Angelina Jolie made a name for herself in Hollywood for being not only a fantastic actress but also a pretty convincing action star in her own right. But for all the crazy movies she’s starred in, all of them pale in comparison to the time she was nearly used as bait to capture one of the world’s most notorious dictators, Joseph Kony.
For those who need a refresher on who the hell Kony is, he is a brutal dictator based in Uganda and is responsible for a series of atrocities ranging from kidnapping children to be child soldiers to war crimes that resulted in the death of thousands.
He was also the subject of that viral Kony 2012 video that circulated YouTube back in 2012 with a huge bang, only for the subsequent campaign to fall flat on its face.
Having a Ugandan warlord running around isn’t exactly a great thing and the International Criminal Court (ICC) thought it was perhaps best to lure Kony out of his hiding spot in the Central African Republic and into a pair of handcuffs.
According to a series of emails (via The Times) between former ICC chief prosecuter Luis Moreno Ocampo and the actress, this was the plan they ultimately came up with: get Angelina Jolie (and Brad Pitt) to lure Kony out and get him talking about Mr and Mrs Smith long enough for U.S. special forces soldiers to catch him.
So in short, the ICC wanted to use a very beautiful Hollywood star (and her then-husband) to bait out a dangerous warlord responsible for several crimes against humanity. If this highly-unrealistic plan seems a bit ridiculous, that’s because it was.
According to the emails, Angelina Jolie was actually pretty excited at the plan at first but quickly became apprehensive over being involved in a ruse more ridiculous than most Hollywood films. It also didn’t help that Ocampo also had a creepy obsession with her as he reportedly sent her an email that read, “Dear Angie, I hope you are well. I miss you.”
Jolie didn’t reply (obviously) and that prompted Ocampo to email her assistant saying “how much [he] loved her.” At this point, she essentially ghosted Ocampo and that was that for the ICC’s grand plan to capture Kony, who is still at large at the time of writing.
It was unlikely Angelina Jolie would’ve travelled to the Central African Republic to lure out Kony anyway because it’s just dangerously risky, but it seems like Ocampo’s creepy boner for her killed any small possibility of that plan actually happening.
Crazy to think that we were actually so close to having Angelina Jolie going into Africa undercover in order to seduce and capture a brutal dictator who was so awful he became the subject of a (flawed) internet viral campaign.