularly refugees. She has clearly been a very devoted parent to those kids. She's always with them. I know there are some cynics who are like, well, yeah, she wheels them out, but I don't think that's true.
I just think that's bullshit. That's what I'm saying, Katie Holmes, wheels out tzuri. It's called parenting exactly.
Those kids are now aged between fifteen and twenty two, and they're choosing how public or not they want to be. Obviously, when they were little kids, they had no choice. They were hounded by the paparazzi. It was disturbing.
So in twenty twenty, Pax wrote on his social media, which was private at the time that has since come out, Happy Father's Day to this world class asshole with a picture of Brad Pitt. You time and time again prove yourself to be a terrible and despicable person. You have no consideration or empathy towards your four youngest children, who tremble in fear, when in your presence you've made the lives of those closest to me a constant hell. You may tell yourself and the world whatever you want, but
the truth will come to light someday. So Happy Father's Day, you fucking awful human being. They're at the age now where they can choose where they want to be and who want to spend time with. And even though this case has gone on and on and on, drawn out by Brad Pitt, it must be noted who feeds the press and manipulates the press constantly and feeds this narrative of what a witch Angelina Jolie is the fact that
Shiloh's done this is a real clapback. It's a real statement without making a statement.
Why do you think Brad Pitt hasn't been canceled, Jim, I.
Don't think my generation and the generations below me care about Brad and Angela as much as your generation.
She said, Angela Angelina Angelena see.
Perfect illustration what I mean.
They've moved on Bob and Angela.
No one really care about them.
So back when I was a teenager, I was keeping on top of them blah blah blah.
But I did feel that they were the celebrities.
Of your generation.
And your generation is still in this kind of cycle of looking at what happened on that plane and Angelina.
We're not even.
Talking about them, like really, they're talking about the Bridgeton stars and whether they're together.
Like I don't.
Remember the last movie that Angelina was in. It's very much a gen X obsession, but.
I do, of course, I didn't got an icon. I'm not saying like, is he this is. My issue is.
Whether you like him or not is an icon. It's not your opinion whether he's an icon. He is one of the richest defensive It's not Holly.
You can't tell someone who an icon is, but why Hollywood icon like he is. He's definitely a Holly dot com icon.
But the reason he hasn't been canceled is, and I was thinking about this, their words on a page.
So only a few weeks ago we saw literal footage.
Of Cassie Ventura being physically assaulted by Sean Diddy Coombs. We watched it, we saw it, and we all got outraged. Many years after the fact, I read the details of what happened on that plane allegedly and they are insane.
Yeah, it's disturbing, and if there was a video of it, everyone everyone would care.
But because it is.
Words on a page, even though those words have been submitted to court and aren't really contested. I mean, I think obviously pits people think they're overblown, but they haven't completely denied that it all happened. Somehow, there's still room there for us to not believe a woman.
But I think it's also Angelina is a very private person. Nowadays, we don't know a lot about her personal life. We don't see what she's drinking in the morning, we don't see any of that.
She doesn't play the Hollywood No.
Social media is wall to wall refugee advocacy. She does not do outfit of the day.
She does not, especially your narration. They're struggling to get to know her because she's not that personal.
On social I feel like I know her. I feel, you know what, I think this story has got a long way to play, because I think Angelina is playing the long game. I think that one day in the future, those children will talk about what happened on that plane, and for all we know, they do have footage of it, but they're choosing not to, you know, reveal it. I get the sense that Angelina Julie is a phenomenal mother, and I feel like she would disadvantage herself if it
meant protecting her children. I don't get that same sense about Brad Pitt. No.
I have to be on the record that I have finally in my heart canceled him Mia After.
All this what does that look like? Though? So it looks like taking the posters off your wall, because here's the thing about cancelation.
MEA and I argue about cancelation quite a lot. But if you really like somebody's work and you've admired them and then the shit comes out about them, sometimes it can take some time for that to sink in and then you're like, Oh, the way that I know I've canceled him in my heart now is that when I see him now in things, and I'm on the record of being a big brad Pit fan out loud is always sending me brad Pit videos when I see him now, particularly this version of him, not the young version of him.
I watched the trailer of the movie that he and Cludey are in. It's called Wolves, and I bet it's good, Like, I bet it is, I bet they're funny. I bet it's all that stuff. It's like a Buddy movie, hit Man, Buddy movie, whatever. But I was like, I got the ick and that happened. Similarly, there's a musician I used to love called Ryan Adams. I've seen him in concert a million times, and when he was canceled, I was like, Oh, I shouldn't listen anymore. But the thing is is that
I still love the music. But then it sort of seeps in and you're like, I can't listen anymore because the person who I thought was writing those songs and singing those songs, it's not who I thought you were. And now I can't listen without going So when the it comes, you can't do the IgG. If you want to listen to some more on this story, The Spill our entertainment podcast, our daily entertainment podcast, is covering it too.
Question for the group, is it too soon to joke about COVID? And also, if you've got COVID, do you still stay home? Yes, well, my parents are on the road. Well they're in like some outback place with COVID. No one really cares about their COVID. I mean, I care about their COVID, but they're, you know, renting this little hut somewhere. They were leaving and they were like, oh, but we've had COVID and do you need And they're like, oh, no, I don't worry. We just wipe it down, like you
remember when there were people in hazmat suits. Anyway, we had a conversation about this on a segment on our subs episode because Lady Gaga made a very scandalous admission. Well, some people were just like, that's long, that's funny. Other people were very upset about it. Here's a little sneak peak.
I think she was being cavalier about it, and I think that.
Do you think it was, Alex. Do you think she said it like a flex?
The look on her face was can you believe I did a quarter of these concerts with COVID. It's the one thing. Whether or not she literally transmitted COVID. I mean maybe they had incredible constraints, which meant that she didn't whatever normalizing it. And that's what she really did, was she went I was able to get up and do a concept and do all of that with COVID. I don't know if that's like a great message to normalize.
We're going back to the soldier soldier runs, and I think that we're also judgmental, whether we admit it or not, of people who take COVID more seriously or who are harder hit by COVID than other people. A link to that episode and our conversation will be in the show notes.
Java bas thank you, thank you, thank you for filling in for our Jesse Stevens. My pleasure and thank you to all out louders who've listened to us today and our brilliant production team for.
Helping us put this show together. We will see you all tomorrow. Why shout out to any Mum of Mes drivers listening. If you love the show and want to support us as well, subscribing to Mom and Miya is the very best way to do so. There is a link in the episode description. Do you know as we're recording this, Jesse is taking off at the beginning of I think it's like a forty five hour stop journey with a ten month old.
That's hell hell on wheels, literally, hell on wings. I bet she's done that thing where she's got lollibags for the other people to be like.
I'm sorry about that. Sounds like something Jesse said, I might do it.
I'm about to do a six hour flight and I'm dreading that. Yes, let alone a forty four hour flight.
Apparently what they say is don't start walking up and down the aisles, because once you start, you have to you're going to do. You have wants to be suffer.
You have to leave that till towards the end.
Oh well, thoughts I pressed with Jesse