Mom can't claim Jolie's son
2007-03-27 15:54
Hanoi - It was "impossible" for the birth mother of Hollywood celebrity Angelina Jolie's newly adopted Vietnamese son to lay any future claim to the three-year-old, Vietnam's top adoption official said on Tuesday.
"That's impossible. She has no right to claim him," said Vu Duc Long, director of Vietnam's International Adoption Department.
The mother, identified by a British tabloid as a 29-year-old heroin addict, has not come forward since the 31-year-old actress formally adopted the boy, now known as Pax Thien Jolie, in Ho Chi Minh City last month.
Britain's News of the World, which tracked down a couple identified as the child's Vietnamese grandparents, speculated on Monday that the adoption was not legally binding because his grandparents, not his mother, signed the release forms.
The grandparents said they feared their daughter might someday launch a custody battle with Jolie and her partner, Hollywood actor Brad Pitt.
"Our daughter is a heroin addict and she is a bag of trouble," the grandfather, identified as Chien, 55, told the newspaper.
"When she finds out that a rich movie star has adopted her baby, she will go after Angelina Jolie for money and make trouble for her. She may even try to take the child back," he told the newspaper.
Long, who approved the adoption in March, said the adoption followed Vietnamese law and the birth mother relinquished any claim when she abandoned him at birth.
"Police launched investigations to find the mother twice. The police never found the mother nor received any word from her at all," Long said. "Even if she now claimed the boy, we would never give him back to an addicted woman."
The grandparents, who never visited the boy in Tam Binh Orphanage after he was placed there at one month old, were tracked down and signed papers asking that he be put up for adoption, Long said.
"Everything has been completed according to the law," Long said, adding, "this film is over."
Jolie's latest adoption brings her family with Pitt to four children -aside from Pax, couple has five-year-old Maddox from Cambodia, two-year-old Zahara from Ethiopia and the couple's biological infant daughter Shiloh.
- SAPA