Check out the cover of the new issue of US Weekly. If you only saw the headline “Her Plot To Destroy Brad”, would you have guessed it was US Weekly? I would have thought it was STAR Magazine. Or In TOUCH Weekly. Or Life & Style. But Brange has always been a moneymaker, no more so than now, now that they’ve imploded. And it would seem while Angelina Jolie took her side online first, with TMZ, Brad Pitt has chosen to feed the magazines, PEOPLE first and then US Weekly. 

What’s interesting here though is that while US Weekly’s cover is demonstrably and undeniably pro-Pitt, none of the details inside are all that fresh. There’s some reporting here about how Angelina rented a house in advance which supports the suggestion that she’d been engineering an escape all along and sources who say that she’s been strategising a move to England and a possible entry into English politics –but that kind of speculation has been around for months, well prior to the airplane incident. The main point the magazine is pushing is that Angelina has engaged in a “smear campaign” against Brad, while Brad presents himself as someone who wanted to go classy all the way in their divorce in order to protect the children, hoping that public opinion would favour him because everyone is still f-cked up over how ugly and how sensational this situation has become.

If you read the print version of US Weekly, however, there is one detail that hasn’t made it online yet. One detail that hasn’t been picked up, yet. It’s buried in the story, in the print version, and it has to do with what went down on that plane. Let’s recap the plane:

They were flying back from France. There was an argument. Maddox supposedly became involved. The argument was so heated that the authorities were called. Last week, Brad Pitt’s sources confirmed to PEOPLE that there was indeed an incident that got out of hand. They stressed, however, that while Brad and Maddox went “nose to nose”, Brad did not strike his son in the face. Those two points were then removed from the original story posted at PEOPLE.com, leaving only Brad’s team’s assertions that he regrets that he lost his temper but at no point became violent. Click here for a refresher of my analysis of that curious PEOPLE.com edit from last week.

So. Even his team can’t deny that a very intense argument went down. It’s the specifics of that argument that are being debated. Given that the specifics are in dispute, with Brad claiming that Angelina has exaggerated the situation to her advantage and Angelina claiming that Brad’s behaviour was so alarming she had no choice but to mobilise against him, this is the bit of information in US Weekly’s story – the print version – that, for some reason, hasn’t gotten a lot of play. Or ANY play.

When Jolie and Pitt boarded the private VistaJet plane from Nice, France, en route to L.A. September 14, their marriage was already beyond repair. “Their arguments,” says the Pitt friend, “progressively became more frequent.” They had another blowout during the 14-hour flight. At some point, Pitt, who had been drinking, allegedly became enraged and began yelling at Jolie. “When Maddox intervened to protect Angelina,” says a Jolie source, “Brad got up in his face and screamed at him to mind his own business.” Another insider claims closed-circuit footage exists of Pitt getting “physical” and causing “damage to the plane itself.” (According to TMZ, when the plane stopped in International Falls, Minnesota, to refuel, Pitt disembarked and tried to drive off in a fuel truck.)

Damage to the plane itself.

That’s a pretty explosive detail, non? And it’s an explosive EXCLUSIVE detail. Which is the word that gives us all an instant erection. If you have an exclusive detail like a source telling you that Brad Pitt’s temper may have caused “damage to the plane itself”, why wouldn’t you make a bigger deal of it?

As I wrote on Monday, I told you to watch for Brad’s counterattack. Brad’s had a few days now to coordinate his media response to Angelina’s first strike last week. Last week was Round 1, this week is Round 2, and it was expected that Brad would take it. If this is a battle then, she would have anticipated that he would mount some kind of rebuttal; it was his only option. So now that she’s seen what that looks like, it now becomes about how she’s going to answer back.