After months and months of reported peace between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, hostilities were once again renewed this week. It started when word got out that Angelina Jolie had filed court documents requesting the disqualification of the private judge working on their divorce case because he’s allegedly in business with Brad’s legal team. Then Brad Pitt’s sources went to Page Six to accuse of her delaying the case because it wasn’t going her way. Then her sources were all like, whatever, dude, I’m the one who wants this handled fairly and efficiently, so let’s just get a new judge and move on.
Supposedly Brad’s lawyers formally filed a counter-response with Los Angeles Superior Court and, amazingly, Page Six was on it immediately. Like their article about it went up at 7:26pm ET, which is 4:26pm PT, before the end of the LA work day:
Well that’s convenient. Was Page Six waiting outside the courthouse? Typically in celebrity news, when court documents are filed, especially in California, TMZ is all over that sh-t because they regularly send over staff to go through public documents or they have a tipster. TMZ doesn’t get beat on this kind of court thing very often. But somehow Page Six was able to pick up on Brad’s paperwork, and pull quotes out of it, clearly representing Brad’s side, and have an article ready to upload to their website, really quickly. Coincidence or conspiracy?
Team Brad has often pulled the “Angelina manipulates the media” card over the last almost-four years since the two broke up. Back in 2018, in actual court documents, Brad’s lawyer wrote that Angelina was trying to “manipulate media coverage”. Angelina is indeed skilled at media strategy – but it’s not like Brad Pitt is some country bumpkin and completely disadvantaged at public relations warfare, which is practically how those who are pro-Pitt like to position him. As though he’s just out here doing his art and making his sculptures and riding his bike and totally above celebrity gamesmanship when his “sources” have done more leaking, to a variety of outlets, than she has. And stories that are favourable to him frequently appear in Page Six – here’s another example from exactly two years ago.
So now we know, thanks to Page Six, that in his most recent filing, Brad’s lawyers are saying that the judge that Angelina’s lawyer now wants DQ-ed was the same one who married them, like that’s supposed to mean that the judge is objective. He could have married them but, since then, steadily been paid by Brad’s lawyers to the point where now Angelina and her legal team aren’t confident in his ability to be impartial. And, as an LA-based family lawyer wrote to me yesterday, “I think it’s more than a 50/50 shot of [the disqualification request] being granted because no trial court judge wants to be overturned on appeal and Jolie has the money to appeal”. Maybe Brad’s lawyers are giving it different odds but if everyone wants to wrap this up as quickly as possible and not leave any possibility for appeal and drag this out again, changing the judge at this point might help with that?
