Brad Pitt's Mom In Fear After Slamming Obama

Days after Jane Pitt's letter to the Springfield News-Leader endorsing Mitt Romney and criticizing President Obama went national, reports said the reaction had shaken Brad Pitt's mother.

The letter, published in early July 2012, had opposed Obama on abortion rights and gay marriage from a socially conservative standpoint. Once it was picked up by the national press, the response online turned vicious: Jane Pitt became the target of a wave of vulgar, hate-filled, and in some cases threatening messages from Obama supporters — some of it directed at her personally, some of it using her son's fame as a weapon.

Reports at the time said the backlash left her frightened and that she had withdrawn from public comment. The episode became a minor emblem of the 2012 campaign's ugliest dynamics: a private citizen's letter to her local paper, amplified by celebrity adjacency into national news, then answered with the kind of anonymous online abuse that the internet was just beginning to industrialize.

Brad Pitt, who disagreed with the letter's positions, had nonetheless defended his mother as a loving parent — a stance that asked something of both sides of the argument: that a woman could hold unfashionable views and still not deserve to be threatened for them.