by Ian Halperin
One of the countries that doesn’t automatically exclude adoptive parents because of mental-health issues is Cambodia, where Jolie had filmed Tomb Raider. She often said that during those weeks on-set, she had fallen in love with the people there. It was soon apparent that she had her sights set on adopting a Cambodian orphan. At first, Thornton sounded like he was on board with the idea, and he even accompanied his wife in September 2001 to fill out the forms required by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to start the process of foreign adoption.
The couple underwent and passed their home study and announced to friends that they would be travelling to Cambodia to visit an orphanage and choose their new baby. “Somebody told me that if you’re going to adopt an orphan, you should adopt from a country you love, because that’s the only history you’re going to share with them,” Jolie later explained of her decision to adopt from Cambodia.
But Cambodia also had another appeal, at least at that time: its relatively lax adoption criteria. According to the internationally respected Cambodian human-rights non-governmental organization, LICADHO, corruption and poverty had in recent years turned Cambodia into a “magnet for wealthy, childless foreigners,” with as many as a thousand adoptions rushed through annually, most of them to the United States.
When she visited Cambodia in November 2001, the UN announced that the purpose of her trip was to visit returned refugees on the Cambodia-Thailand border. But according to local photographer Chor Sokunhea, “We all knew why they were here: to adopt a baby at an orphanage she had been to when she made the movie.” She did indeed take a trip to an orphanage in Battambang, and by the end of their two- hour visit, Jolie knew she had found her son. He was the last child she saw, a three-month-old boy named Rath Vibol, who she said was from “a very poor village.” “I went into an orphanage and decided I’d not go for the cutest child but just go to the one that connected to me,” Jolie later recalled. “He was asleep, and he woke up and smiled. As soon as I saw him smile, I felt like this kid wasn’t uncomfortable with me. He seemed okay in my arms.”
Before the adoption could be completed and the parents could bring the boy—renamed Maddox Chivan by Jolie—back to the States, there was still a significant amount of red tape to cut through, not the least of which was getting the U.S. visa required to bring him home. That process suddenly got very complicated in December when the first reports came to light that illegal networks in Cambodia were buying infants from destitute mothers and selling them to orphanages. “The key is money,” explained Naly Pilorge, deputy director of LICADHO. “Americans are paying $10,000 to $20,000 [for a child] in a country where the average income is $250 a year … That comes to something like $7.5 million a year, all under a cloak of humanitarian assistance.”
The news prompted the U.S. government to ban the adoption of Cambodian orphans by Americans. An exception was made, however, for applications processed before December; those would be decided on a case-by-case basis. This meant that Jolie and Thornton were still eligible.
Less than three months later, Jon Voight, who had just been nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Howard Cosell in the biopic, Ali, attended a luncheon honoring Oscar nominees. After lunch, he let the news slip. “Angelina adopted a Cambodian baby. I’m a grandfather today,” he said. Indeed, the Cambodian authorities had suddenly approved the adoption, and baby Maddox was brought to an ecstatic Jolie, who was in Namibia filming Beyond Borders.
Meanwhile, to the frustration of the new parents, the U.S. embassy in Cambodia still hadn’t issued Maddox’s visa to enter the U.S. “I’m certain Thornton and Jolie both know that … they must complete the proper procedures in accordance with U.S. law before bringing the child into the U.S.,” the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, Kent Wiedemann, said.
Finally, at the end of April 2002, the embassy’s special investigations unit approved the adoption, and Maddox was cleared to travel to his adoptive land. Then, after Jolie finally returned with baby Maddox to begin her new role as mother, she was suddenly engulfed by an adoption scandal that was now rocking Cambodia. In June, human rights agencies in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, charged that Maddox was not an orphan at all but that he had been “bought” from his destitute mother. Equally alarmingly, they charged that his adoption had been fast-tracked after “substantial bribes” had been paid to senior government officials. “I’m sure that this child was not a real orphan and was not abandoned,” Dr. Kek Galibru, head of LICADHO, told the London Daily Mail. There was an allegation that Maddox’s birth mother was paid approximately $100 to hand over her son, a small fortune for a poor Cambodian.
Maddox’s adoption had been facilitated by American businesswoman Lauryn Galindo, a Hawaiian-born former professional hula dancer who had been working as an adoption agent in Phnom Penh since the early 1990s. It was Galindo who had personally brought Maddox in March from the Cambodian orphanage to Walvis Bay, Namibia, where she delivered him to Jolie. Galindo later denied that she had paid money for children or been involved in any illegal practices. “When people ask me what I do, I don’t say adoptions, I say humanitarian work,” she told the Cambodia Daily newspaper. “I didn’t come here to steal children. I came here to do what I could to help.” Pressed further, she admitted that half of the $9,000 fee she charges American couples for processing an adoption was handed over to government officials. She denied that this is akin to bribery. “It’s OK to give tips,” she explained. “It’s fine because these guys can’t live on their salaries … I’m really happy to share the wealth.” Quizzed by reporters about the controversy, Jolie insisted that the adoption was legitimate and maintained that she and Thornton had hired private investigators to determine Maddox’s lineage. She has never released the results of that investigation, however, nor the documentation that she was given about Maddox’s origins.
Behind the scenes, Jolie immediately hired a team of lawyers to fight any attempt to return Maddox to Cambodia after the U.S. government hinted that she might have to do so. “I would never rob a mother of her child,” she insisted. “I can only imagine how dreadful that would feel. Maddox is my baby, he is by my side all the time, and I think I can give him so much. I can no more imagine living without him than not breathing.” Her efforts appear to have been successful, and no further action was taken.
Two years later, however, when the allegations had been long forgotten, Jolie’s adoption agent, Lauryn Galindo, quietly pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to fraud and money laundering in the falsification of documents to obtain visas for Cambodian children purported to be orphans. It is uncertain to this day whether Maddox was one of the orphans whose papers she had falsified, but Jolie was never formally implicated in her case.
The indictment leveled against Galindo, in fact, concerned only adoptions processed between 1997 and 1999, more than two years before she helped Jolie obtain Maddox. But it does provide a rather revealing insight into her modus operandi. In one 1998 case, according to the charges, Galindo faxed her sister the medical records of a child to be adopted with a handwritten note: “Father dead, mother very poor.” Four months later, she allegedly told the adoptive parents to give the birth mother $100 and to donate $3,500 to the orphanage that had been holding the child.
This may be significant, given that at the height of Maddox’s adoption process, Jolie announced that she was making a sizable donation to the orphanage. “Before I adopted Maddox, I decided to do something financially to help the whole orphanage,” she explained at the time. “I can’t bring every kid home, but I can make sure that life is better for a big group of them.” Now people wondered whether that contribution was demanded from her as a condition for taking Maddox.
What would a baby-buying scandal do to Jolie’s new image as a humanitarian and a mother? Just four days after the first American paper, the Boston Globe, broke the story of the adoption scandal and Galindo’s role in it, Jolie neatly changed the subject once again, suddenly announcing to the media that she and Thor
nton had split up.
“You have to hand it to her,” a Hollywood publicist said recently, laughing. “There sure are a lot of coincidences involved in that marriage. It started when she was accused of shagging her brother, and it ended when she was about to be accused of purchasing her baby. She came through both times smelling like roses, and the media played into her hands both times. It’s like in magic where the secret to the trick is misdirection. Angelina is a master magician. I wish I was half as good as her at my profession. She’s probably the most talented image consultant on the planet.”
The publicist, however, didn’t give all the credit to Jolie herself. “My hunch is that the real mastermind is Geyer,” she speculated. “That’s his department. He takes good care of her. She brags about how she doesn’t have a publicist, but she doesn’t need one. She has Geyer.” She was referring to Jolie’s long-time manager, Geyer Kosinski—one of the people she thanked on Oscar night—who has helped her navigate many different crises while acting as her gatekeeper, spokesperson, and damage-control artist.
Whoever was responsible for keeping the adoption scandal from tarnishing Jolie’s reputation was certainly skillful. Other than a single headline in the New York Post, “Did Angelina Buy Her Baby?” the story was virtually ignored in the United States, and most Americans are still unaware that she was caught up in a potentially devastating scandal.
Meanwhile, details appeared about her breakup with Thornton. It seemed as though Jolie would emerge from this, too, unscathed, while Thornton would be portrayed as an insensitive Hollywood boor, unsupportive of her attempts to save the world. At first, Jolie explained that the two had simply chosen different paths. “What went wrong, or not even wrong but what wasn’t meant to be was he was focusing on his music, and I was upstairs reading. I went through a change in my life and started paying more attention to the news and learning about other countries and becoming more politically active. I was saying, ‘OK, well, listen, you’re going to finish this song and I’m going to Washington and I’ll see you on Monday,’ and then I’d come back and we wouldn’t discuss what he wrote in the studio and we wouldn’t discuss what I learned in Washington, and then two weeks later it would be, ‘OK, I’m going to Sierra Leone and Tanzania …’”
Soon, however, her accusations became harsher, and she accused her ex of failing to support her humanitarian activities. “He’s never been to a refugee camp,” she told US Weekly in July 2002. “I asked him to come, but he chose not to. You learn what a person is about by their behavior. And sometimes what they do hurts you.”
Despite Thornton’s public claims that he planned to raise Maddox with Jolie, it was clear that this was a smokescreen when it emerged that she had put only her name on the adoption papers. It was a hint that the marriage had been over already for some time. When news of their separation emerged, the two had only been seen together in public four times in the previous five months, although Thornton had accompanied her to Cambodia to choose Maddox and then to Namibia where they took possession of the new baby. The last time she saw her husband, she revealed to US Weekly, was on June 3, the day before her twenty- seventh birthday. They had a huge fight. “It was ugly,” she said. Since then she hadn’t spoken to him. Jolie officially filed for divorce from Thornton on July 17, 2002.
* * * *
Less than a month after the end of that relationship, her world was turned upside down by another man she loved. In the beginning of August 2002, Jon Voight contacted the producers of Access Hollywood and asked if he could appear on the show to send a message to his daughter. The next night, he shocked America with what he had to say. Breaking down in tears, an emotional Voight declared, “I’ve been trying to reach my daughter and get her help, and I have failed. I’m sorry, really. I haven’t come forward and addressed the serious mental problems she has spoken about so candidly to the press over the years. But I’ve tried behind the scenes in every way. You can be sure that’s been my agenda. They’re very serious symptoms of real problems … real illness. I don’t want to look back and say I didn’t do everything I could.”
He then described an incident that he says happened while Jolie was wrapping up shooting Girl, Interrupted. “I went to New York, and I went on the same mission, you know, to be with her and try to get her and try to get her help. She said, ‘You can’t help me! You can’t help my pain!’ And I saw it, you know, and I said, ‘Angie, we can. We can get help for this.’”
He blamed the people around her for failing to get her the help she so desperately needed: “When the money train is running everybody wants to be on it and nobody wants to make adjustments, and I’m angry about that. And I’m especially angry at her manager who has been with her and seen everything. I begged him to help me many times, and always he has turned her against me.”
He was referring, of course, to Geyer Kosinski, who in July had ordered Jolie’s bodyguards to block Voight from stepping forward and giving his daughter a hug when they both attended a gala celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of Paramount studios. In an effort to discredit him, somebody later leaked a false story to the media that the bodyguards stopped Voight from physically manhandling his daughter, despite numerous witnesses saying he had done nothing improper.
Voight ended the shocking interview by saying his biggest heartache was not being able to see his newly adopted grandson, Maddox, and knowing that the interview would likely put at risk a future relationship with the boy. “Of course I want nothing,” he said, breaking into tears again. “I want nothing more than to hold my baby in my arms, and keep her from harm … At least she knows that somebody’s out there, trying to get help.”
The next day, Jolie issued a terse statement in response. “I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father,” she stated. “After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child.” Jolie’s mother immediately rallied to her daughter’s defense. “I’m shocked,” Bertrand said. “There’s nothing wrong with Angelina’s mental health. Mentally and physically, she is magnificently healthy.”
Many people, including those who knew the family well, were blindsided by the suddenly public family drama. A friend of Voight’s, who said he has helped the actor in his charity work, reported in 2007 that Voight has always refused to tell anyone what sparked the feud. “It didn’t seem to be a single incident that set it off, as if something suddenly happened that caused them to fight. I know Angie was peeved at her father for leaking the news of Maddox’s adoption to the press before she had a chance to announce it for herself, but that was just a squabble. They always bickered good-naturedly and occasionally she’d tell her dad off, but honest to God, they got along great. We [his friends] always speculated that he found something out about her that freaked him out, but we could never figure out what it was. It made him sad. He loved those kids so much, and then he lost both of them. Jamie took it badly. And he was so excited about meeting his grandson. He would talk about changing [Maddox’s] diapers and how he hoped he hadn’t forgotten his technique.”
The feud was all the more surprising to those who had been following Jolie’s career closely. They knew very well that, contrary to later media reports, Jolie and her father had never before been estranged. Her consistent public statements over the years amply demonstrated that she and her father were close. She repeatedly talked about how much she loved him, and time and again, she called him a great father in interviews. She had always made it clear she did not like being asked about being the daughter of Jon Voight because she didn’t want to be measured against her father, but she never shied away from expressing her appreciation for him.
They fought occasionally, and she seemed to resent his frequent lectures over her public behavior, even how she dressed, but that was normal father-daughter stuff. There had never been any extended period since childhood when the two weren’t in contact, except when their work took them to
different places for lengthy blocks of time. The media seems to have gone along with the post-2002 mythology created by Jolie and her brother about their relationship with their father. It is common today to read descriptions of Jolie’s family life that claim he “abandoned” their mother when they divorced and that Jolie has been estranged from her father ever since. It is almost impossible to find references to the fact that Bertrand and Voight had joint custody and that the children were for years raised by their father as much as they were by their mother. It is even rarer to find mention that for years Voight traveled once a month across the continent, after their mother moved to New York, to spend time with his kids.
Today, Jolie likes to tell reporters that she and her father “were never close.” But a smattering of her own statements over the years belies this, notably what she told an interviewer in 2001: “I never remember a time when I needed my father and he wasn’t there.” And of course there was her Oscar acceptance speech, in front of a billion viewers in March 2000, when she said, “Dad, you’re a great actor, but you’re a better father.”
In another odd twist, after the feud began, it was often James Haven who went on the offensive in interviews to discredit their father, despite having been even closer to Voight than his sister. In 2007, Haven told Marie Claire magazine that he had devoted himself to the cause of abused women after watching Voight inflict “years of mental abuse on his mother.” He also said Voight had failed to provide financially for Bertrand and the children. And yet Jolie herself had frequently given interviews over the years mentioning that Voight and her mother remained “best friends” even after they divorced. In 2001, just a year earlier, she had talked openly of how much fun she and her dad had when, at her request, he played Lara’s father, Lord Croft, in the first Tomb Raider film.
Family friends of both Voight and Bertrand had confirmed many times that everybody got along very well over the years and that they didn’t even seem like a broken family. In interviews, Bertrand frequently stated that Voight was an excellent father and a good friend to her. “Nothing means more to Jon than the children,” she told People magazine in 1993.