While making the first Tomb Raider movie, Jolie traveled to Cambodia and reportedly “fell in love with the sovereign state,” so much so that she later returned there in 2002 “to adopt her first child, Maddox.” That adoption was later scrutinized by the media since Jolie’s adoption was facilitated by a woman named Lauryn Galindo, who pled guilty to “money laundering and visa fraud in 2004 after being caught brokering adoptions of Cambodian children whom she claimed were orphans but in fact had been taken from their mothers” allegedly after being paid for “as little as the cost of a bag of rice.”
While the circumstances behind Jolie’s specific adoption are still unclear, the fact that it was brokered by the “first American convicted on charges related to baby trafficking” sure isn’t great – and it makes it all the weirder that all of this began with a movie about a Westerner casually plundering foreign countries.