Christina Applegate Has a Great Story if You Don't Like Brad Pitt

It’s not often I get to write about a story that I was too young to know about, so excuse me while I relish in this brief moment of not feeling perpetually ancient. I’m just a regular spring chicken over here, and yup, I ruined it already. Sonofa…

Anyway, I genuinely had no idea that Brad Pitt and Christina Applegate were a thing because the 1989 VMAs happened when I was nine. As much as I made my bones in celebrity gossip, it was a pairing that completely escaped me until the past 24 hours.

Applegate has mentioned parts of this story before, but as the legend goes, she ditched Pitt at the ceremony for another dude, who has remained a secret. Thanks to her new memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, we now know the identity of the man who made Brad Pitt look like chopped liver, and you will not see this one coming. It was Sebastian Bach. Yup, the guy from Gilmore Girls. Nailed it.

Via Billboard:

“I hate to put it like this, but Brad back then was still making his way as an actor, and he wasn’t yet THE Brad Pitt, the man of so many people’s dreams,” she continued bluntly. “I felt so powerful and sure of myself for once that when the awards show was over, I left with Sebastian Bach, not Brad Pitt.”

While Applegate was off pursuing Bach — who, unbeknownst to her, had a girlfriend and 1-year-old baby back home — Brad was “left to sullenly drive” the Dead to Me star’s mom and friend Lori Allison home from the ceremony. “Apparently, at a gas station on the way, Brad almost got into a fight with a bunch of gang members and, not surprisingly, was subsequently very mad at me,” she added in her memoir.

Considering the current state of Brad Pitt’s reputation, I’m sure very few of you feel bad that his 17-year-old date ditched him when he was 25. (Yup, you read that.) However, the two did patch things up years later, and this is definitely one way to describe the situation.

“Eventually, we agreed that I’d been a kid, and though he deserved much better, it was time to forgive the child who dumped him for the lead singer of Skid Row,” Applegate wrote.

Did he deserve better though? I keep seeing the world “child” back there, and wait, what do you mean he almost got into a fight with a “bunch of gang members” with your mom in the car? How does that happen? Was he spraying them with gas Zoolander-style? Because that’s what I’m picturing now. Also, how old was Sebastian Bach in 1989? Let’s look… hmm, what a pleasant surprise.

(Correction: In a previous version, Mike thought Bach was born in 1958 instead of 1968. Math is hard, which is why he types words about famous people into the computer machine.)