A smitten Brad Pitt threatened to kill Harvey Weinstein for Gwyneth Paltrow

When it comes to Brad Pitt’s love life, the story revolves mainly around his marriage to Jennifer Aniston and how it overlapped with the beginning of his romance with Angelina Jolie while strongly hinting at the possibility that he cheated on his wife. What many forget is that he was in love with Gwyneth Paltrow before falling for the Friends star, so much so that he openly, brazenly vowed to kill Harvey Weinstein.

A year before Pitt married Aniston and eventually married her, he was in a relationship with Paltrow, who was new to the industry and not the established actress she would go on to be. They began dating in 1994 and got serious with a speed that saw the couple engaged by 1996. It is perhaps an example of this devotion Pitt had for Paltrow that spurred him to confront Weinstein, an industry behemoth at the time, the minute he learned that he had laid hands on his girlfriend.

The Vanilla Sky star made the allegations in 2017 during a chat with The New York Times, revealing that she was cast as the lead in Emma in 1994, and during a work meeting in a LA hotel, Weinstein inappropriately touched her. She was expected to keep the interaction a secret, but she told Pitt about it, and he refused to remain silent about it.

She revealed more about the confrontation during her appearance on The Howard Stern Show, sharing that it took place at the opening of the Broadway show Hamlet in 1995 where Pitt told Weinstein that “if you ever make her feel uncomfortable again, I’ll kill you.”

“It was the equivalent of throwing him against the wall, energetically. It was so fantastic… He leveraged his fame and power to protect me at a time when I didn’t have fame or power yet. He’s the best.”

The couple would break their engagement in 1997 and go their separate ways as, per Paltrow, she wasn’t ready to get married. But Brad Pitt remains the hero who stood up for her when she needed it the most and practically protected her from a sexual abuser. Sadly, decades later, the actor would not be seen as the protector his kids and now-ex wife Angelina Jolie needed as they levelled serious accusations of physical violence against Pitt, alleging that he assaulted her and her children when they came to help her.