There's getting weak-kneed at the sight of Brad Pitt on the silver screen, and then there's falling hopelessly in love with Brad Pitt, conducting a yearlong online romance, and sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to the down-on-his-luck actor for cancer treatment. As the BBC reports, a Frenchwoman known to the world only as "Anne" apparently found herself in the latter camp and ended up sending scammers $855,000.
Per NBC News, the 53-year-old interior designer says in an interview with French broadcaster TF1 that she was approached online by a woman purporting to be Pitt's mom, who told Anne that her little boy "needed someone like me." Anne and the supposed Brad Pitt corresponded via various social media platforms, with the fake actor sending her what turned out to be AI-generated selfies and eventually pleading for money for kidney cancer treatment—claiming that his small fortune was locked up in his divorce battle with Angelina Jolie. "At first I said to myself that it was fake, that it's ridiculous," says Anne. "I just got played, I admit it, and that's why I came forward, because I am not the only one."
Anne herself was going through a divorce, from which she was awarded almost $800,000—all of which and more went to the scammers. The jig was up when Anne spotted pictures last summer of real Pitt with his real girlfriend, but by then the money was gone. The online mockery that has followed her story has been so severe that TF1 has since taken down the interview. A rep for the real Pitt tells Entertainment Weekly that it's "awful that scammers take advantage of fans' strong connection with celebrities." (You can check out the AI photos of Pitt that Anne received here.)
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