Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s dispute over their French winery took another twist.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that the case will head to trial, despite Angelina’s push to have the case dropped. The judge agreed that there was an informal, but implied contract in regards to the shares of the holding company, recognizing Brad’s two claims of interference.
The actors are locked in a dispute over the property, which houses their wine label, Miraval. Post-divorce, Angelina initially showed interest in selling her share back to Brad, but negotiations stalled, leading to Brad to file the suit. Angelina allegedly sold her shares to a third party, but Brad claimed they had previously agreed not to sell the shares to anyone else.
Angelina previously pushed to have Brad stop the lawsuit as her lawyer, Paul Murphy, previously told Page Six: “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.”
As the business disagreements continued, Angelina cited concerns far beyond just share-holding. In response, Angelina requested that Brad disclose third-party communications related to an alleged incident on a plane where her lawyers claim he “grabbed Jolie by the head and shook her, and then grabbed her shoulders and shook her again before pushing her into the bathroom wall.”
Brad has strongly denied these allegations. His court filing, obtained by the Mirror, hit back hard against Angelina. The papers argue: “These private, third-party communications are far removed from the issues and allegations in this case, and in many cases, they have nothing but the most tenuous relationship to ‘what happened on that plane.’ Jolie, however, wants them anyway as part of her efforts to turn this business dispute into a re-litigation of the former couple’s divorce case.”
Nonetheless, Angelina is persistent that these documents are critical to the case at hand and will shine a light on a larger context. A court filing claimed: “Jolie has never contended that all NDAs are problematic. The stark and obvious contrast between the NDA to which Jolie objected and the ones that Pitt is now demanding Jolie review and produce is that none of these other NDAs were covering up substantial physical and emotional abuse of Jolie and their children.”
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