The legal battle between exes Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt is getting murkier. A new report sources court documents to show that Brad has now accused Angelina of lying and withholding critical information about the controversial sale of their $500 million French winery.
Documents accessed by In Touch Weekly show that Brad’s legal team has accused Angelina of withholding ‘hundreds of emails’ to suppress the truth. “In a last-ditch attempt to suppress the truth about her wrongful sale to the Stoli Parties, [Angelina] has withheld hundreds of emails she exchanged with her inner circle in the period leading up to the sale on claims of attorney-client privilege. But 126 of those emails are entirely between non-lawyers. These 126 communications should be ordered produced,” reads the submission from Brad in the case.
The couple purchased the French winery in question – Chateau Miraval -jointly. However, Brad claims that it was sold to a third party without his knowledge and consent right after their divorce in 2016. The couple has been battling this in court for years now.
In the documents, Brad’s legal team claims that Angelina did produce some documents after ‘stonewalling for more than a year’ but calls it ‘illusory’, as she has ‘produced only one internal communication discussing or reflecting the sale’.
The legal team says, “[Angelina] claims that all of her team’s other internal communications on this subject are protected by the attorney/client privilege. This includes hundreds of emails to or from non-attorneys, such as her business manager Terry Bird, her image consultants Chloe Dalton and Arminka Helic, her wine consultant Christophe Salin, her finance consultants Marjorie Brabet-Friel and James Friel, and her personal assistants Michael Vieira and Mindy Nyby. 126 of these communications do not even involve any attorney participant. [Angelina’s] wildly overbroad assertion of privilege over these 126 communications is unsupported by the law, and it cannot justify her near-complete cover-up of this critically important discovery.”
After Brad and Angelina split in 2016, she emailed him that she wanted to get out of the winery business. Brad said his team negotiated a deal to buy her stake, offering to pay her $54.4 million over six years. However, he claims she dropped out of negotiations with him and sold her stake to Russian billionaire Yuri Shefler, pocketing $64 million from the deal. Brad has urged the court to nullify the deal.
