Angelina Jolie has accused Brad Pitt of being physically abusive towards her and two of their children in a new court filing.
The documents were filed as part of a legal battle over a winery the prominent Hollywood actors once owned together.
In the new court documents filed, Jolie accuses Pitt of having ‘choked’ one of their six children during a violent dispute on a private jet, hitting another in the face, and slamming her against a wall while grabbing her hair.
The incident is alleged to have happened in 2016 on a flight from France to California and is said to be one of the factors that led to the dissolution of their marriage.
According to Jolie, the incident left the children crying and traumatized, and left her with injuries to her back and elbow.
Federal authorities, who have jurisdiction over flights, investigated the incident but declined to bring criminal charges.
Five days after the flight she filed for divorce, and in September 2021 she sold her stake in the French winery she co-owned with Pitt. He sued her over the sale, and on Tuesday she counter-sued, blaming him for sparking the highly-public mud slinging.
Lawyers for Jolie stated that negotiations to sell her share of the business to Pitt had broken down over his demand that she sign “a nondisclosure agreement that would have contractually prohibited her from speaking outside of court about Pitt’s physical and emotional abuse of her and their children.”
“She has gone to great lengths to try to shield their children from reliving the pain Pitt inflicted on the family that day,” her lawyers wrote.
“But when Pitt filed this lawsuit seeking to reassert control over Jolie’s financial life and compel her to rejoin her ex-husband as a frozen-out business partner, Pitt forced Jolie to publicly defend herself on these issues for the first time.”
