Brad Pitt has been making headlines all week – and even with the assist from major entertainment outlets, they’re not the kind of headlines he and his PR team would be happy with.
Let’s start with Make It Right, Brad’s foundation. Make It Right made Brad Pitt look real good when he announced that they would be building sustainable homes for people in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Those homes were poorly designed and ended up basically falling apart – so the homeowners sued Brad and Make It Right and for a couple of years, Brad seemed to be dipping and dodging until this week, when a settlement was reached, but only because Global Green (Brad’s friends, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ed Norton, among others, are members of the board), came through with $20.5 million to compensate homeowners and fix Brad’s mess. Did Brad have to call in some favours so that he could wrap this lawsuit up and avoid more bad publicity?
Because here’s the thing about Make It Right. You could argue (if you absolutely had to take that position) that they were naïve in their ambitions, and they got in over their heads but that they ultimately meant well…but….
Remember too that the residents and homeowners who filed the class action lawsuit allege that when everything went south, Make It Right “ignored their complaints and then vanished as the houses continued to decay”.
Per NBC in 2018, when the lawsuit was filed:
“As the problems worsened, the organization has all but disappeared. Make It Right hasn’t built a home, filed tax forms or updated its website since 2015. The downtown New Orleans office has been closed, the staff has been cut to a handful and residents say their calls go unreturned.”
So did they … like… ghost these people whose homes were uninhabitable?
I mention this because as we know, Brad is currently involved in another lawsuit over property – over in France, with his winery Chateau Miraval. He’s suing Angelina Jolie for selling her share of the estate to Tenute del Mondo and that part of the legal situation has sucked up all the oxygen but what hasn’t gotten enough play is that before Brad sued Angelina over Miraval, Tenute del Mondo, after taking over ownership, had been putting the heat on Brad and his business for failing to turn over documents and mismanagement of the business.
When you connect those accusations to Make It Right, then, and the way they bailed on the homeowners, and seemed to walk away from responsibility, well, I mean, he can act, but it doesn’t seem like he can run a charity, nor does it seem like he can run a business?
So that’s one headline.
The other headline, obviously, is the FBI investigation and the case files that have now become public. More details have emerged since I last posted about the situation. Media going through the documents have now noted that two photos are included – a black and white photo of Angelina’s injured hand has been published by some outlets. But also, heavily redacted handwritten pages that are believed to be from the children. All six of the kids, of course, were witnesses but also, as the NY Post points out, so were the on-board staff.
Brad Pitt has denied wrongdoing and his team is accusing Angelina of bringing all this up to f-ck him over but as I wrote yesterday, she filed the Freedom of Information claim against the FBI for an explanation as to WHY, when there are photos and witness accounts, when a plane was grounded mid-flight by the crew, investigators did not proceed with charges. Beyond her own personal situation, if she can’t get authorities to proceed on a domestic violence investigation, you can imagine the barriers that non-famous women are confronted with – which is why she was involved in supporting the ratification of the Violence Against Women Act.
But why do this publicly?
I explained it yesterday, how it was Politico that triggered all of this, seemingly by accident, and the NY Post of all places has more detail:
“[…] Jolie isn’t the one who released these FBI docs. It was a Politico reporter who came across them back in April, after stumbling across a Freedom of Information Act request filed by an anonymous Jane Doe against the FBI.
Doe — who, yes, is Jolie — had her lawyer request that the FOIA itself be sealed, to protect her children, but a judge ruled against it. Had it been up to Jolie, these docs would never have come to light.”
The problem is, these are finer points that have not been widely reported on. Most mainstream outlets are not bothering to include that detail, which is kind of a big detail. TMZ hasn’t even updated on the situation since their last post about it (at least at the time of this writing), which was all about how Brad thinks Angelina’s behind this leak.
TMZ, for example, an outlet known to get all up in people’s legal business, has yet to publish the photos of Angelina’s injuries (and it’s not like they haven’t in their history published photos of famous women who’ve been domestically abused!); they’ve yet to mention the fact that the children wrote witness statements.
So there are people out there just running with Brad’s messaging that Angelina is deliberately attacking him and putting him on blast, making her look like the aggressor and he’s the victim. Himpathy, you see. With a big assist from so much of the media.
Meanwhile he’s gotten away – to Seoul, where he was today alongside Aaron Taylor-Johnson promoting Bullet Train. Where he can safely assume that the media there wouldn’t know to question him about his personal drama.
