A Reddit thread questioning Hollywood's silence on Brad Pitt's relationships with teenage girls in the late 1980s has drawn significant attention on r/WhyWereWeOkWithThis. The post featured a picture of Brad Pitt and Christina Applegate.
Pitt was 26 at the time, and Applegate was 17, technically not even an adult. Moreover, the post brings to light that Pitt “dated 16-year-old Juliette Lewis the same year.”
Christina Applegate’s own memoir reveals some details about the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards when she invited Pitt as her date. However, she remembers ditching him mid-date to leave with Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach, a decision she now calls teenage regret.
One commenter in the thread recalled this very story. “Famously, she left him stranded at the VMAs 1989 and he had to drive her mother home, effectively ending the relationship,” the user writes.
Another user added a correction: "Worth calling attention to the fact that she ditched him for another dude - Sebastian bach. :) I think it's also worth noting that they didn't really date - he invited her to attend the VMAs with him, and that's the only time they went out."
Even so, the age gap remained the thread's central concern, a teenage sitcom star and a man in his mid-twenties sharing a red carpet as a date.
The thread does not stop with one name, as Juliette Lewis was pulled into the same conversation.
Lewis was "about 17" and Pitt was 27 when they started dating, according to InStyle. Their relationship began around the television film Too Young to Die? and continued into the early 1990s.
DID YOU KNOW BRAD PITT DATED A 16 YEAR-OLD ?
— i Expose Racists & Pedos (@SeeRacists) October 13, 2024
Brad Pitt(26) and Juliette Lewis(16) dated from 1990 to 1993.
The couple worked on 'Too Young to Die?' and 'Kalifornia' together and starting dating. She was 16 at the time, 10 years younger than him. ? pic.twitter.com/FyDk90F76q
One user wrote, “Why are so many actors like THIS?!”. Another commenter stepped back from the individual story and focused on the wider industry.
“These are all circles where the accountability starts to disappear. Pitt didn’t lose job offers or face jail time for his bad behavior,” they write, saying the problem sits not only with one man, but with systems that treated these age gaps as background noise.
Another commenter connected the thread's discussion to Pitt's later years, referencing the 2016 plane incident involving Angelina Jolie, subsequent custody disputes and allegations of abuse that have been documented in court filings
