Fresh from his appearance at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding, Brad Pitt is still trying to use the court system to abuse his ex-wife Angelina Jolie and punish her for leaving him. This has been happening for nearly a whole-ass decade, ever since Brad abused and terrorized Angelina and their six children on a private plane in 2016. In 2021, Brad sued Angelina for legally selling off her half of Chateau Miraval, and she later countersued because he’s a financial abuser on top of everything. Speaking of, Brad’s latest thing is begging the court to order Angelina to turn over her tax returns for the years after she left him. Her lawyer responded, and People Magazine sort of buried this whole story.
Angelina Jolie is pushing back against Brad Pitt’s latest effort to obtain years of her financial records, arguing he has repeatedly mischaracterized her claims in their long-running legal battle over Château Miraval, according to a recent court filing obtained by PEOPLE.
In the filing submitted on June 26 in Los Angeles Superior Court, Jolie asked the court not to require her to turn over tax returns and other financial records dating back to 2017, after Pitt’s June 18 filing, also obtained by PEOPLE, asked her to “produce documents sufficient to show her income and profit participation payments” from 2017 through 2019.
“Jolie has made her alleged financial vulnerability central to her case,” Pitt’s filing stated.
Her attorneys argued Pitt was incorrectly portraying her as having claimed she was in financial distress, when her legal filings instead described her efforts to separate her finances from her ex-husband, according to the filing.
“The issue is not whether Jolie needed the money — the issue is that she was trying to untangle her life and her finances from her controlling and abusive ex-husband,” the filing stated. “That distinction makes all the difference.”
Pitt had argued that Jolie made her financial condition relevant to the case by alleging she wanted “financial independence” and had “concluded that she needed to sell her interest in Chateau Miraval” to achieve it. However, Jolie’s attorneys contended in the filing that she “has never alleged that she was in financial distress.”
“Her allegations are clear that she sought to untangle her financial life from the ex-spouse she was divorcing,” the filing added.
Pitt had argued in his filing that Jolie had “repeatedly placed at issue the financial distress and susceptibility to economic pressure she allegedly faced following her separation from Pitt in 2016. Yet there is substantial reason to doubt this allegation.”
The document stated that “Jolie was, during the relevant period, one of Hollywood’s most prominent and highly compensated actresses, with income streams from major studio projects and profit-participation rights.” It added that “during and around the relevant period, Jolie starred in, committed to star in, or received compensation from major commercial films, including Disney’s Maleficent franchise and Marvel’s Eternals. Jolie’s Maleficent films grossed well over $1 billion worldwide, and Eternals grossed approximately $402.1 million worldwide.”
Jolie’s filing claimed she had already turned over her tax returns and profit participation statements for 2020 and 2021, even though her attorneys maintained she was not required to do so. Requiring her to produce records from 2017 through 2019 would amount to “a serious invasion of Jolie’s privacy rights,” her attorneys insisted.
Her attorneys further contended that Pitt’s request relied on “selective quotes and inaccurate paraphrasing” rather than what Jolie actually alleged in previous court filings.
“Discovery motion practice should be grounded in what actually appears in the pleadings, not on recharacterizations designed to grab headlines but that have no basis in reality,” the filing stated.
However, Pitt’s lawyers had insisted, “Jolie has made her financial condition central to her cross-claim and defense. She cannot now use her alleged financial vulnerability as a sword while simultaneously invoking privacy interests as a shield against scrutiny.”
Here’s my thing: even though Angelina did need money (or at the very least, she needed more liquidity at that time), that has no bearing on the case? There’s nothing illegal or even notable about Angelina selling her property (which she legally owns) because she needs money or she’s going through a situation where she needs more cash on hand, rather than tied up in a money-pit investment. Brad’s argument seems to be “Angelina had plenty of money, so she should have kept tens of millions of dollars locked into Miraval, which I have been grossly mismanaging for years.” All that being said, of course Angelina is correct – she shouldn’t have to provide these records to the man who has been financially abusing her for the past decade.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
