In the back pages of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a newspaper devoted to legal notices and business filings, a small item appeared four times in June: a petition for a name change. The petitioner, Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt, 21, sought to become Zahara Marley Jolie. A few pages away, a similar notice ran for Maddox Chivan Jolie-Pitt, 24, who wished to be known as Maddox Chivan Jolie. The announcements, required by California law before a court can approve a name change, invited written objections from anyone with a legal interest. None are expected.

The filings, confirmed by court documents, mark the latest chapter in a long, public unravelling. Maddox and Zahara are the third and fourth of the six Jolie-Pitt children to legally sever the paternal surname. Shiloh, now 20, successfully petitioned for the change on her 18th birthday in 2024; Vivienne, 17, was credited as Vivienne Jolie in a Broadway playbill for The Outsiders. Only Pax, 23, still uses Pitt officially, while Knox, 17, has reportedly dropped it from informal documents. The children’s mother, Angelina Jolie, filed for divorce in 2016, days after an alleged altercation on a private plane that led to child abuse allegations against Pitt; he was later cleared by authorities. The divorce was finalised only in 2024 after a protracted legal battle over custody and a French winery.

In Hollywood, a name is both a brand and a lineage. The hyphenated Jolie-Pitt once signified a union of two of the industry’s most luminous stars, a blended family of adopted and biological children that the celebrity press chronicled as a modern tribe. To drop the father’s surname is to redraw that map, and the method—a series of small-print notices in a legal journal—is a curiously bureaucratic echo of the very public fracture. The notices themselves are a quirk of California law: anyone seeking a name change must publish the petition for four consecutive weeks, giving the world a chance to object. It is a procedure designed for transparency, but here it has become a quiet ritual of separation, each publication a small, printed step away from a shared past.

The global audience has followed the Jolie-Pitt saga for nearly two decades, from the Mr. & Mrs. Smith set to the Cambodian and Ethiopian adoption papers. Now, the story is being read as a barometer of family loyalty. In Brazil, news outlets note that the children are 'waiting for a hearing'; in Indonesia, the newspaper ads are described as a public announcement of the erasure. Spanish-language media frame it as a 'hard blow' for Pitt, while Arabic reports focus on Zahara’s September court date. A source close to Pitt, speaking to People magazine, attributed the estrangement to a 'prolonged campaign' of parental alienation, adding that the actor loves his children and misses them. Yet the children’s public choices—Zahara introducing herself as Jolie at her Spelman College graduation, Maddox dropping Pitt from the credits of his mother’s film Couture—suggest a quiet consensus.

The final hearings are set for September: Maddox on the 14th, Zahara on the 28th. If no objections are filed, a judge will sign the orders, and the name Pitt will vanish from their legal identities as cleanly as a line of type deleted from a galley. In the meantime, the Los Angeles Daily Journal continues to publish its daily record of births, deaths, and name changes, a grey archive of private decisions made public. For the Jolie-Pitt children, the most famous family in the world is being quietly re-registered, one legal notice at a time.