LOS ANGELES – A Los Angeles court will hear Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt’s name change petition on September 28, after she completed the final procedural requirement under California law, according to court records obtained by Fox News.
California’s name-change statute requires petitioners to publish their intention in a court-approved newspaper for four consecutive weeks, giving any interested party time to come forward and object. Zahara’s legal team ran the required notice in the Los Angeles Daily Journal on June 16, June 23, June 30, and July 7. No written objection was filed during that window. The September 28 hearing is now on the court calendar.
If the petition is approved, she will legally become Zahara Marley Jolie, dropping “Pitt” from the hyphenated surname she has carried since her adoption was finalized in 2005. She would follow her sister Shiloh, who completed the same legal process in 2024 around her 18th birthday and has since been publicly identified as Shiloh Jolie. The pattern, now emerging a second time, suggests the name change has become something closer to a family transition than an isolated decision.
A source told Fox News the proceedings represent the visible surface of a much longer fracture. “This is what happens after years of one parent turning the kids against the other,” the source said. “It’s a painful outcome, but not a shocking one.” Brad Pitt has not made any public statement in response to Zahara’s petition.
Zahara is 21. She was adopted from Ethiopia as an infant in July 2005, one of six children Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie raised together across more than a decade of marriage. She is currently enrolled at Spelman College in Atlanta, one of the country’s historically Black colleges and universities, where she was photographed joining the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in 2022. Pitt was not among the parents photographed at that event. The adoption gave her the combined Jolie-Pitt surname from birth, making the current petition, in legal terms, a severance that only requires her consent as an adult.
The timing carries its own significance. Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt turned 18 on July 12, meaning all six of the Jolie-Pitt children are now legal adults. Maddox, 24, has not pursued a formal name change but told a court-ordered deposition in 2019 that he had no relationship with Pitt. Pax, 22, aired his estrangement more publicly through social media posts. Each of those statements was personal and informal. Zahara’s petition is neither. It is a legal filing in a California court with a scheduled hearing date, carrying a weight no social media post can replicate.
The divorce Jolie filed in September 2016 has produced an unusually convoluted legal record. An early arrangement to have disputes heard by a private judge was later invalidated by the California First Appellate Court on grounds that the judge had undisclosed business ties to Pitt’s legal team. The case was returned to the traditional court system. A 2021 ruling granted shared custody, but final terms remain out of the public record. In a recent interview, Jolie described raising her children with an awareness of her own mortality, saying she had prepared them “almost for my absence” – a reflection shaped by losing her mother early and by her decision to undergo a preventive double mastectomy after testing positive for the BRCA1 gene.
Brad Pitt’s legal team has not filed any documentation with the court indicating he intends to contest Zahara’s petition. Under California law, any interested party may object before the hearing date. A father objecting to his adult daughter’s legal name change would be procedurally possible but is historically uncommon once all statutory publication requirements have been met without a response.
The September 28 date is the next public checkpoint. Whether Pitt files a written objection in the weeks before that date, appears at the hearing, or allows it to proceed without contest will determine the pace of what follows. Zahara’s sister completed the same process two years ago; that hearing proceeded with minimal public attention until documents surfaced afterward. What the California court record cannot resolve is the private question underneath the legal one: whether the children of one of Hollywood’s most publicized couples have, through a series of quiet legal filings, collectively decided what they want to be called – and by extension, whose story they are willing to carry forward.
