An international child adoption scandal has found its way into the heart and home of Angelina Jolie and her family. An in the works documentary by 21-year-old filmmaker Elizabeth Jacobs will dissect the nuanced and delicate possibility that Angelina Jolie’s son Maddox, whom she adopted from Cambodia in 2002, “may have been stolen from his birth family.”
It all started with an adoption agent by the name of Lauryn Galindo. Jolie sought out the help of Galindo to adopt Maddox, but it turns out that Galindo’s methods and practices were the exact opposite of ethical and legal. Galindo was jailed in 2004, two year after working with Jolie, for “falsifying documents to obtain US visas for orphans.”
The filmmaker behind this project, Elizabeth Jacobs, was herself adopted from Cambodia under the watch of Galindo. The film will mainly seek to expose cruel and family-severing practices that Cambodian families undergo at the hands of child snatchers and so-called “baby recruiters.” The title of the documentary is aptly named The Stolen Children.
It is reported that between 1997 and 2001, over half of adoptions that took place from Cambodia to the United States were aided by Galindo and her shady practices. Jacobs, a University of Massachusetts film and marketing student, is determined to get to the bottom of Galindo’s history and adoption procedures.
When this information about Galindo came to light, Jolie said that she went to “great lengths to ensure Maddox did not have a living birth-mother in Cambodia,” and furthermore that she would “never rob a mother of her child.”
In 2017 however, a Cambodian man by the name of Mounh Sarath claimed to be Maddox’s biological father in order to speed up the adoption process. This has never been fully verified or denied.
Jolie shares guardianship of Maddox, now age 19, with ex-husband Brad Pitt. This looks like it will be a developing story as Jacobs works towards completing the film, so it will bee interesting to see how Jolie approaches the situation.
