On Tuesday this week, the New York Times’s coverage of Angelina Jolie’s cross-complaint detailed explosive allegations against Brad Pitt about how he abused her and their six children on that private flight in September 2016 that preceded her filing for divorce. Since then, Brad and his representatives have been on damage control, engaging with the usual entertainment outlets to make sure his narrative is represented: TMZ, Page Six, the Daily Mail, Us Weekly.
According to Brad’s people, Angelina is waging a smear campaign against him and she’s constantly changing her story about what happened on the plane and adding new details. His team released another statement yesterday via his lawyer Anne Kiley:
“Brad has owned everything he’s responsible for from day one — unlike the other side. He’s not going to own anything he didn’t do. He has been on the receiving end of every type of personal attack and misrepresentation. Thankfully, the various public authorities the other side has tried to use against him over the past six years have made their own independent decisions. Brad will continue to respond in court as he has consistently done.”
As I wrote in my post earlier this week when Angelina’s cross-complaint was reported by the NYT, Angelina didn’t wake up on Tuesday and decide to put Brad on blast. For those who are just following this story via TMZ and Page Six, what’s missing is the timeline and the context. Angelina’s allegations are part of a COUNTERclaim in response to him suing her over the sale of her share of Chateau Miraval. And his defenders are all like, why is she bringing up what happened on the plane in a lawsuit about selling the winery – these are two separate issues? If you’re only going by TMZ and the Daily Mail’s description of the situation, sure, they do seem like two separate issues…
What those outlets conveniently minimise though is that those two issues, Chateau Miraval and Brad’s alleged violence on the plane, are now linked because Brad was the one who connected them. Because as part of the negotiations between him and Angelina for her to sell her share of Miraval back to him he was the one who insisted at the last minute to make the sale conditional upon her signing an NDA which would silence her from discussing what went down on the plane.
Which means that HE was the one who introduced the plane incident into the conversation. Which is why she’s addressing the plane incident in her COUNTERclaim.
But again, Brad’s advantage is that so many mainstream entertainment media outlets are willing to amplify his narrative over and above what’s actually documented. He has a film coming out soon – Babylon, directed by Damien Chazelle. A major studio film, directed by an Oscar winner, with an all-star cast, scheduled for a December release, with big awards ambitions…
A lot of people have invested a lot of time and money into his movie and there’s a whole ecosystem in place to support and protect that investment, including the golden boy who’s in the lead role. And that means access, whether it’s the promise of access, or the restriction of access, when it comes time to promote the film. Nobody wants to jeopardise that access and lose out on an opportunity to feature Brad or Margot Robbie or Tobey Maguire or any number of celebrities associated with the film. And certainly nobody wants to jeopardise future exclusives, opportunities for future interviews and photoshoots or even breaking news about his personal life. “You know, one day, when Brad is ready to talk about his new girlfriend, he just might want to talk to you about it… but it would be hard to do that if, you know, you’ve been portraying him as a domestic abuser”, is something that someone might say …
Which is why people might be inclined to gloss over much of the information contained in Angelina’s cross-complaint and compare it to what Brad has put out there. Basic information about the Chateau Miraval lawsuit that undermines his position. So if you’re still reading this, read some more – here’s a link to the full document that was filed on Tuesday. If that doesn’t work, here’s another one.
If you don’t have time at the moment and plan to go back to it later, consider right now the origins of this lawsuit, which AGAIN was initiated by Brad, not Angelina. The news broke back in February of this year that he was suing her; the story was a big headline at the time. Here’s how PEOPLE reported it – note the highlighted passages:
So Brad busts out of the gate and gets the jump on Angelina in the media “claiming she violated an agreement they’d previously made […and] sold her interests in Chateau Miraval despite prior agreement that neither would do so unless the other person approved”.
TMZ had similar reporting – note the highlighted passages:
Brad’s team, with an assist from outlets like TMZ and PEOPLE, laid the foundation here that Angelina broke her promise to him and blindsided him with the sale. That’s the basis of his lawsuit, the lawsuit that HE started, and the lawsuit that she is countering. He accused her first of breaking a promise. So it’s up to her to defend herself by proving that there was NO PROMISE to be broken to begin with.
And she has the receipts. Here’s the passage from Angelina’s cross-complaint, passages highlighted:
Angelina has provided email correspondence between her advisors and Brad’s advisors from back when they first bought Chateau Miraval together, and it turns out her people had asked him to consider putting in writing a plan for what to do with the place should they separate – and BRAD was the one who refused, saying it was unnecessary.
There was no promise in writing. And there was no verbal promise either. Brad’s lawsuit, rather, is based on what he considers to be a “secret” consent agreement between him and Angelina that was NEITHER WRITTEN NOR VERBAL. So they made a promise through brain waves and telepathy and that gives him the right to sue her?
Note that there are dates specified in Angelina’s cross-complaint, dates relating to emails, in other words DOCUMENTS, exchanged back and forth. Those documents back up the fact that there was never a promise, never an agreement, certainly not the agreement that TMZ and PEOPLE reported back in February.
And there are other emails and documents, too, that set up the timeline of how all of this unfolded, including emails pertaining to the negotiations that were happening between Brad and Angelina when she tried to sell her share back to him. That, actually, was what she tried to do first. She never intended to sell to Tenute del Mondo (the company that eventually bought her share and the company that is now also in a legal dispute with Brad over his alleged mismanagement of the business) because she wanted to just sell it all to Brad. And they were close to a deal.
Angelina’s cross-complaint includes details about correspondence going back and forth between representatives of the two sides and at one point their representatives actually congratulated each other because it looked like it was actually going to happen. They had basically agreed to terms with Angelina selling to Brad for less than what her share value would be. The deal was ready to go… and then he stopped it.
But you will note, in February, when TMZ and PEOPLE and other outlets covered the story of Brad suing Angelina because she sold her share to someone else over his objections, they fail to mention that she tried initially to sell to him. Which means that those who were reading about the situation and only getting that framing of it would assume that she just decided to f-ck him over and blindside him with the sale.
The paperwork and the email chain and the trail of documents referenced in Angelina’s cross-complaint say otherwise. And if the BASIS of his lawsuit, the fundamental seed of his accusations against her, is this absurd (how do you prove TELEPATHIC CONSENT?!), shouldn’t that tell you something about the motivation?
There is a LOT in Angelina’s cross-complaint, with receipts, including specific dates and other correspondence provided as supporting documentation, that seriously challenges the narrative that Brad and his PR team have been able to get out there. But the problem is most people aren’t going to read the cross-complaint. Their perspective on the situation has already been shaped by media outlets like TMZ and the Daily Mail which cherry-pick certain parts of the documents while overlooking others. And it’s easier to read a quick post at TMZ and not spend ten to fifteen minutes going through the PDF of a legal document. Brad and his team are using that to their advantage.
But his bigger problem is where the children are concerned. In suing Angelina over Chateau Miraval, Brad compelled Angelina to disclose the sequence of events that led to the breakdown in their negotiations for her to sell her share of the estate back to him. The deal fell through because he was trying to force her to sign an NDA about him allegedly abusing her and the kids on the private plane. So he was the one who made the plane incident relevant.
And now that those details have been included in the cross-complaint, people know more about the alleged domestic violence. It certainly doesn’t help that, well, he hasn’t been seen with his children – any of his six children, not a single child – in SIX YEARS. Not since that flight.
Part of the damage control that’s happening right now then is that he and his team have to explain it. Never fear, TMZ is here. And of course Angelina is to blame. TMZ reported yesterday that Angelina has “poisoned the kids against Brad” and that they have a “limited and strained relationship, because of her campaign of alienation”.
Well that’s interesting because just a couple of months ago, when he was promoting Bullet Train, according to PEOPLE, Brad was living his best life:
Last year E! News reported that Brad has a great bond with them:
These are all HIS sources, people “close to HIM” (emphasis mine) who are leaking this sh-t to the media periodically to maintain the façade that Brad is a good dad.
But now Brad’s insiders are saying that it’s not actually great between him and the kids and it’s all Angelina’s fault. Which one is it? Has she poisoned the kids against him or does he have dinner with them in LA?
At this point, if you’ve been visiting this site over the years, I’m sure you know how it works. Brad Pitt definitely knows how it works. Few people are better at playing the game than he is and if he could, we would have seen photos of him with his kids a long time ago. The fact that we haven’t is a major PR issue for him. Which is why he has to go on the attack on Angelina and claim that she’s alienated them from him, so that he can divert attention from the fact that they were on that plane. They saw what they saw. He’s trying to convince the public that they didn’t see what they saw and that their mother is telling them what they saw. And that when the public sees Angelina with the kids all the time and him with his kids never the time, we’re not really seeing what we think we’re seeing either. He’s just a man being harassed by a vengeful bitch. This is DARVO and Himpathy in full effect.
