This week, Angelina Jolie publicly asked her ex-husband, Brad Pitt, to drop his lawsuit against her over the winery they once shared in a lengthy statement. Pitt, Jolie's legal representation claims, “has control of all the properties the couple shared as well as control of the business, but still he demands more, and is suing Angelina for $67 million plus punitive damages.” The legal back-and-forth over the business, a vineyard by the name of Château Miraval, has been raging since Jolie sold her shares in 2021 to the Russian oligarch-owned Stoli group. In February 2022, Pitt filed a lawsuit against Jolie for selling the shares without his consent, seeking monetary damages, legal fees, and calling for the sale to be voided; his suit accuses Jolie of intentionally seeking to “inflict harm” on him. In March, Entertainment Tonight reported that five out of seven of Pitt’s claims against Jolie had been dismissed by a judge; these included dismissed tort claims that would have made Jolie liable to pay Pitt for damages and would have granted Pitt her former shares of the winery. (Two claims that can still move forward include Pitt’s claim that he and Jolie shared an “unwritten, unspoken implied contract” that Jolie would not sell her shares without Pitt’s consent,” and Pitt’s assertion that he invested more in Miraval than Jolie did and should be paid accordingly.) At the time, Jolie’s attorney, Paul Murphy, said in a statement to ET that he hoped Pitt would drop his lawsuit altogether, and wrote off the filing as an attempt to distract from abuse allegations against him. “The judge dismissed most of Mr. Pitt’s claims because they don’t have a legal basis," Murphy said in the statement. Mr. Pitt’s lawsuit has never been about a business dispute; instead, it is about his attempts to cover up serious abuse, and we are gratified the judge has thrown out so much of Mr. Pitt’s complaint." The allegations of "serious abuse," of course, stem from the 2016 incident on a private jet as Pitt, Jolie, and their children returned to Los Angeles from France, where Château Miraval is located. Jolie accused Pitt of verbally and physically assaulting her, as well as two of their children. Pitt, however, has not dropped the lawsuit. In April, Jolie's legal representation claimed Pitt attempted to force her to sign an NDA that would prohibit her from speaking publicly about the alleged abuse. Pitt's team has denied this, and instead, claimed it was Jolie who requested the NDA. “While Angelina again asks Mr. Pitt to end the fighting and finally put their family on a clear path toward healing, unless Mr. Pitt withdraws his lawsuit, Angelina has no choice but to obtain the evidence necessary to prove his allegations wrong,” Murphy said this week. It's worth noting that in May, the pair's eldest child, Shiloh, petitioned to change her last name simply to "Jolie." Their youngest daughter, Vivienne, has also appeared to get rid of her hyphenated last name. In the playbill for the musical The Outsiders, which she helped her mom produce, Vivienne is only listed as “Vivienne Jolie.” Recent reports state that Pitt currently has "virtually no contact" with any of his adult children.
