14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, in an interview with the New York Times, part of her ongoing campaign for a Best Actress Oscar for her role in “Cake,” Jennifer Aniston almost-oh-so-casually mentioned the tragedy of losing a boyfriend she’d loved so much and who could have been “the one” for her.
That boyfriend was Daniel McDonald, whom she broke up with when her career started picking up with “Friends.” His widow, actress and filmmaker Mujah Maraini-Melehi is very upset that she would exploit his memory this way for publicity.
Why now?
In a beautifully worded post on her Facebook, Mujah writes about her shock and anger when she learned that all the papers had covered the tragedy that marked Aniston’s start in showbiz, when she lost her “true love.”
She isn’t mincing her words at all: Aniston has been working in the industry for decades, so she knows better than anyone that whatever detail, no matter how small, she gives about her love life will make headlines and be dissected at lengths by the tabloids and celebrity bloggers.
She also knows that nothing gets her as much attention as the revelation of such a detail would, so she must be using Daniel’s memory for publicity, even though she never mentioned his name in the interview. For sure, Aniston would have known that the media could put 2 and 2 together and figure out who this “true love” she’d lost was.
“Why now? I wonder,” Mujah writes, clearly hinting that Daniel is nothing but yet another stop for Jennifer to pull on her campaign trail.
Aniston has no right to speak about Daniel
“I am sorry that Jennifer did not realize the treasure that was Daniel when she had the chance, long before he and I met and long before he died. It pains me to read the headlines that allude to her losing him tragically when she was not present during his long and difficult illness,” Mujah further says.
It pains her just as much to have the tabloids say that Daniel would have probably never married her if Aniston had not left; just as Aniston would not have married Pitt. For a widow who had a life with this man and a beautiful family, that’s not the kind of thing you want to read in the press after he’s gone, no matter how long it’s been.
Moreover, Mujah says, if Aniston was so heartbroken when Daniel died, why did she not want something to remember him by?
“After Daniel died,” she says, “I reached out to her to give her back all the photographs from the time they were together. I never got an answer back from her.”
Her message is available in full on Facebook.