The Company Angelina Jolie Founded To Deal With Her Winery Shares Is Suing Brad Pitt For $250 Million
The gloves are off! But that happened back in 2016. At this point in their legal brinkmanship, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are just slapping at each other with the skeletal remains of their flayed hands. Just a bunch of raggedy ass bones clacka-lackin’ in each other’s faces, phalanges flying all willy-nilly and shit. It’s gotten so bad now that Angelia is using a surrogate hand to slap Brad in his face.
In the latest development in the divorce decree to end all divorce decrees, Nouvel, the company Angie founded to handle her stake in Château Miraval, the former couple’s formerly jointly held winery and estate in the south of France, is suing Brad for $250 million. The suit claims that Brad “embarked on a multi-faceted, years-long campaign to seize control of Chateau Miraval and appropriate the company’s assets for his benefit and that of his own companies and friends,” effectively seizing control of the winery “in retaliation for the divorce and custody proceedings.” Nouvel’s suit was filed in response to Brad’s suit against Angie in which he accused her of selling her shares of the winery to Stoli to purposefully “inflict harm” on him. So I guess we’ll just be doing this until their bodies catch up to their hands and there’s no fresh flesh left to slap or be slapped with. Page Six reports:
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s battle over a French winery has gone from nasty to nuclear.
A company founded by Jolie has filed a jaw-dropping $250 million lawsuit against her ex-husband claiming that he and a gang of cronies launched a devious campaign to “seize control” of the French winery that they bought as a couple “in retaliation for the divorce and custody proceedings” and to “ensure… Jolie would never see a dime” of its vast profits.
The court papers filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles claimed that after the pair bought the 1,300-acre estate in the South of France in 2008, they jointly invested tens of millions of dollars to improve it.
It says the pair had an agreement that the “Malificent” actress would oversee their humanitarian projects, including the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, while “oversight of the couple’s investment in Chateau Miraval was left in the hands of Pitt.”
Nouvel claims that before she sold her 50% stake in the company, “much of Jolie’s personal wealth” was tied up in the winery and that over the years, Brad has “squandered millions of the company’s money on ‘vanity projects,’ including more than a million dollars on a swimming pool” and insisted that “a single staircase at the chateau to be built and rebuilt a total of four times after he was unhappy with the first three attempts.” But since this lawsuit isn’t really about wine, per se, but more about the alleged wino behind the curtain, Nouvel also reminds us that Brad “developed a publicly acknowledged alcohol abuse problem,” so, of course, I’m now picturing a rose-all-day-drunk Brad screaming at the crew of Croatian workers trying to build that staircase “MAKE IT RIGHT, GODDAMMIT!” Nicely played Angie. Page Six adds:
The suit claims Pitt was aided in the alleged chicanery “by his allies, including Chateau Miraval directors Gary Bradbury, Roland Venturini, and Warren Grant, and his business partners, Marc Perrin, Familles Perrin and Miraval Provence.” Nouvel is also suing them.
“Although Jolie was not obligated to sell [her stake] to Pitt, she nevertheless offered to sell her interest to him and negotiated with him for months. Nearing a deal,” the suit claims, “Pitt’s hubris got the better of him: he made an eleventh-hour demand for onerous and irrelevant conditions, including a provision designed to prohibit Jolie from publicly speaking about the events that had led to the breakdown of their marriage. Pitt knew that much of Jolie’s wealth and liquidity were tied up in [her stake in the winery] and used that fact to try to force Jolie to agree to his unreasonable terms.”
The papers say that in October 2021 “after Pitt ignored Jolie’s final offer to sell her interest in the winery on the same terms Pitt had proposed but without the hush-clause” she sold it to Stoli instead.
The suit says that Stoli was ready to put its experience and distribution network to work for Chateau Miraval, but that “unwilling to share control, Pitt refused to work with [Stoli] as an equal partner.”
That must be one helluva staircase if Brad’s still this personally invested in Miraval. Might be time to let it go. If Stoli has any sense, in so much as a multinational corporation run by a Russian oligarch can have sense, they’d turn the chateau into an international tourist destination by offering haunted house tours with holographic projections depicting Brad and Angie’s short but consequential time there. It’d be like “Here’s the chapel in which they were married” and you’d get to see a little bit of their wedding, “now step over here to the million dollar pool, this is where Brad banged that married German model that one time.” The tour would conclude with a trip down Brad’s Make It Right staircase which leads right to a tasting room and gift shop where you can purchase Miraval branded slapping gloves. Now tell me, who wouldn’t pay big bucks for an experience like that?!
Pic: INFGoff.com