Melissa Etheridge and Brad Pitt were such good buddies way back in the 1990s that Etheridge and then-partner Julie Cypher considered asking him to be their sperm donor.
Etheridge revealed her thinking about Pitt on Friday during an interview with Angela Bishop of the Australian news show Studio 10.
“Because he was such a good friend of mine, and we did consider it,” Etheridge said. “And yet, I looked and I saw how badly he wanted children, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to share this with someone who really, badly wants children, because my children don’t need another parent. They have two.’ “
Instead, the couple chose musician David Crosby, who was already married with children. Cypher gave birth to Bailey in 1997 and Beckett in 1998.
Before the couple revealed that Crosby was the donor in a 2000 Rolling Stone magazine article, there was speculation about Pitt.
Etheridge took some of the blame for the rumors when she appeared on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in January 2000, after the Rolling Stone article appeared.
“I made a joke once at the, I think it was the VH1 Honors,” Etheridge told King. “He gave me an award. … The press backstage, someone said, ‘What’s Brad Pitt to you?’ I said, ‘The father of my children.’ ” She was kidding, she added.
Now teenagers, her older children tease her about their other daddy possibility. “My son said, ‘I could have been amazingly handsome, but no!’ ” Etheridge told Studio 10.
Etheridge sang at Pitt’s 2000 wedding to Jennifer Aniston, but the friends seem to have grown apart after Pitt split from Aniston and started a relationship with Angelina Jolie.
It probably doesn’t help that Etheridge criticized Jolie’s choice to have a preventative double mastectomy after learning that she has the BRCA gene mutation, which increases her risk of breast cancer. Etheridge also has the BRCA mutation.
“I actually think it’s the most fearful choice you can make when confronting anything with cancer,” she told the Washington Blade in 2013. “My belief is that cancer comes from inside you, and so much of it has to do with the environment of your body. It’s the stress that will turn that gene on or not.”
Etheridge also has twins with ex-partner Tammy Lynn Michaels, who gave birth in 2006. Etheridge is now married to television executive Linda Wallem.
Pitt married Jolie in 2014, and they have six children.