Angelina Jolie Says Brad Pitt Physically Abused Her Before That 2016 Incident

For over a year now, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have been embroiled in a legal war over Jolie’s decision to sell her shares of their once-shared winery to a Russian oligarch instead of Pitt at the end of 2021, prompting Pitt to sue her in February 2022. In response, Jolie’s lawyers have previously alleged that she only sold her shares of Château Miraval to the Russian Stoli Group after Pitt “made an eleventh-hour demand for onerous and irrelevant conditions,” including “a provision designed to prohibit Jolie from publicly speaking about the events that led to the breakdown of their marriage.” This seemed to reference allegations that Pitt attacked Jolie and their kids on a private plane in 2016, which are detailed at length in an FBI report that was made public in 2022.

In a new court filing on Thursday, Jolie’s attorneys allege that Pitt was physically abusive toward Jolie prior to the 2016 plane ride. “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. Jolie then immediately left him,” the filing states.

The court filing comes as Jolie’s team argues that the ensuing legal conflict between Pitt and Jolie could have been avoided altogether were it not for an NDA that Pitt tried to make Jolie sign at the last minute, as a condition of him buying her shares of Miraval. Her lawyers claim that Pitt sought the NDA after Jolie made a sealed filing in their custody suit which “included emails, summaries of the family’s expected testimony, and other evidence” pertaining to Pitt’s alleged abuse, and “caused Pitt to fear that the information could eventually become public.” According to her attorneys, Pitt determined he couldn’t rely on Jolie to voluntarily keep his alleged abuse private, and demanded that Jolie “contractually bind herself to that silence” about his alleged “personal misconduct, whether related to Miraval or not.”

“Mr. Pitt refused to purchase Ms. Jolie’s interest when she would not be silenced by his NDA,” Jolie attorney Paul Murphy said plainly in a Thursday statement to the Los Angeles Times.

In the same filing, Jolie’s attorney accuses Pitt of  “unrelenting efforts to control and financially drain” Jolie and “attempting to hide his history of abuse, control, and coverup.” The filing also claims that despite Pitt’s history of abuse toward Jolie and the incident on the plane in which he physically attacked their children, Jolie did not press charges because “she believed the best course was for Pitt to accept responsibility and help the family recover from the post-traumatic stress he caused.” But still, according to the filing, Pitt refused domestic violence counseling.

Pitt has not commented on this latest court filing, but one of Pitt’s friends accused Jolie of deceit in a statement to People on Thursday. The source claimed Jolie’s lawyers “consistently choose to introduce misleading, inaccurate and/or irrelevant information as a distraction.” Meanwhile, a different source told People that Jolie “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.”

In March, a court dismissed five out of seven of Pitt’s claims against Jolie in the winery lawsuit. Those claims include tort claims that would have made Jolie liable to pay Pitt for damages and would have granted Pitt her former shares of the winery. In response, Murphy said in a statement to ET at the time that he hopes Pitt will drop his lawsuit altogether, and wrote off the entire suit 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,” he said. “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.”