Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s decade-long custody arrangement has officially come to an end, as their youngest children, twins Knox and Vivienne, turned 18 this month, freeing both parents from the legal restrictions that have governed their relationship with the couple’s six children since their 2016 split.
The twins, born in Nice, France, on July 12, 2008, are the youngest of the six children Jolie and Pitt share, following Maddox, 24, Pax, 22, Zahara, 21, and Shiloh, 20. With all six children now legal adults, the former couple are no longer bound by the custody terms that shaped much of their post-divorce lives, marking what amounts to a new chapter for both Pitt and Jolie roughly two years after their divorce was formally settled.
Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt in September 2016 after 12 years together, an announcement that stunned fans given the couple’s status as one of the most closely watched relationships in Hollywood. What followed was an unusually protracted legal battle, stretching roughly eight years and covering both the couple’s shared assets and the custody of their children, before the divorce was finally settled in December 2024.
Jolie had spoken publicly years earlier about how central the custody agreement was to her day-to-day life, including her decision to remain based in Los Angeles. In a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jolie explained that the custody terms were the primary reason she stayed in the city at all. “As soon as they’re 18, I’ll be able to leave,” she said at the time, adding that she planned to spend significant time abroad once free of the arrangement. “I’ll spend a lot of time in Cambodia. I’ll spend time visiting my family members wherever they may be in the world.”
More recently, Jolie suggested in an interview with Variety in June that her children have been not just aware of, but actively encouraging of, the freedom she would gain once Knox and Vivienne turned 18. “My kids are almost all 18, so now they want to see me travelling the world, they want me to get out and do things,” Jolie said. “They know me more than anybody, and they still like me, which says a lot. I think they’re very encouraging of me kind of getting back to aspects of myself that maybe I hadn’t felt as free to do.”
While the end of the custody agreement marks a significant milestone for Jolie, Pitt’s relationship with the couple’s children has followed a markedly different trajectory in recent years. Pitt is now largely estranged from his six children, and five of them have taken the notable step of publicly removing his surname from their own names, choosing instead to go simply by Jolie.
Shiloh was the first of the siblings to legally change her name, doing so upon turning 18 in 2024. Maddox followed soon after, filing legal documents to officially drop the Pitt surname, having previously been credited as Maddox Jolie in the film “Couture.” Zahara publicly dropped the surname during her college commencement ceremony in May 2026, later filing to legally change her name to Zahara Jolie. Vivienne chose to be credited as Vivienne Jolie during the 2024 Broadway production of “The Outsiders,” while Knox opted to have the name Knox Jolie printed on his high school diploma. Pax remains the only one of the six children who has not publicly taken steps to drop his father’s surname.
Despite the resolution of both the divorce and the custody arrangement, Pitt and Jolie remain entangled in a separate, contentious legal dispute over their jointly owned French winery, Château Miraval, a multimillion-dollar battle that has continued well beyond the settlement of their divorce and custody terms and shows no clear sign of resolution.
Jolie and Pitt were together beginning in 2004, marrying in 2014 before announcing their split just two years later in 2016. Their relationship, and subsequent divorce, became one of the most closely tracked celebrity separations of the past decade, in part because of the scale of their shared family and assets, and in part because of how long the legal proceedings ultimately took to resolve.
With the custody agreement now formally concluded, both Pitt and Jolie enter a phase of their post-divorce lives no longer shaped by the day-to-day logistical and legal obligations tied to raising minor children together. For Jolie, that shift appears to align with plans she has discussed publicly for more than a decade, centered on increased international travel and time spent with extended family and humanitarian work abroad, including in Cambodia, where she has maintained long-standing personal and philanthropic ties.
The end of the custody arrangement does not, however, close the book on the legal ties that continue to connect the former couple. The ongoing dispute over Château Miraval, the winery the couple purchased together in the south of France in 2008 and later became a flashpoint in their divorce proceedings, remains unresolved and continues to keep Pitt and Jolie legally connected even as the custody chapter of their relationship comes to a formal end.
As their children continue to step further into adulthood, several of them have also begun carving out their own public identities separate from their famous parents, with Zahara’s recent college graduation and the visible pattern of surname changes among the siblings reflecting a broader shift in how the six children are choosing to define themselves publicly, nearly a decade after their parents’ split first made international headlines.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login