A Los Angeles judge has approved a petition by 21-year-old Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt, the daughter of actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, to legally change her name to Zahara Marley Jolie, making her the latest of the couple’s six children to shed their father’s surname in court. The judge granted the request on Monday, Sept. 28, 2026.
Los Angeles Superior Court’s Stanley Mosk Courthouse hosted the proceeding, with Judge Virginia Keeny on the bench. Peter Kenneth Levine, the attorney representing Zahara, joined the morning hearing by remote appearance. No one appeared to oppose the petition, and no written objection had been filed. The decree was signed and filed the same day.
“There being no objections, the petition for change of name is granted,” the Sept. 28 minute order states.
The Petition and Its Notices
Court records show Zahara filed her name-change petition on June 4 in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Daily Journal carried notices of the proposed change on June 16, June 23, June 30 and July 7, an advertising step California law obliged her to take. Objectors had a window after each notice to submit a written challenge before the hearing. None was filed.
Word of the advertisements reached the public more than two months ahead of the ruling. Reports at the time revealed that Zahara and her brother Maddox had each placed newspaper notices signaling that they meant to drop “Pitt.”
Dueling Responses From Both Camps
People close to each parent responded to the ruling in sharply different terms. Pitt’s side, speaking through a source, called the decision one more chapter in what that source characterized as complete and total alienation, casting it as an effort to pull attention from the actor’s professional success. That same source said that over the past decade only one side of the family has publicly discussed the children or tried to use them as leverage.
Jolie’s camp rejected that account through a source of its own. “Today’s hearing was required by law and scheduled months ago by the L.A. court system,” the source said. The source called it a new low for Pitt’s camp to float a conspiracy theory, refuse responsibility for his conduct and target his own daughter, and added that Zahara has declined to air the details of his behavior publicly. A person close to Jolie claimed Pitt’s strained relationship with the children resulted from his own actions.
A person close to Pitt said of the fallout from the split: “The divorce from Angelina was bad but the alienation from his children was the worst thing that ever happened to him.” Another person close to Pitt said he had moved from “hurt and pain to acceptance” and believed the family needed to move beyond the hostility surrounding the breakup.
Siblings Who Made the Same Move
A Los Angeles judge signed off Sept. 14 on the petition Maddox, 25, had filed in May, replacing the legal name Maddox Chivan Jolie-Pitt with Maddox Chivan Jolie. Shiloh’s petition, filed on her 18th birthday in May 2024, was approved in August 2024 after she published the required public notice.
Vivienne has petitioned to become Vivienne Marcheline Jolie, with a hearing scheduled for Nov. 2. Vivienne Jolie-Pitt is 18 and was credited as Vivienne Jolie in the Playbill for the Broadway production of “The Outsiders,” which she worked on, before filing her petition. Online court records viewed as of Sept. 29 show her case remains pending. Pax uses the Jolie-Pitt surname publicly, and Knox reportedly graduated from high school using “Knox Jolie.”
None of the siblings has offered a public explanation that goes beyond the court documents. The age at which each could file independently was the point each of them waited for.
Two Decades of Name Changes
The paperwork trailed the practice by years. Spelman College in Atlanta introduced her in May as Zahara Marley Jolie as she accepted the diploma for the Bachelor of Arts in psychology she had earned there. The official commencement program, however, still carried her name as Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt. She had used the same introduction in November 2023 at her induction into Spelman’s Mu Pi chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Ethiopia was Zahara’s birthplace in January 2005, and Jolie adopted her later that year. Pitt formally adopted her in January 2006, when a California judge approved changing her name from Zahara Marley to Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt. Twenty years on, a different California judge undid it.
A private-plane incident involving the family, which became the subject of investigations, preceded the 2016 divorce filing by Jolie. The couple spent years litigating the split before reaching a settlement in 2024. In 2002, Jolie legally dropped “Voight” from her name, changing it from Angelina Jolie Voight to Angelina Jolie after becoming estranged from her father, actor Jon Voight. Jolie and Pitt remain in a legal dispute over their French winery, Château Miraval.
The next family court date on the calendar is Vivienne’s Nov. 2 hearing.
