Brad, Angelina and the Hollywood divorce dramas
Brad and Angelina’s divorce and its aftermath have lasted four times longer than their two-year marriage. Could it be the longest running split in Hollywood history?
Of the many things that bother me about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s marriage and protracted divorce, what bothers me most is this: how can they possibly still be arguing? This week there are yet more court filings, highlighting yet more things about which they vehemently disagree. But this has been going on since Jolie called in the lawyers in 2016. Their divorce and its aftermath have lasted four times longer than their marriage. Could it be the longest running split in Hollywood history?
The latest court papers are about Chateau Miraval, their home and vineyard in Provence. Jolie’s lawyers claim that she has evidence of Pitt’s “history” of controlling and physical abuse, which Pitt has always denied, and that their children continue to experience “significant and ongoing post-traumatic stress”.
Her lawyers accuse Pitt of offering to buy her half of the chateau on condition that she sign an NDA. His aim, they allege, was to “hide his history of abuse, control and cover-up”, which Jolie claims began long before the incident on the private jet in which he was alleged to have been physically abusive to one of their children that prompted her to file for divorce. Jolie refused to sign the NDA and sold her stake to a Russian billionaire instead. Their lawyers have been coining it in since.
“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,” Jolie’s lawyer told the LA Times this week.
The couple were married for two years. The aftermath is in its eighth year, throwing into sharp relief how quick and apparently amicable was the divorce of Isla Fisher and Sacha Baron Cohen. The split was announced last week, by which point it had long since been finalised. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s first divorce, in 1974, was so quick that they were able to remarry a year later. Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow’s conscious uncoupling took little more than a year. Kim Kardashian’s first marriage lasted 72 days and the divorce was wrapped up in less than two years. Only Arnold Schwarzenegger outlasts Jolie and Pitt, his divorce from Maria Shriver taking a decade.
“Pitt’s history of physical abuse of Jolie started well before the family’s September 2016 plane trip,” the new legal papers say, adding that “this flight marked the first time he turned his physical abuse on the children as well.” Jolie filed for divorce three days later, and, while it was granted in 2019, the arguments carried on. First over custody of the children, which Jolie had in full until three years ago, when Pitt won the right to have them half of the time. And now, still, over Miraval, where they enjoyed their last holiday as a family and from where they were returning to California on that fateful flight in September 2016.
Since then Pitt is said to have given up drinking, and in 2022 he started dating the jewellery executive Ines de Ramon, 34. She has moved in with him, and his career has gone from strength to strength. He has been famous since he was 26 and is now 60, and while Johnny Depp’s reputation took a dive after his toxic divorce from Amber Heard, Pitt’s reputation – not to mention his status as a heart-throb – now arguably eclipses that of his long-time friend and co-star George Clooney. In 2020 he swept the board at awards ceremonies, winning an Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for his role in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Last year he was more photographed than the players when he turned up at the men’s final at Wimbledon wearing aviator shades and a washed-out polo shirt.
Jolie, meanwhile, has stayed largely out of the limelight. She has just finished her sixth film as a director, and is starring in another film, as Maria Callas. She last walked the red carpet in 2021, and has appeared in only five films since the split. She recently founded Atelier Jolie, a sustainable fashion company in New York where she hopes that people will collaborate with tailors, pattern-makers and artisans to up cycle old clothes and create new ones.
Her last big-screen hit was Maleficent, in 2019, and while she has more than 15 million followers on Instagram, they are updated mainly on humanitarian issues. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ magazine in December she said that she had spent the years since her divorce mostly at home, thinking, and avoiding work that took her away from her family. “We had to heal,” she said. “There are things we needed to heal from.” She wouldn’t become an actor today, she said, at least not in Hollywood, and she doesn’t really have a social life, or go on dates. Her divorce, she said, deprived her of the ability to travel as widely as she would have liked to, or to live abroad, or at her home in Cambodia. “I will move when I can,” she said, adding that her closest friends are refugees. “Maybe four out of six of the women that I’m close to are from war and conflict,” she says. Her children are “the closest people to me and my life, and they’re my close friends. We’re seven very different people, which is our strength.”
She and Pitt bought Miraval in 2008, four years after they met on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith, and got married there in 2014. According to Vanity Fair, Pitt spent months building a petting zoo at the estate for their young children, filling it with rabbits, goats and peacocks. He handmade bunk beds for their six children, who had urged them to get married and whose doodles were embroidered by Atelier Versace on Jolie’s wedding dress. We didn’t realise, Pitt said at the time, how much it meant to them for their parents to be married. When the couple sold photographs of the wedding it raised 5 million dollars for charity. They spent their honeymoon making a film about a couple whose marriage is falling apart, and two months later they were photographed having a furious argument on a balcony in Sydney.
In an email Jolie sent to Pitt in 2021 Jolie wrote of Miraval: “Even now impossible to write this without crying. Above all, it is the place we brought the twins home to, and where we were married over a plaque in my mother’s memory. A place where I thought I would grow old. But it is also the place that marks the beginning of the end of our family.” Jolie’s hopes of growing old there were dashed, but she may yet grow old arguing about the place.
Buying Miraval cost them about euros 25 million. Fighting over it is costing many millions more. Did Pitt “loot” the winery and spend millions on “vanity projects”, as the court filing states? Was Jolie’s sale of her stake lawful, as she claims, or not, as he does? Did the couple agree not to sell their respective interests in the estate without the other’s consent, as Pitt alleges, or did they not, as Jolie claims? Pitt’s lawyers say that Jolie’s sale of her stake to a subsidiary of the Stoli Group was done “vindictively” and without his consent, to “recover unearned windfall profits for herself”.
“Miraval was a love letter to his wife and children, providing a beautiful life for Angelina and the kids and shielding them from the intense pressures of celebrity,” said Frank Pollaro, a bespoke furniture designer and wine enthusiast. Pitt first commissioned Pollaro to build a desk for Jolie to use at Miraval, and later turned to him for help assembling a cellar of hundreds of bottles of French wine. Pitt embraced his life at Miraval, telling a wine magazine that he had become a farmer and was putting in 12-hour days with the team of architects, stone workers, plumbers and electricians who were renovating the chateau to his exact specifications (more California than Provence, one local sniffed). He asked Pollaro for help to improve Miraval’s winemaking business and for a list of French winemakers who could be recruited as consultants.
Thanks in no small part to Pitt and Jolie’s star power, Miraval has become one of the most famous wines in the world. Whether they can stop arguing and enjoy its success is another matter.
The Times
