Brad Pitt’s “top story”

As of 1045am ET on Thursday 10 July, the “top story” at PEOPLE.com, and it had been that way for hours, was the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie legal battle over Miraval, the estate they once shared.

Angelina sold her stake after their split and Brad is alleging that she did so to spite him as he does not want to co-own the winery with Tenute del Mondo, the company that made the deal with her; and that in doing so she supposedly violated the agreement they made that required mutual approval. Angelina denies that there was any such agreement in place and that she tried to sell to him until he demanded she sign NDAs prohibiting her from discussing the alleged abuse she and her children endured when they were married. 

So back to this PEOPLE headline and the timing of it. Brad is coming off the success* of F1. There’s an asterisk beside “success” because while the movie is no doubt Apple’s most successful theatrical release, it also cost $250 million to make and another $100 to market so, per Variety just this week: 

“…the racing drama isn’t close to climbing out of the red. “F1” cost more than $250 million to produce and roughly $100 million more to market, which means the tentpole will require multiple laps around the track to justify its massive price tag. But these ticket sales, which are encouraging for any adult-skewing original film, at least give Apple a reason to stay the course.”

Still, where Brad Pitt is concerned, it’s a public relations win and definitely the biggest opening of his career, to go along with all the media fawning that cushioned him for weeks ahead of the movie’s release. How, then, is he spending that PR capital?

According to PEOPLE, three days after F1 hit theatres, his legal team filed court documents in the Miraval case. And PEOPLE was able to “obtain” these documents and reported on the contents yesterday, with this headline which is the aforementioned “top story”.

Brad wants to depose an executive at Tenute del Mondo who he claims had knowledge of the sale and was communicating with Angelina. It doesn’t matter who, exactly, this person is because the words “Brad Pitt”, “Angelina Jolie”, and “private messages” are a tantalising lure for gossips. Because in 2025, if we’re talking about celebrities and legal battles and private messages, we are triggering the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni reflex and the chaos that has resulted from that scandal. Justin Baldoni’s legal team has been accused of using DARVO in an attempt to turn public opinion against Blake. And that tactic, as we have seen online, has been successful. The text messages were a big part of that in his complaint – which has now been dismissed – but the damage was done anyway. 

Now PEOPLE is pumping out headlines about Brad Pitt digging around for text messages to and from Angelina Jolie in his court battle against her, while enjoying the fact that the media and much of the public doesn’t seem to give a sh-t that he’s not only been accused of domestic violence on a private plane with his then-wife and children. So one could argue that Brad’s been engaging in some lite DARVO himself in these years since he and Angelina broke up, with coded language about how vengeful she is and wants to “inflict harm”. This is often how women who report abuse are labeled – vindicative liars out to besmirch innocent, good men. Much of the mainstream media is only too happy to help. 

Last week Angelica Jade Bastién wrote a great piece at Vulture, “Brad Pitt is Fooling You” about how smoothly Brad has been able to “remov[e] the specter of violence from his own narrative”. At the same time, while he’s managed to eliminate the unsavoury parts of his narrative from the discourse, there simultaneously continue to be stories targeting Angelina, driving the discourse in a direction that favours him over her and arguably harms her– as illuminated by this PEOPLE article about him trying to get at Angelina’s private messages, and how conveniently public it’s become. This is a dark art. And he’s masterful at it.