Christina Applegate is finally telling the full story. In her candid new memoir, You with the Sad Eyes, out March 3, the 54-year-old actress revisits one of Hollywood’s most enduring romantics what-ifs: the night she brought a young Brad Pitt as her date to the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards and left with someone else.
The revelation confirms decades-old whispers and offers a fascinating glimpse into a moment when two future stars were just beginning their journeys. Applegate was 17, already famous as Kelly Bundy on Married…With Children. Pitt was 26, still “making his way as an actor,” as Applegate puts it, years before Thelma & Louise would make him a superstar.
Applegate writes that she and Pitt had been “platonic pals for the longest time,” part of a larger friend group that also included a young Johnny Depp. He would often visit her small row house for barbecues and casual hangouts. But eventually, something shifted.
“One day I took another look at Brad and thought, ‘Hmm…’ Apparently, he did the same,” she writes. When she was asked to present at the VMAs, she invited him as her date. Pitt was “the perfect date,” even offering to pick up Applegate’s mother, Nancy Priddy, and her best friend Lori Allison (then married to Depp) since Applegate had to arrive early for rehearsal.
Applegate wore a vintage Ceil Chapman gown that made her feel “incredible”, a rare feeling for a teenager struggling with self-esteem and disordered eating. But throughout the ceremony, her attention drifted.
“I had spent all night staring at Bach, who was then a long-haired hunk fronting the band Skid Row,” she admits. “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.”
When the show ended, Applegate made her choice. “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”.
Pitt, meanwhile, was left with a responsibility he hadn’t signed up for: driving Applegate’s mother and friend home. The ride took an unsettling turn when Pitt stopped at a gas station and nearly got into a fight with a group of gang members.
“Not surprisingly, [he] was subsequently very mad at me,” Applegate writes. The aftermath was even more awkward. Bach, she soon discovered, was already in a long-term relationship and had a one-year-old child. The rock star fantasy fizzled fast.
The fallout lasted years. “We didn’t talk for many years after that,” Applegate reveals. The story followed both of them, and apparently, Pitt held onto the hurt.
“Much later, but at different times, two of his movie star girlfriends asked me if it was true that I was the girl who left Brad behind at the MTV Video Music Awards,” Applegate writes. “Brad had apparently told both of them separately that he was still mad at me”.
She doesn’t name the girlfriends, but the detail underscores how deeply the memory stuck with Pitt.
Eventually, the two reconciled. “Eventually, we agreed that I’d been a kid, and though he’d deserved much better, it was time to forgive the child who dumped him for the lead singer of Skid Row”.
Applegate can’t resist a wry observation about how things turned out: “Of course, Brad is now THE Brad Pitt, and Sebastian Bach . . . well, he still has long hair, I guess”.
This isn’t the first time the story has surfaced. In 2015, Applegate appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen and confirmed the rumor without naming names, only revealing the mystery man was famous but not an actor, and that they didn’t date afterward.
The following year, Bach identified himself while promoting his own autobiography. “That dude would be me,” he said. “So, there was a time on this earth when Sebastian Bach was, like, a hotter lay than Brad Pitt. Of course that’s going in the book”.
While the Pitt-Bach anecdote is generating headlines, Applegate’s memoir covers far more territory: her childhood, her mother’s experiences with abuse, her own painful relationships (including a brief, humiliating stint doing laundry for Anthony Kiedis after he dumped her), a past abortion, and her ongoing battle with multiple sclerosis, diagnosed in 2021.
“I’ve spent most of my life living under the pressure to be perfect,” she writes. “I won’t lie and pretend to be a ‘good girl’ anymore. This book is a conversation with the younger me who believed she had to be perfect”.
As for Pitt? He’s now a two-time Oscar winner, and the two have long since moved past that awkward night in 1989. But thanks to Applegate’s memoir, the world finally has the full story of the VMA date that went down in Hollywood lore.
