Sometimes it's a burden to be carrying the most beautiful child in all of creation inside your womb. People are desperate to see and touch the luminous infant foetus, even if it gets them in trouble with the law.
Namibia is currently crawling with photographers, all jostling to get an exclusive snap of Brad Pitt and his heavily pregnant girlfriend Angelina Jolie. And one of them even spent the weekend in jail for trying to take a sneaky photo of Brad and Angelina. But he's been released now. Which is either a) good, b) bad or c) neither, depending on how seriously you take this nonsense.
Ever since Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes brought baby Suri into the world, public scrutiny has focused on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who are expecting their first child any day soon. Brad and Angelina are hiding out in Namibia while they wait for the baby to pop out. That's good for Namibia, which has gained much more attention than it normally would, but a side effect is that the country has become overrun with paparazzi trying to get pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie together.
Even though Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have already sold the baby's picture rights away, the snappers know that a Jolie-Pitt exclusive picture would net them a fortune. And if they have to spend a weekend in a communal Namibian police cell to get it, then so be it.
That's what happened to John Liebenberg, anyway. Liebenberg, a South African photographer, was caught up in his exuberance to take pictures of a private hospital – thought to be where Angelina Jolie will give birth – that he didn't notice he was trespassing on a police barracks to get his all-important shot. John Liebenberg was promptly nicked and thrown in jail over the weekend. But a judge yesterday dismissed the charges, saying:
"It might be that you are a foreigner and that you were arrested for trespassing (but) why was it necessary to keep you in custody for the whole weekend? I think it was unnecessary."
Reacting to the arrest and jail time, John Liebenberg said that the police were merely making an example of his for other wayward snappers:
"They probably wanted to make an example of me to the other paparazzi press. But we have been very respectful to them."
Meanwhile, Angelina Jolie is either still really pregnant, or has secretly had her baby and is just being very quiet about it. If the latter is correct, the most beautiful family in the universe is now complete, and we should all kneel down or something.
Read more:
Charges dropped over Jolie pic bid – Mercury
[story by Stuart Heritage]