Yesterday marked the five year anniversary of the end of Brange. Angelina Jolie filed for divorce on September 15, 2016, just before Emmy weekend. The news didn’t break until the following Tuesday. At around 1015am ET. I remember it clearly because it was the gossip equivalent of a nuclear bomb, and this is not hyperbole. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, together, were already one of the biggest celebrity stories of the last 25 years. The announcement that they had broken up after 12 years was monumental. And, at the time, no one saw it coming. Despite years and years of rumours and tabloid headlines about their relationship, which fueled an entire industry for a decade, they’d managed to keep their sh-t contained until, well, it could no longer be contained. 

 

From September 20, 2016 onward, for weeks, World War Brange was front-page news. Especially after it was revealed that something happened on a flight, involving Brad and one of their children, that precipitated the decision. 

Five years later and Brad and Angelina are officially single but they’re still working out custody and financial issues through the court. A three judge panel in a California appeals court ruled in Angelina’s favour recently and disqualified the private judge presiding over their case on the basis of conflict of interest. Brad is reportedly now trying to take it to the California Supreme Court. 

And now, five years to the day that Brange broke, Page Six had an exclusive yesterday about the Brange battle over Miraval. Back in the summer it was reported that Angelina wanted out of the business and the estate and was appealing to a judge to intervene so she could sell her shares. According to her claims, Brad and his team are making it difficult for her to exit herself from the property. 

 

Now Brad is claiming that she’s using “devious means” to cut him out from the sale and that she did none of the work in building up the value of the asset and tried to unload her share without giving him right of first refusal. 

I’ve mentioned this before but isn’t it interesting how often Page Six has Brad Pitt exclusives, all the way back to those rumours about him dating Professor Neri Oxman? 

“Devious means” – you know what that triggers, when a woman is described as “devious”, right? We’re now evoking a centuries-old narrative about the allegedly cunning nature of a woman. The devious woman is deadly. She will come at you under cloak of night and bleed you out before morning. And if we’re talking historical narratives, this situation in particular is a fight over land. How’s that for inherited misogyny? 

 

When it comes to land, of course, back in the day, it was the men who owned it, because women were incapable and their role was to do the woman sh-t. And now Brad’s source is telling Page Six that:

“He did all the work; she did nothing,” where Miraval was concerned. 

As all the men hear the dog whistle… 

Don’t let that bitch come from your bank account or your property. But do let this distract the public from the ongoing issues related to their custody dispute, and one of the sticking points for Angelina – which is that she wants her children to be given a voice, when several of them have asked to be heard, in court about their family situation before a decision about their family is made. And why Brad’s legal position is to prevent that from happening, while engaging media outlets to help advance the devious woman storyline. 

Also attached - Angelina grocery shopping with Zahara on the weekend in LA.