A French woman who revealed on TV how she had lost her life savings to scammers posing as Brad Pitt has faced a wave of online harassment and mockery, leading the interview to be withdrawn on Tuesday.
The woman, named as Anne, told the Seven to Eight program on the TF1 channel how she had believed she was in a romantic relationship with the Hollywood star, leading her to divorce her husband and transfer 830,000 euros (US$855,259).
The scammers used fake social media and WhatsApp accounts, as well as artificial intelligence image-creating technology to send Anne selfies and other messages from Pitt.
Photo: EPA-EFE
To extract money, they pretended that the 61-year-old actor needed money to pay for kidney treatment, with his bank accounts frozen because of divorce proceedings with his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie.
Anne, an interior decorator in her 50s with mental health problems, spent a year and a half believing she was communicating with Pitt and only realized she had been scammed when news emerged of Pitt’s real-life relationship with girlfriend Ines de Ramon.
“The story broadcast this Sunday has resulted in a wave of harassment against the witness,” TF1 presenter Harry Roselmack wrote on his X account. “For the protection of victims, we have decided to withdraw it from our platforms.”
The channel at the time of its broadcast said that Anne has had severe depression and was hospitalized for treatment.
The story and subsequent media coverage went viral on Monday.
Toulouse soccer club tweeted that “Brad told us that he would be at the stadium on Wednesday” for the team’s next match, before withdrawing the message and posting an apology.
Netflix France also posted on social media promoting “four films to see with Brad Pitt (really) for free,” while other media commentators made fun of Anne’s gullibility.
She was first contacted by a woman posing as Pitt’s mother shortly after she began using Instagram for the first time while on a ski trip with her family in France.
“I ask myself why they chose me to do such harm like this,” she told TF1. “I’ve never harmed anyone. These people deserve hell.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS