Angelina Jolie’s legal team wants Brad Pitt to drop his lawsuit over the French winery they co-owned — and “end the fighting and finally put their family on a clear path toward healing.”
Pitt, 60, first sued Jolie, 49, in February 2022, claiming that she breached their contract by selling her Chateau Miraval stake in October 2021 to a third party without his consent. He claimed she did it in an attempt to “undermine [his] investment.”
The exes bought the winery in 2008, marrying on the property in southern France six years later. After splitting in late 2016, Pitt and Jolie were declared legally single in 2019. They have since spent years wrapped up in messy legal disputes over Chateau Miraval and custody of their minor children. (The pair share six kids: Maddox, 22, Pax, 20, Zahara, 19, Shiloh, 18, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 16.)
In April, Jolie’s lawyers filed a motion related to the vineyard drama. They claimed that Pitt would not buy Jolie’s shares in the wine company unless she signed a mutual nondisclosure agreement (NDA) and also alleged that Pitt’s request was meant to conceal his “physical abuse” of the actress before the now-infamous 2016 airplane incident with their kids that led to divorce.
Pitt’s lawyers denied the allegations and argued that Jolie’s defense is undermined by her own routine use of NDAs. They alleged that Jolie made the claims about his proposed NDA being controlling “in an effort to rationalize” her “wrongful sale” of her Miraval stake. In May, a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge granted Pitt’s motion to compel Jolie to produce every NDA agreement that she signed with a third party between 2014 and 2022.
Jolie was given a 60-day deadline to produce the relevant documentation. A source told Us at the time that the ruling was a crushing legal blow for her.
On Wednesday, July 17, her lawyer, Paul Murphy, released a new statement to Us Weekly alleging that Pitt “tried to punish and control Angelina by demanding a newly expanded NDA to cover his personal misconduct and abuse.”
“Those actions are central to these proceedings. We are not at all surprised Mr. Pitt is afraid to turn over the documents demonstrating these facts,” Murphy continued. “While Angelina again asks Mr. Pitt to end the fighting and finally put their family on a clear path toward healing, unless Mr. Pitt withdraws his lawsuit, Angelina has no choice but to obtain the evidence necessary to prove his allegations wrong.”
A friend of Pitt who is familiar with the ongoing legal debacle told Us earlier this year that the ongoing lawsuits are “a pattern of behavior” between the two.
“Whenever there is a decision that goes against the other side they consistently choose to introduce misleading, inaccurate and/or irrelevant information as a distraction,” the source shared. “There was a lengthy custody trial that involved the entire history of their relationship and a judge who heard all the evidence still granted him 50/50 custody.”
