A woman who claims to be the birth mother of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s adopted 2-year-old daughter, Zahara, wants her back. In an interview with In Touch, Mentewab Dawit Lebiso, 24, says she never signed papers giving up her daughter, and she now wants to see Zahara and let her know where she came from.
On June 20, 2006, Angelina proudly told CNN’s Anderson Cooper about the daughter she named Zahara. “She’s from Ethiopia. She’s an AIDS orphan,” Angelina said. But Zahara’s adoption papers, which an In Touch representative was shown on November 12, clearly states that Zahara has a grandmother and extended family alive in Africa— and the grandmother introduced In Touch to her daughter, who claims to be Zahara’s mother.
In 2005, the U.K.’s Sun also talked to the woman, who claimed to be Zahara’s birth mother. In the town of Awassa, 140 miles south of the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, In Touch spoke with that woman again. She’s very much alive, she doesn’t have AIDS — and she’d love to be with the child who was taken away. “I want my daughter to come home to see where she is from,” the woman who says she’s Zahara’s mother, Mentewab Dawit Lebiso, 24, tells In Touch. “Her grandmother and I both tried very hard to raise her, and I want her to come home to regain her identity.”
Lebiso also explains the circumstances that led her to abandon baby Zahara.
According to Mentewab, Zahara was conceived when she was raped by a stranger who broke into her home. After the baby — whom she named Yemasrech, which means Good News — was born on January 7, 2005, she moved in with her mother and got a job as a laborer. But Mentewab became overwhelmed. “I thought the baby was going to die because there was no food, so I ran away,” she confesses.
Unable to care for her alone, Almaz says she brought the child to a local authority, explaining that her daughter had run away. Another man, who worked on behalf of WHFC, but was not an official employee, took the baby away and told the agency that her mother had died. “What he has done is equal to murder,” charges Mentewab. “He took my daughter away and he just disappeared with her. He said I was dead, but I heard from my mother that she never said that.” But Dr. Tsegaye disputes this account.
Mentewab struggled to feed her family. “Sometimes all I had was a piece of bread all day,” she tells In Touch.
Zahara’s mother Mentewab sells onions at the market. Her grandmother Almaz says they couldn’t afford to keep Zahara
“I would tell other families not to give up their children,” says Zahara’s aunt Frehiwot, 18, with another aunt, Zinash Haile Yenero. “I would tell them what happened to us.”
First of all, there is no way these people are getting Zahara back. She can’t even afford to feed or take care of herself, so how is she going to raise a child? This woman ran away after she thought her baby was going to die of starvation, and now she is getting all uppity because some adoption official said she had died? Bitch please. She abandoned her daughter and basically left her for dead, and now that Zahara has been adopted by a rich and famous couple, she is suddenly crying foul. It’s so obviously all about the money.
