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Christina Applegate has revealed that her ex Brad Pitt didn’t speak to her for years after she invited him on a date only to ditch him for another man.
The Dead To Me star was just 15 when she rose to fame as Kelly Bundy in Fox’s first sitcom Married… With Children, and is now looking back at her life in her memoir You With The Sad Eyes. It details her career, as well as her life since being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021.
While Applegate’s career has featured awards wins and blockbuster roles, the 54-year-old admitted in her memoir that there was one embarrassing moment in her past that proved to be – to reference one of Pitt’s other exes – a real sliding doors moment.
In 1989, Applegate was 17, and in an extended friendship group containing a “little‐known actor named Brad Pitt”. Her and Pitt’s friendship was always platonic, Applegate explained, “then one day I took another look at Brad and thought, hmm… Apparently, he did the same.”
Applegate was due to appear at the MTV Video Music Awards, and invited Pitt to come along as her date. As she needed to be there early, he was “kind enough” to drive to her house and take her mother, the actress Nancy Priddy, and best friend Lori Allison, who had previously been married to Johnny Depp, to the awards.
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Applegate told the story in her new memoir (Getty Images)
However, any chance at romance got derailed when Applegate laid eyes on musician Sebastian Bach, the “long‐haired hunk” who was the frontman of mortal band Skid Row and had a one-year-old child.
“I felt so powerful and sure of myself for once that when the awards show was over, I left with Sebastian Bach, not Brad Pitt,” Applegate admitted. “I hate to put it like this, but Brad back then was still making his way as an actor, and he wasn’t yet THE Brad Pitt, the man of so many people’s dreams.”
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Applegate (right) on ‘Married… With Children’ in 1990, aged 18 (Getty Images)
After Applegate ditched him, Pitt ended up “sullenly” driving her mother and Allison home. He also narrowly avoided getting into a fight with “a bunch of gang members” while stopping at a petrol station on the way back, meaning the actor was “subsequently very mad” at Applegate.
“We didn’t talk for many years after that. Much later, but at different times, two of his movie star girlfriends asked me if it was true that I was the girl who left Brad behind at the MTV Video Music Awards. Brad had apparently told both of them separately that he was still mad at me.
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“Eventually, we agreed that I’d been a kid, and though he’d deserved much better, it was time to forgive the child who dumped him for the lead singer of Skid Row. Of course, Brad is now THE Brad Pitt, and Sebastian Bach . . . well, he still has long hair, I guess.”
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Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach, pictured in 2013 (Getty Images)
Applegate previously spoke about ditching Pitt for Bach on an episode of Watch What Happens Live in 2015, when she revealed that the man she’d left the awards with was known to the public but not an actor, and that they hadn’t ended up dating.
Bach identified himself as the man in question the following year while promoting his autobiography. “That dude would be me,” he said. “So there was a time on this earth when Sebastian Bach was, like, a hotter lay than Brad Pitt. Of course that’s going in the book. I’ve gotta tell somebody that!”