[Source: CNN News]
In the latest round in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s ongoing litigation over the former couple’s French winery Château Miravel, the two are fighting over Jolie’s request for Pitt to turn over third-party communications related to a 2016 plane incident.
Pitt’s attorneys, in a separate filing, called the request “oppressive and harassing” and claimed in their initial opposition motion that he “voluntarily offered to produce documents sufficient to show everything that occurred on the flight that precipitated the ex-couples divorce .”
Pitt and Jolie have been locked in a fraught web of legal proceedings since 2016. While the two were declared legally single in 2019, their divorce is not yet finalized.
Details surrounding the circumstances of the private plane incident emerged in August 2022, when a heavily redacted FBI report, provided to CNN by a source at the time, revealed that Jolie had accused Pitt of physically assaulting her and verbally abusing their children while they were aboard the private jet, traveling to the US from France.
Pitt became the center of a probe related to the incident but was never arrested or charged, according to an FBI statement at the time.
Their fight over the Miravel property began in February 2022, when Pitt sued Jolie and her former company, Novel LLC, over what he claimed was the “unlawful” sale of her stake in Miraval, acquired by the couple in 2008.
Pitt’s lawsuit alleged that he and Jolie had agreed when they purchased the winery that neither would sell without the other’s consent. According to a subsequent 2023 court filing, attorneys for Pitt called Jolie’s sale “vindictive” after an “adverse custody ruling.”
A countersuit filed by Novel LLC in September 2022 accused Pitt of “waging a vindictive war against” Jolie and claimed that there was never any such agreement. The countersuit alleges that Jolie attempted to sell her share of the winery to Pitt but the deal fell apart over a provision in a non-disclosure agreement “designed to prohibit Jolie from publicly speaking about the events that had led to the breakdown of their marriage.”
Jolie sold Novel LLC and its stake in the winery to Tenute del Mondo, a subsidiary of Stoli Group, controlled by Russian oligarch Yuri Shefler, in October 2021.
