Business
Angelina Jolie blames Brad Pitt’s NDA for scuttling winery sale, alleges abuse before plane altercation
Angelina Jolie’s legal team filed a motion Thursday to acquire Brad Pitt’s communications stemming from an “all-encompassing” nondisclosure agreement he wanted that purportedly tanked the sale of his ex-wife’s share of their Chateau Miraval winery to him.
The former Hollywood power couple’s protracted legal dispute over the winery — and its legacy for their six children — took another turn as Jolie’s team asked a judge to compel Pitt and his company, Mondo Bongo, to produce documents pertaining to his calling for a “more onerous NDA” in order to purchase Jolie’s share of the south-of-France winery.
The documents Jolie seeks, according to the Thursday filing in Los Angeles County Superior Court, are “highly relevant” and also likely to yield admissible evidence in the case, her team argued.
Her attorney, Paul Murphy, also accused the “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” Oscar winner of “unrelenting efforts to control and financially drain” Jolie, as well as “attempting to hide his history of abuse, control, and coverup.”
An attorney and a publicist for Pitt declined to comment Thursday on the new filing and allegations of prior abuse.
Pitt has accused Jolie and her company, Nouvel, of secretly selling her share of their winery and family home to “seize profits she had not earned and returns on an investment she did not make.” He claimed in a February 2022 lawsuit and subsequent amended complaints that his investment in the business “exceeded Jolie’s by nearly $50 million” and that Jolie had reneged on exclusive buyout negotiations they had agreed on in early 2021, when she originally said she wanted out of the business.
Pitt has been seeking a jury trial and the undoing of Jolie’s October 2021 sale to the Tenute del Mondo wine group, a subsidiary of the Stoli Group.
In October 2022, Jolie filed a cross-complaint that argued that the couple had no agreement regarding two-party consent to the sale of either party’s interest in the property. She also detailed allegations of abuse that prompted her to file for divorce from Pitt in 2016, ending their two-year marriage and much-talked-about 10-year romantic relationship. (The actors, although legally unmarried since 2019, have not yet finalized their drawn-out divorce.)
The “Inglourious Basterds” star has also complained that he can no longer enjoy his private residence in France, as it is now co-owned by strangers; Jolie contended Thursday that she and their children have not returned to the French estate since leaving it and boarding the fateful September 2016 flight that precipitated Jolie filing for divorce five days later.
In Thursday’s motion to compel, reviewed by The Times, attorneys for the “Girl, Interrupted” Oscar winner asked again for responses from Pitt to help them figure out his reason for pulling out of their implied agreement for him to buy Jolie’s stake in the winery. Pitt’s decision to pull out of the sale, her attorney said, “nearly broke” Jolie.
“If that sale had been completed, this lawsuit never would have happened. But at the last minute, Pitt ‘stepped back’ from his agreement to buy Jolie’s interest in Miraval, and the deal collapsed. The question at the heart of this case — and at the center of this motion — is why,” the motion said.
The answer, her attorney said, has to do with sealed documents Jolie submitted in the ex-couple’s separate but simultaneous custody dispute. The new filing referred to sealed March 2021 documents — titled “Testimony Regarding Domestic Violence” — that “apparently enraged Pitt” and led to him “stepping back” from the sale.
“When Jolie filed the evidence in the custody suit, she was careful to file it under seal so that no member of the public could see it. But Jolie’s sealed filing, which included emails, summaries of the family’s expected testimony, and other evidence, caused Pitt to fear that the information could eventually become public,” the document said.
Pitt then decided he could no longer rely on Jolie’s voluntary efforts to keep things private and demanded that she “contractually bind herself to that silence,” her filing said.
With that, her team indicated there was abuse of Jolie that predated the contentious 2016 private-plane flight. In referring to that sealed filing in the custody case — as well as another titled “Testimony of Minor Children” — her team argued that Pitt tried to force a more sweeping NDA on Jolie to conceal his alleged “personal misconduct, whether related to Miraval or not.”
Her team is seeking Pitt’s communications with the FBI, U.S. attorney’s office, the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services and the Los Angeles Police Department regarding the private flight. She is also seeking information from DCFS about its investigation, drug and alcohol testing and a safety plan the agency purportedly required Pitt to undertake to address his conduct.
“While Pitt’s history of physical abuse of Jolie started well before the family’s September 2016 plane trip from France to Los Angeles, this flight marked the first time he turned his physical abuse on the children as well,” the new motion states.
According to an exhibit on a 2024 court declaration by Jolie attorney Murphy, an offer to turn over many of the communications requested by Jolie’s team was rejected last month by attorney Stella Chang, who told a Pitt attorney via email that his “proposal does not come anywhere close to providing the documents responsive to [the team’s requests], which Ms. Jolie needs to defend herself from Mr. Pitt’s frivolous allegations.”
Pitt was never charged in connection with the plane incident, either by the U.S. attorney’s office or the Department of Children and Family Services, which investigated the incident — and its allegation of child abuse — before the FBI got involved. The FBI decided in November 2016 to close its probe without filing any charges against the actor. People magazine reported that he was drunk during the incident, which “escalated more than it should have,” and asserted that “no one was physically harmed.”
Jolie never pressed charges, the filing said, “as she believed the best course was for Pitt to accept responsibility and help the family recover from the post-traumatic stress he caused.” It also alleged that Pitt refused to seek domestic violence counseling.
Pitt, in a 2017 GQ interview, admitted he had a drinking problem — saying, “I was boozing too much” — but said he was now sober. He said he was going to therapy after first going through two therapists who didn’t work out, and lamented his and Jolie’s marital woes being dragged out and misconstrued by the media with no “delicacy or insight.” Pitt has never argued that his behavior on the 2016 flight was acceptable.
His legal team said in a June 2023 court filing that while Jolie had backed out of the winery sale, purportedly over “restrictive language” requested in a mutual nondisclosure agreement, a year later she proposed an even broader NDA in their divorce case that would have required that “[o]ther than in court pleadings or testimony, neither party shall directly or through a party’s representatives make in a public forum any derogatory remark about the other party.”
The “Thelma & Louise” actor alleged in court documents that Jolie decided to sell her Miraval stake to the Stoli subsidiary after receiving an “adverse custody ruling” in their protracted divorce proceedings.
Pitt’s legal team last summer claimed that Jolie “vindictively” sold her stake in the winery behind his back and alleged that she “sought to inflict harm on Pitt,” subsequently revealing more details about the unraveling of the couple’s relationship. Jolie’s camp at the time insisted — and continues to do so in the new filing — that Pitt refused to complete a Miraval sale with Jolie “unless she agreed to being silenced” about his alleged abuse.
Now her team is claiming that Pitt attempted to cover up the alleged abuse by objecting to the children testifying on their custody preferences. The filing includes a May 2021 text message from Jolie to a friend (as an exhibit) relaying that she tried to sell the winery to Pitt per their agreement but that he was “really not being fair” and demanding “a lot of punishing restrictions.” The filing also outlined for the first time the language of the “more onerous NDA.”
Said restrictions, per the motion, were put forth in an “expansive” NDA that stated that the parties could not make any statements or take actions that would “disparage, defame, or compromise the goodwill, name, brand or reputation of Miraval Provence or any of its affiliated or direct and indirect shareholders,” including Jolie, Pitt, Pitt’s business partner and good friend Marc Perrin, and Familles Perrin SAS.
It also stated that the parties could not “commit any other action that could likely injure, hinder or interfere with the Business, business relationships or goodwill of Miraval Provence, its affiliates, or its direct and indirect shareholders.” Jolie refused to sign it, and “by June 3, 2022, the deal was dead,” the motion said.
Pitt’s NDA in the failed winery deal would have required, according to 2023 court documents filed by his legal team, that “[a]t no time for a legally binding period of four (4) years following the Closing Date, and, on a good faith basis, any period thereafter, shall the Parties (i) make any statements, or take any other actions whatsoever, to disparage, defame, or compromise the goodwill, name, brand or reputation of Miraval Provence or any of its affiliates or direct and indirect shareholders,” including Jolie, Perrin, Familles Perrin SAS and Pitt, who has been the celebrity face of the winery, so as not to hurt or hinder the business.
Jolie accused Pitt of gaslighting her and, according to the new documents, signed a power of attorney at that point authorizing her European lawyer, Laurent Schummer, to take over the sale process.
“Mr. Pitt refused to purchase Ms. Jolie’s interest when she would not be silenced by his NDA,” Jolie attorney Murphy, managing partner at the law firm Murphy Rosen LLP, said Thursday in a statement to The Times.
“By refusing to buy her interest but then suing her, Mr. Pitt put directly at issue why that NDA was so important to him and what he hoped it would bury: his abuse of Ms. Jolie and their family. After eight months of delays, this motion asks the Court to force Mr. Pitt to finally produce that evidence.”
A person close to Jolie who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case told The Times that Pitt “is drawing all this out of Angelina.”
“She does not want to be here, she does not want to be raising any of these facts, and she is doing it only because Pitt’s lawsuit against her is forcing her to defend herself. It’s incredibly sad and she just wishes he could move on and let her be,” the person said.
The person added that Jolie’s lawyers have emails, photos and testimony that was presented under seal in the custody case that would help her in this matter. However, the person said, if the case goes to trial, she “will be forced to use that evidence in the trial whether she wants to or not.”
Times assistant editor Christie D’Zurilla contributed to this report.
Disneyland Resort in Anaheim will offer $59 tickets for select evening admission to either theme park as part of a new promotion.
The one-day, one-park evening ticket offer will allow attendees to enter Disney California Adventure at 5 p.m. or Disneyland at 7 p.m. Park reservations are still required, as has been the case since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The offer only applies for admission from July 12 through Aug. 5 on Sundays to Wednesdays.
Disneyland Resort is commemorating its 70th anniversary through Aug. 9, and has introduced new shows and additions to rides as part of the occasion.
Walt Disney Co.’s theme parks and experiences business are a crucial boost to its finances, making up about 56% of the company’s operating income last fiscal year.
During the Burbank-based company’s most recent earnings call in May, Disney executives said attendance at its U.S.-based parks was down 1% compared with the prior year, a shift they attributed to “continued softness” in international visitations. However, the company said at the time that it was starting to move past those issues.
Disney’s experiences division reported $9.5 billion in revenue in that fiscal second quarter, up 7% compared with the same period a year ago, something executives said was due to higher guest spending domestically and more capacity on its cruise line.
An aging downtown office complex will be converted into apartments as part of an ambitious plan by local real estate companies to create 4,000 affordable housing units in Los Angeles.
The first project will be a $200-million makeover of the L.A. World Trade Center, a sprawling white elephant of an office complex on Figueroa Street built in the 1970s that will be turned into 512 apartments in one of the largest affordable housing conversions to date downtown.
Future projects being planned in the central city for delivery over the next five years will include other office-to-apartment conversions and new housing built from the ground up.
The 10-story World Trade Center, right, at Figueroa and Fourth streets in downtown Los Angeles, was built in the mid-1970s.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Behind the building campaign unveiled Monday are two of the region’s largest real estate companies, Jamison and Kennedy Wilson. Jamison is the city’s most prolific converter of offices to market-rate apartments and currently has a major makeover of a downtown office skyscraper underway for tenants who can pay top rents.
Kennedy Wilson, a real estate investment company based in Beverly Hills, owns Vintage Housing, which builds and operates affordable housing using tax credits and other state and federal financing to help fund it.
Vintage Housing and Jamison’s new affordable housing division, Arden Residential, will take on the campaign to build the housing where qualified tenants will pay rents below market rates.
Rents in the World Trade Center — which will be renamed Sky Castle when it opens in early 2028 — are expected to start at $937 for a one-bedroom unit. Some two- and three-bedroom units would rent for $1,100 and $1,300 per month, respectively, developers said.
Sky Castle will have shared amenities found in more expensive modern apartments, the developers said, such as a fitness center, resident lounge and co-working space. It already has six tennis courts on the roof, which may be converted to pickleball courts, Jamison Chief Executive Garrett Lee said.
The goal is to build higher quality affordable housing by using efficient construction methods Jamison has learned through building more than 8,000 market-rate apartments in the past, Lee said. The makeover of the World Trade Center will mark Jamison’s 15th conversion of an office building to housing.
The plan to redevelop the L.A. World Trade Center, bottom left, is one of the largest affordable housing conversions to date downtown.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The 10-story World Trade Center was built in the mid-1970s to fanfare saying it would be home to international companies. In 1976, The Times described the center as a place to prepare for an overseas trip where visitors could get passports and visas, as well as exchange dollars for francs, marks, rubles and other currency. There was a language school and branches of U.S., Swiss and Japanese banks.
By the mid-1980s, the 400,000-square-foot office complex covering a city block at Figueroa and Fourth streets had lost its international flavor and was falling out of favor with corporate tenants who were moving into glossy new skyscrapers on Bunker Hill and in other locations.
The building has been cleared of remaining office tenants to allow work to begin in August, Lee said.
Kennedy Wilson is a nationwide operator of market-rate apartments that has also moved into building affordable housing in the last decade, said Nicholas Bridges, global head of capital markets at the company.
Building affordable, workforce housing “in almost all cases requires public subsidies,” Bridges said, and Kennedy Wilson has developed expertise in assembling “a cocktail of public financing sources” that includes low-income housing tax credits and tax-exempt bonds.
In the past, many housing developers have shied away from building affordable housing because assembling the subsidies needed to make construction profitable is challenging.
An artist’s rendering shows what the L.A. World Trade Center could look like after being redeveloped into affordable housing. The new complex is to be called Sky Castle.
(Ian Camarillo)
“It’s complicated,” Bridges said, “and not for the faint of heart.”
Eligible tenants must earn between 30% and 80% of the median income in the area where the housing is built.
Jamison and Kennedy Wilson will develop about 15 affordable housing projects between downtown and the 405 Freeway, Bridges said, many of them in aging office buildings such as the World Trade Center that are already owned by Jamison and are close to public transit.
Substantial potential for affordable housing lies in L.A.’s underused office buildings, he said.
“In this post-COVID world, the way people are utilizing office buildings, particularly older office buildings, has just fundamentally changed,” he said.
It makes sense for developers of conventional multifamily housing to move to building affordable housing, Lee said, because the government supports it through subsidies, zoning reform and the fast-tracking of construction permits. The city of Los Angeles also recently streamlined its adaptive reuse rules to make it easier to convert office buildings to housing.
“There are a lot of incentives pushing us in this direction,” Lee said.
Comcast is spinning off its NBCUniversal entertainment and news media businesses into a separate publicly traded company, a move that would unwind an audacious play the cable giant made for the storied Hollywood assets 15 years ago.
The plan would put broadcast networks NBC and Telemundo, NBC News, cable network Bravo, streaming service Peacock, the Los Angeles-based Universal film and television studios, Universal theme parks and British TV service Sky in a new stand-alone company.
Philadelphia-based Comcast would remain in its core business of distributing pay-TV channels, broadband internet and wireless services.
The spinoff would be the second such move by Comcast in two years. Late last year, the Brian L. Roberts-controlled company cast off most of its cable portfolio, including CNBC, USA Network, MS NOW and Golf Channel to form a new entity called Versant.
But the maneuver failed to budge Comcast’s listless stock, which has languished for years as its primary business lost thousands of broadband customers.
Comcast executives needed to make a bolder move to mollify frustrated investors.
Comcast stock peaked at nearly $26 per share Monday before closing at $24.22, up roughly 4.5% from Friday. Still, the stock remains below its 52-week high of $34.34.
The plan announced Monday would unravel Comcast’s bold decision to acquire NBCUniversal from General Electric Co. in 2011. At the time, Comcast saw tremendous value in marrying NBC’s entertainment operations, including its then-lucrative cable channels, with its cable TV distribution service that Roberts’ late father, Ralph, launched in Tupelo, Miss., in 1963.
“They were two distinct businesses,” longtime cable analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a Monday note to investors. “Having them under the same roof didn’t make either better.”
Consumers shifted to streaming, and Comcast’s attempt to build a top-tier digital service, Peacock, has fallen well short of its goal. Peacock lags behind rivals despite billions of dollars in investment from Comcast.
The concept of unwinding its NBCUniversal operation began in earnest in the fall, when Comcast joined the bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery. Comcast executives knew they could ill afford to spend billions to buy a rival; Wall Street would have pummeled the company.
So Comcast offered to spin off NBCUniversal and pair it with Warner Bros., turning two original Hollywood studios into a new media colossus.
But 43-year-old billionaire David Ellison prevailed in the bidding, agreeing to pay $111 billion to capture Warner Bros. Discovery. Losing the auction forced Comcast to find a different path forward.
On a call with investors, Roberts said the separation would bolster the two firms as they navigate increasing competitive challenges while technology companies continue to transform entertainment.
“We asked ourselves three basic questions,” Roberts said. “One, can these businesses stand alone and have the heft to stand alone in separate companies? Two, do they have a clear, viable capital allocation path to invest? And three, is now the right time? And the answer we came back with was yes to all counts.”
A free-standing NBCUniversal, home of the “Minions” and “Jurassic Park” franchises, probably would be an acquisition target, as media companies have been consolidating in an effort to get more content and mass distribution for their streaming services. Ellison’s Paramount is on track to close its Warner Bros. purchase, which would combine such media assets as HBO Max, CBS, CNN, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. studios.
With its Sky business, NBCUniversal has a toehold in Britain and Europe at a time when Amazon and Netflix are flexing their global distribution muscles.
Comcast would be positioned to combine with another cable and internet provider, such as Connecticut-based Charter, which owns the Spectrum television service. Charter is in the process of buying the smaller Cox cable service, which also has operations in Southern California.
Comcast is expected to complete the spinoff next year and will retain an 19% stake in the new entity.
The timetable could put NBCUniversal up for grabs by 2028 — when the company is set to broadcast the Summer Olympics, which will be held in Los Angeles.
Comcast acquired NBCUniversal in 2011. The industry-reshaping deal combined the largest distributor of TV channels with a provider of top-rated TV channels and a movie studio. But the streaming revolution has decimated the cable television business. Traditional TV viewing has been in a steady decline over the last decade. NBC has relied heavily on NFL broadcasts, and more recently, NBA and Major League Baseball games to remain relevant.
NBCUniversal has invested heavily in its streaming service, Peacock, but has been unable to reach the scale necessary for profitability. Comcast‘s stock price has struggled as a result.
Roberts, chairman and chief executive of Comcast, will continue to be involved in the leadership of Comcast and NBCUniversal, working in partnership with the CEOs of both companies.
Mike Cavanagh will remain as CEO of NBCUniversal, and Comcast’s former chief financial officer, Michael Angelakis, will return to run Comcast after the spinoff.
“Perhaps the best part of today’s welcome announcement … is that Mike Angelakis is coming back,” Moffett, the analyst, wrote. “He will now helm the cable business, [which] is unequivocally good news. With Mike Angelakis’s return, Comcast has come full circle.”
Moffett added that, despite Monday’s announcement, the 2011 combination was not a complete bust.
“The deal to acquire NBCU from GE was financially brilliant,” he said. “It was structured so that Comcast paid for just half of the acquisition and then let NBCU’s own cash flow pay for the rest.”
Over the years, Comcast has raked in billions in profit from its media holdings.
Comcast executives on the analyst call played down the notion that the two companies were being positioned for another deal.
“Absolutely not,” Roberts said. “This is the right move to put each company in the strongest position to create value, fully monetize its assets and aggressively pursue its own organic growth strategies.”
Cavanaugh, who has been running the combined company for three years, sounded more like a buyer than a seller.
“Our plan for NBCUniversal and Sky is to build and invest for growth,” he said. “We have the freedom now to explore adjacent businesses where we have the right to play, and that’s thanks to the stability of our company and management team.”
The spinoff announcement comes a week after Fox Corp. announced its deal to purchase the streaming platform Roku for $22 billion. The deal is aimed at ensuring that Fox has a means to get its portfolio of sports, news and entertainment channels into viewers’ homes as the traditional pay-TV business continues to erode.
-
Maryland5 minutes agoWes Moore’s military record: what’s known, what isn’t
-
Michigan12 minutes agoWhitmer says she will pull Michigan National Guard from D.C. if troops used in Trump’s Safe and Beautiful Mission
-
Massachusetts15 minutes agoMassachusetts dad on ‘adventure of a lifetime’ left fighting for his life in Fiji after noticing bug bite
-
Minnesota20 minutes agoInvasive ‘bloody red shrimp’ reach Lake Superior
-
Mississippi27 minutes agoMississippi Lottery Mississippi Match 5, Cash 3 results for June 30, 2026
-
Missouri30 minutes agoMissouri Sports Betting May 2026: $256.4M Handle, Record $21.3M Revenue
-
Montana35 minutes ago
Montana Lottery Mega Millions, Big Sky Bonus results for June 30, 2026
-
Nebraska42 minutes agoErstad joins Nebraska golf program
