A NEW documentary about adoptions in Cambodia will take a fresh look at whether Angelina Jolie’s son Maddox may have been stolen from his birth family, The Sun can exclusively reveal.
The Hollywood star was one of hundreds of American parents who used Lauryn Galindo to facilitate the adoption of Maddox from Cambodia – apparently unaware of her potentially unethical practices.
But questions remain over whether her son’s real parents are still alive and were duped by Galindo’s “baby recruiters”, who reportedly preyed on poor families in rural areas.
Questions were asked about the legitimacy of Maddox’s “orphan status” at the time of the adoption in 2002, with Cambodia child welfare workers believing he might have been sold by a poverty-stricken mother for $100.
At the time, Kek Galibru, head of the human rights agency Licadho, who investigated the adoption scandal, said: “I’m sure that this child was not a real orphan and was not abandoned.”
However, Jolie said she’d gone to great lengths to verify that Maddox had no living parents and has always maintained that he was an orphan.
She said: “I would never rob a mother of her child. I can only imagine how dreadful that would feel.”
The Sun has reached out to Angelina for further comment, but did not receive a reply.
Now, filmmaker Elizabeth Jacobs is determined to uncover the truth about Galindo’s adoptions in a new documentary she’s making called The Stolen Children.
She will be traveling to Cambodia later in the year and hopes to get answers about her own adoption, which may help to better understand hundreds of others around that time, including Maddox.
Jacobs, 21, is from the same generation as Maddox, 19, and the circumstances of her own adoption from Cambodia remain murky after her parents also used Galindo.
Between 1997 and 2001, at least half of all adoptions from Cambodia to the US – around 800 of 1600 – went through Galindo and her sister Lynn Devin’s agency Seattle International Adoptions.
A year after Maddox’s adoption, Galindo and Devin were both charged, with Devin being given a $150,000 financial penalty for falsifying documents to obtain US visas for ‘orphans’.
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