Angelina Jolie’s lawyer claps back at Brad Pitt over the NDA & abuse issues

In recent years, Angelina Jolie has been working with lawyers who understand that they can’t allow Brad Pitt’s “crisis management” and public bullying sit out there, unaddressed. In the past year alone, Jolie’s legal team has been much more active about publicly pushing back on Pitt’s lies and bullsh-t and calling it out for what it is. It’s been nice to see Jolie and her people be more proactive, because it wasn’t always this way. It feels like the shift in strategy came after Pitt sued Jolie over her sale of her stake in Chateau Miraval. Angelina stopped playing nice – she’s so clearly outraged that Brad is still trying to control her and abuse her, so she’s laying all of this at his door. None of this would have come out if Pitt wasn’t so hellbent on punishing her for leaving him. But now the floodgates are open, and so here we go.

Last week, as part of the back-and-forth lawsuits over Miraval, Angelina once again pointed to the non-disclosure agreement Pitt wanted her to sign as part of her attempt to sell Nouvel to him. Jolie says, in new filings, that the NDA was specifically about Pitt trying to silence her about how he was physically and emotionally abusing her before the 2016 plane terror. Those of us who have been following this years-long situation were not surprised by this information. But now People Magazine platformed Pitt’s lawyers and their reaction to Jolie’s new filing:

A Brad Pitt source calls Angelina Jolie’s new claims of past abuse a “misdirection and distraction” as the exes continue their battle over their French winery Château Miraval. Lawyers for Pitt, 60, filed a motion in court April 5 demanding that Jolie, 48, produce nondisclosure agreements she has made others sign. The motion is in response to Jolie’s own filing from a day prior. Jolie’s legal team filed a motion seeking to release communications they say would prove Pitt would not let Jolie sell her share of the winery to him unless she agreed to a “more onerous” and “expansive” NDA.

Lawyers for Pitt seek to prove that the NDA Pitt asked her to sign was no more restrictive than ones she asks others to sign on a regular basis and allege that less than six months after Jolie sold her shares of Miraval, her lawyer proposed an even broader, mutual non-disparagement clause to Pitt in connection to their divorce proceedings.

“For example, if Jolie conditioned her continued employment of an individual on that individual’s agreement to an NDA covering what they witnessed in her home — including her treatment of her children and Pitt — that would be highly probative of whether she truly believed the provision requested by Pitt was an ‘unconscionable gag order,’ ” Pitt’s lawyers wrote in court documents obtained by PEOPLE.

In their April 4 motion, Jolie’s lawyers suggested the actor feared that sealed documents included in their separate, years-long custody battle could be made public without the NDA. As part of that filing, her lawyers referenced the incident that occurred the day before Jolie filed for divorce in 2016, stating, “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.”

But the Pitt source says, “This case isn’t about what took place on a plane in 2016. It’s about whether they had an agreement not to sell their interests in the winery and family home without the other’s consent. That’s what Brad and his team are focused on.”

“They keep using the same tired playbook year after year,” adds a friend of Pitt.

Paul Murphy, an attorney for Jolie claimed in a statement obtained by PEOPLE that the NDAs are indeed different. “For Pitt to equate common NDAs covering confidential information employees learn at work, with him attempting to cover up his history of abuse is, frankly, shameful. All she wanted was separation and health. She deserves peace after all these years,” he said.

[From People]

Yeah, it is shameful to compare a standard-issue employment NDA to trying to get your ex-wife to shut up about your years of physical, emotional and financial abuse. This is what I mean about Jolie’s new legal strategy too – I love that Paul Murphy chimed in immediately and called out this latest Pitt mess.

While I understand that the fight over the NDA is important – because it gives Jolie space to speak about why Pitt was trying to silence her and what lengths he’ll go through to silence her – I’d just like to point out that the NDA discussion actually proves that Pitt was lying about everything else. He claimed that he was absolutely shocked and appalled to learn that Jolie sold Nouvel to a Stoli subsidiary, and that she never told him anything about it. What the NDA argument shows us is that there’s a lengthy paperwork trail of Angelina trying to sell Nouvel to Pitt, Pitt throwing a tantrum and demanding Jolie’s silence, Jolie refusing and Pitt then pulling out of the purchase… after which Jolie informed Pitt that she was looking to sell to someone else. Like, the whole crux of Pitt’s dumbf–k lawsuit is that he was blindsided by all of this, when he was fully informed of everything and actively tanking Jolie’s attempt to sell Nouvel to him.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.