There’s a lengthy, extensive history between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s legal issues, and the personal and business issues are intertwined. In 2016, Angelina left Brad immediately following his hours-long terror and abuse of Jolie and their children. She filed for divorce and they’ve spent the past eight years battling in family courts and, on one notable occasion, the California Supreme Court. Then in 2021-22, Angelina Jolie successfully sold her 50% ownership stake in Chateau Miraval to a Stoli subsidiary. Pitt freaked out and began suing everybody. Jolie countersued, and Stoli has also countersued. French law enforcement is involved, and Pitt is currently being carved up in American, French and Luxembourg courts. Before Jolie sold her stake to a Stoli subsidiary, she tried, in good faith, to sell her half to Pitt. Then at the eleventh hour, Pitt tried to add a very strict non-disclosure clause to the deal, a clause which would have effectively silenced Jolie not just about their finances and the Miraval sale, but about their divorce and custody battle. Now that Pitt is suing Jolie over the sale of her half of Miraval, all of this is connected as Jolie defends herself. In a newly filed motion, Angelina and her lawyers lay this out plainly, and reveal something new: Brad’s abuse of Angelina did not start on the plane, he was abusive before that flight.
Angelina Jolie’s legal team filed a motion Thursday to acquire Brad Pitt’s communications stemming from an “all-encompassing” nondisclosure agreement he wanted that purportedly tanked the sale of his ex-wife’s share of their Chateau Miraval winery to him. The former Hollywood power couple’s protracted legal dispute over the winery — and its legacy for their six children — took another turn as Jolie’s team asked a judge to compel Pitt and his company, Mondo Bongo, to produce documents pertaining to his calling for a “more onerous NDA” in order to purchase Jolie’s share of the south-of-France winery.
The documents Jolie seeks, according to the Thursday filing in Los Angeles County Superior Court, are “highly relevant” and also likely to yield admissible evidence in the case, her team argued. Her attorney, Paul Murphy, also accused the “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” Oscar winner of “unrelenting efforts to control and financially drain” Jolie, as well as “attempting to hide his history of abuse, control, and coverup.”
In Thursday’s motion to compel , reviewed by The Times, attorneys for the “Girl, Interrupted” Oscar winner asked again for responses from Pitt to help them figure out his reason for pulling out of their implied agreement for him to buy Jolie’s stake in the winery. Pitt’s decision to pull out of the sale, her attorney said, “nearly broke” Jolie. “If that sale had been completed, this lawsuit never would have happened. But at the last minute, Pitt ‘stepped back’ from his agreement to buy Jolie’s interest in Miraval, and the deal collapsed. The question at the heart of this case — and at the center of this motion — is why,” the motion said.
The answer, her attorney said, has to do with sealed documents Jolie submitted in the ex-couple’s separate but simultaneous custody dispute. The new filing referred to sealed March 2021 documents — titled “Testimony Regarding Domestic Violence” — that “apparently enraged Pitt” and led to him “stepping back” from the sale.
“When Jolie filed the evidence in the custody suit, she was careful to file it under seal so that no member of the public could see it. But Jolie’s sealed filing, which included emails, summaries of the family’s expected testimony, and other evidence, caused Pitt to fear that the information could eventually become public,” the document said. Pitt then decided he could no longer rely on Jolie’s voluntary efforts to keep things private and demanded that she “contractually bind herself to that silence,” her filing said.
With that, her team indicated there was abuse of Jolie that predated the contentious 2016 private-plane flight. In referring to that sealed filing in the custody case — as well as another titled “Testimony of Minor Children” — her team argued that Pitt tried to force a more sweeping NDA on Jolie to conceal his alleged “personal misconduct, whether related to Miraval or not.” Her team is seeking Pitt’s communications with the FBI, U.S. attorney’s office, the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services and the Los Angeles Police Department regarding the private flight. She is also seeking information from DCFS about its investigation, drug and alcohol testing and a safety plan the agency purportedly required Pitt to undertake to address his conduct.
“While Pitt’s history of physical abuse of Jolie started well before the family’s September 2016 plane trip from France to Los Angeles, this flight marked the first time he turned his physical abuse on the children as well,” the new motion states. Jolie never pressed charges, the filing said, “as she believed the best course was for Pitt to accept responsibility and help the family recover from the post-traumatic stress he caused.” It also alleged that Pitt refused to seek domestic violence counseling. Jolie accused Pitt of gaslighting her and, according to the documents, signed a power of attorney authorizing her European lawyer, Laurent Schummer, to take over the sale process.
“Mr. Pitt refused to purchase Ms. Jolie’s interest when she would not be silenced by his NDA,” Jolie attorney Murphy, managing partner at the law firm Murphy Rosen LLP, said Thursday in a statement to The Times. “By refusing to buy her interest but then suing her, Mr. Pitt put directly at issue why that NDA was so important to him and what he hoped it would bury: his abuse of Ms. Jolie and their family. After eight months of delays, this motion asks the Court to force Mr. Pitt to finally produce that evidence.”
I’m really sad to admit that this was my suspicion once the FBI files were released – the way Jolie described Pitt terrorizing the family and hurting her repeatedly, it just struck me that this was not the first time he had been violent. In her own description, before the plane terror began, Angelina was already trying to calm him and ease his mood, like she was afraid of what would happen (because it had happened before). A source close to Jolie also told the LA Times that Pitt’s lawsuit against Jolie (for the sale of Miraval) is what started all of this, saying: Pitt “is drawing all this out of Angelina. She does not want to be here, she does not want to be raising any of these facts, and she is doing it only because Pitt’s lawsuit against her is forcing her to defend herself. It’s incredibly sad and she just wishes he could move on and let her be.” The friend also said that Jolie has extensive documentation which she will introduce in court, if that’s what it comes to. Re: the Pitt records which Jolie is now seeking… I hope Jolie’s lawyer is also seeking Pitt’s communications with his crisis management team, because you know there’s a lot of sh-t there and I doubt any of that is privileged communication.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.