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Daily News
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Jolie's Six-Figure Subterfuge
Forget about that alleged foiled kidnapping plot involving Fugee frontman Wyclef Jean. The real story may be how actress Angelina Jolie got People to make a $600,000 donation to his charity.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
By J. Sperling Reich
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Back when she was just Mrs. Smith
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By now, you’d have to be living under an extraterrestrial rock not to know about the love triangle of actresses Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston and actor Brad Pitt. It is a story custom made for the renewed frontier of weekly glossy entertainment tabloid magazines, all of whom have not missed even the slightest opportunity to run countless stories featuring the three.
Most of these “news stories” (and that word is being used in its loosest form) have spent a great deal of time building Jolie up as a home wrecker, one who broke up the happy marriage of Hollywood power couple Pitt and Aniston by having an affair with the former while they were starring together in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Indeed, few would argue that Jolie came out of the last year of her life without the specter of a dark cloud hanging over her public persona. Her personal reputation has taken a pounding around every turn and she has done little, if anything, to counter. Most recently, this situation was compounded earlier this month when People Magazine ran a picture of Jolie, disembarking from an airplane in Haiti, visibly pregnant.
Rather than public scrutiny being aimed at a media institution that has continuously crossed journalistic boundaries by prying into the personal lives of public figures, eyebrows were once again raised in the direction of Ms. Jolie for having a child out of wedlock, and Pitt for supposedly not directly informing his ex-wife Aniston of his impending fatherhood status.
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Helping orchestrate a subterfuge-e
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It is almost a sad statement of our current society that nobody even questioned how the picture of a pregnant Jolie in Haiti, of all places, wound up in People, still the most widely read and profitable U.S. consumer mag. Ironically, that may be just what Jolie was counting on when she orchestrated the photograph and its publication.
A source close to the negotiations that helped People land the scoop, and who spoke to FilmStew on condition of anonymity, disclosed that it was Jolie herself who arranged for the photograph to be taken and published by People. With rumors of her pregnant status beginning to circulate rather widely at the beginning of January, Jolie decided to take matters into her own hands.
The actress phoned musician Wyclef Jean, a native of Haiti, where Jolie is currently filming The Good Shepherd. He in turn phoned a friend at People and ultimately negotiated a deal with an editor of the magazine: People would receive a photograph for publication that would show Jolie to be conclusively pregnant and, in return, People would pay $600,000 for the photo by making a check out to Yéle Haiti, a charitable organization founded by Jean and “intended to empower the people of Haiti and the Haitian diaspora to rebuild their nation.”
The photo was taken by a non-professional with a point-and-shoot camera, precisely at the moment that Jolie had pre-determined.
The reality of the entire situation is that Jolie knew that at some point someone, most likely a well known member of the paparazzi, would wind up snapping a picture of her that would reveal her pregnant status. Nobody would argue that. Rather then enriching a photographer associated with one of the most reviled forms of journalism, Jolie figured out a way to privately and discretely orchestrate the release of her first “pregnant picture” and in the process make a small fortune for a worthy cause.
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