Brad Pitt accused of ‘looting’ French vineyard he owned with ex-wife

Brad Pitt has been accused of acting like a ‘petulant child’ who ‘looted’ a French vineyard he co-owed with Angelia Jolie, according to the latest legal filing in the couple’s drama. Château Miraval is a vineyard in Provence, South of France, that Pitt bought with his then-wife Jolie for roughly $28million in 2008. They became 50/50 owners of the property, as well as its wine-making enterprise. But Pitt has now been accused of spending millions of dollars on vanity projects building a recording studio and renovating the swimming pool, according to a lawsuit filed by Jolie’s former investment company, Nouvel.

Jolie sold her stake in Nouvel in 2021 to a Russian oligarch, and lawyers said that made Pitt’s behavior at the winery worse. According to the lawsuit seen by the Financial Times, Pitt acted like a ‘petulant child’ and engaged in a ‘blatant money grab.’ Jolie’s lawyers slammed the actor for styling himself as a winemaker, instead saying he ‘deals in illusions, not dirt and grapes.’ Nouvel, Jolie’s former company, said in a legal document that Pitt ‘engaged in increasingly outrageous actions to retain control’ of the winery, and that he is allegedly ‘stripping [the rosé producer] of its assets.’

The rosé brand that Pitt and Jolie established with the help of winemaker Marc Perrin has generated more than $16million in profits in 2022, according to the FT. Since the couple divorced in 2016, Pitt has allegedly ‘masterminded a so-far-successful plan to seize de facto control of Château Miraval’, Nouvel’s lawyers claimed in the California court filing. In the new filings, Jolie has taken aim at Pitt’s styling of himself as a wine maker – brandishing his affectations as ‘ludicrous.’ ‘During the years that he allegedly ‘built’ the business, he filmed and appeared in dozens of movies, not to mention making countless promotional appearances, jetting-setting [sic] around the world for movie premieres, and attending Hollywood parties,’ the filing obtained by Page Six read. 

‘While he no doubt visited the vineyards to admire the work of the French laborers who actually made the business successful, Pitt is no vigneron.’ The fight over the winery is just the latest in their seemingly never-ending legal battles stemming from their acrimonious 2016 split. Details were revealed in Vanity Fair last month after the couple’s former head of security, winemakers, real estate brokers and others with intimate knowledge of the couple’s time in the south of France spoke out. The report notes in 2021, Jolie, 48, and Pitt, 59, appeared to have come to an agreement where he would purchase her half of the business. The deal stalled when Pitt tried to insert an NDA that would prevent the Maleficent star from publicly talking about their infamous argument in front of their kids on a private jet in 2016, according to the Vanity Fair piece. 

Representatives for Pitt have maintained it was Jolie who first broached the idea of an NDA, when the 12 Monkeys star began negotiating about the contents of the agreement, that’s when Jolie backed away from the deal. Not long afterwards, Jolie sold her share in Nouvel to Russian billionaire Yuri Shefler, who has been designated as an ‘oligarch’ by the U.S. Treasury Department. The couple had a ‘mutual and binding commitment’ to the $160 million Chateau Miraval business and agreed not to sell up without the other’s permission. According to Vanity Fair, Jolie says that ‘no such agreement ever existed.’ Pitt discovered his ex-wife had ‘secretly’ sold her 50 percent stake when a 2021 press release announced that he had new business partners, according to the actor’s lawyers. 

The buyer was part of a ‘Russia-affiliated’ vodka conglomerate headed by Shefler, who would use his new relationship with the A-lister to enhance and improve his reputation, court filings alleged. ‘For Jolie, the sale was a business transaction she had every right to make. In an effort to preserve her own mental health and well-being, she looked for and found what she believed would be a good business partner for Pitt,’ a source told Vanity Fair. While Pitt saw the sale as a ‘betrayal.’ ‘It is not a coincidence that she sold her interest in Miraval to an adversarial party, and part of the family home to a stranger, right after a judge granted a huge win: 50-50 custody,’ a source close to Pitt told Vanity Fair. The Fight Club star attempted to fight Jolie’s sale to Shefler. 

Pitt and Jolie met in 2005 on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, playing a bored married couple who discover they are both assassins hired by competing agencies to kill one another. They married at Chateau Miraval in 2014 and parented six kids – three biological and three adopted – who are now aged between 14 and 21. The Vanity Fair piece notes that cracks began appearing in the marriage in 2015. Those tensions reached boiling point as the family were returning to the U.S. from Chateau Miraval in 2016. ‘By September 14, 2016, tensions between and had been boiling for about a year. They tried to keep their arguments between themselves and had made a point to never argue in front of the children. Until the plane,’ according to the Vanity Fair article. 

The couple’s head of security Gary Bradbury told the magazine that in 15 years working Pitt, he never saw him drunk. On the day of the flight from Nice, France, to Los Angeles that included a refueling stop in Minnesota, Pitt was ‘drinking quite a bit.’ ‘Brad was drinking, and the confrontation got out of hand. He was absolutely wrong in how he behaved but immediately apologized and acknowledged that he had crossed a line,’ another source said. ‘He will always regret [it], and right away took steps to address this and try to make amends,’ the source added. Following the incident, Pitt became sober. Jolie filed for divorce shortly after he plane incident and a long legal battle, primarily over the custody of their six children, ensued. Read the full story: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12284805/Brad-Pitt-accused-acting-like-petulant-child-vineyard-owned-Angelina-Jolie.html?ito=msngallery

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