Some things can stay in the ’90s.
Photo: Toni Anne Barson/WireImage
Now that she’s a veteran newswoman herself, The Morning Show star Jennifer Aniston has even more perspective on the tabloid mania surrounding the 2005 end of her marriage to Brad Pitt. “It was such juicy reading for people,” she tells Vanity Fair in its September cover story. “If they didn’t have their soap operas, they had their tabloids.” It has been 20 years since she first addressed rumors that she was in a “love triangle” with Pitt’s future ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, in a Vanity Fair story. “I haven’t looked at that article in forever. I just remember the experience of doing it — which was kind of jarring. It was also such a vulnerable time,” she says today. “Journalism back then felt more like a form of a sport. There’s obviously some PTSD we all have, which is why these scare me. How are they going to misinterpret my words or take something out of context? And one line nowadays …”
At the time, even what she and Pitt didn’t say became news, filling supermarket tabloids and fueling the growth of online gossip media with rumors about Aniston’s alleged unwillingness to have children in contrast with Jolie, who had adopted son Maddox from Cambodia in 2002. “It’s a shame that it had to happen, but it happened,” she says of the rumors and nastiness. “And boy did I take it personally.” It has made her more skeptical of sensationalized news stories — good and bad — not unlike her news-anchor character on The Morning Show. “They were sort of building us up and then tearing you down,” she says of the Y2K-era tabloids, starting to sound like an Alex Levy quote comparing herself to a piñata (“Oh God, did I just quote The Morning Show?”) before continuing. “I didn’t have a strong enough constitution to not get affected by it. We’re human beings, even though some people don’t want to believe we are. They think, You signed up for it, so you take it. But we really didn’t sign up for that.”
Her support system to this day includes some of the era’s biggest tabloid targets such as Sandra Bullock and Pitt’s other ex, Gwyneth Paltrow. Pitt, meanwhile, should be afraid of the gossip they exchange when they’re together. “How can we not?” Aniston says. “We’re girls.”
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