Jolie believed her family wouldn't feel guilty about her death if it was murder instead of suicide.
Trigger warning: This story mentions self-harm and substance abuse that may be disturbing to readers.
It's no easy feat being a celebrity; there are a lot of ups and downs, especially because everything about them is out in the open and even the smallest of things might change a fan's opinion about them. Angelina Jolie has always been in the limelight, ever since her first movie, and this put a lot of stress on her, mentally. According to Far Out Magazine, Jolie always felt isolated as a teen, and she chose self-harm as a coping mechanism.
“For some reason, the ritual of having cut myself and feeling the pain, maybe feeling alive, feeling some kind of release, it was somehow therapeutic to me.” It's something that doesn't really go away with time, and when she began her career, she turned to drugs for some respite, and at a very young age, she had tried “just about every drug possible”, choosing heroin as her favorite.
However, things got so bad for her that she considered hiring a hitman to end her life, she revealed during an interview with The Herald, in 2001.
She was contemplating suicide, and she felt it would be easier for her family to process it if they knew that someone had killed her, instead of her ending her own life. She added that this thought came to her when she was going through a ''rather bleak'' time in her life. So, she decided to hire a hitman; one who would put an end to her misery.
“This is going to sound insane but there was a time I was going to hire somebody to kill me,” she said. “With suicide comes all the guilt of people around you thinking they could have done something,” Jolie added. ”With somebody being murdered, nobody takes some kind of guilty responsibility.” Surprisingly, this was not her first attempt to end her life, she tried when she was just 19.
The Face then asked Jolie why she felt compelled to hire a hitman to carry out her death. “They’re not that hard to find in New York,” she responded. “As insane as it sounds, I think a lot of people consider suicide when they’re young,” Jolie admitted.
“I was very aware that so many people around me, like my mother, would feel as though they didn’t give enough or do enough, if I’d taken my own life,” Jolie continued. “So my solution to that was if someone else had taken my life – like in a ‘robbery’ – then it would be murder and it wouldn’t be that anyone would feel they’d let me down.”
The Tomb Raider actor went ahead with her plan and even decided to “take out cash over a certain amount of time, so there wasn’t a big chunk in my bank account” to pay the killer. Thankfully, the plan didn't fall through, and it was not because Jolie decided she wanted to live. It was actually because the hitman convinced her there was a lot more she had to experience in life.
''The person spoke very sweetly to me, he made me think about it for a month. And after a month other things changed in my life and I was surviving again."
“He was a decent enough person and asked if I could think about it and call him again,” she explained. “Something changed in my life and I figured I’d stick it out.”
As surprising as it may seem, Jolie does owe it to that hitman who decided to save a life instead of taking the money and going ahead with the plan.
References:
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/angelina-jolie-hired-hitman/
https://theface.com/culture/hollyweird-angelina-jolie-hitman-suicide-attempt
Cover Image Source: Getty Images | Photo by Gareth Cattermole
