Random Fuzzy
VF billed the article as an "Exclusive" "In a special investigation for VF,
@MarkPSeal
gets the inside story about the fight for Miraval." But in fact, the "investigation" simply rehashed public filings that have already been widely reported, and then proceeded to quote from past tabloid reports. The length of the section -- Part 2: The War -- did not obscure the fact that it had nothing new and nothing that could qualify as an investigation.
What was truly an exclusive that VF could have touted more is the
highly unusual access Brad granted the writer to speak with Gary Bradbury and Frank Pollaro. Bradbury and Pollaro did not talk about any fight, they used
every opportunity to talk about his love for Angelina and the kids.
The article starts with "Part 1: The Miracle. " While the word "miraval" can mean miracle, as Miraval Studios wrote, Miraval means looking at the valley.
It would be a straightforward matter for Brad to instruct Gary Bradbury, the head of security at Miraval, to talk to the writer while giving him a tour of Chateau Miraval. But he had to ask Frank Pollaro to do this as a favor. Together with the real estate agent Jonathan Gray and the former owner of Miraval Tom Bove they all spoke on the record about how Brad and Angelina scouted for property in Provence, how they started the JV with the Perrins, and about their love.
With the possible exception of Bove, the other three were not obvious sources for this article. They were likely suggested or volunteered by Brad. Marc Perrin
is an obvious source and his photo with Brad accompanies the article, but he is totally absent. The only quote from him is lifted from Wine Spectator:
Arriving at Miraval, Perrin had the same sensation as everyone else. It was, he says, “heaven.” Awestruck by Miraval’s majestic setting in its own valley, he told Wine Spectator, “A winemaker could never own this unless it was in the family for something like twenty generations.”
"War of the Rosé" without the person who not only produces the rosé but is also a cross-defendant in the war. That already tells you the true purpose of the article is not what it is billed to be. It is not about any war, it is Brad starting to give his story.
Everyone who spoke on the record only discussed the period before September 14, 2016.
Sprinkled in the long section where the writer rehashed the cases in the wake of Sept. 14, 2016 were a few quotes from "a source close to Pitt", "a source familiar with the matter", "one person who knew the family" and "someone in the château / estate."
"Someone on the estate" is probably Bradbury. "One person who knew the family" could be Pollaro. The "source close to Pitt" sounds like it could be Laura Brill and Lance Spiegel or Anne Kiley. But some of the quotes seem familiar and the writer may have just lifted them from filings or from previous news reports. The one below is new.
According to a source close to Pitt, “Brad was drinking, and the confrontation got out of hand. He was absolutely wrong in how he behaved but immediately apologized and acknowledged that he had crossed a line, which he will always regret, and right away took steps to address this and try to make amends.”
The "source familiar with the matter" who seems to be speaking up for Angelina could be Paul Murphy and possibly Samantha Bley Dejean. The quotes below are also new.
According to Pitt’s lawsuit, Ouderkirk also issued a detailed report finding Jolie “not credible,” though a source familiar with the matter says he never used those words.
In the years since the plane incident, Jolie has shifted her focus, according to a source familiar with the matter: “In addition to continuing her global humanitarian work, she began advocating for survivors of domestic violence. She spoke before members of the Senate and House and campaigned on behalf of the Violence Against Women Act; the Justice for All Act, which protects the rights of crime victims; and Kayden’s Law, also known as Keep Your Children Safe From Family Violence. She also partnered with Amnesty International to write a book for young people called Know Your Rights and Claim Them.”
“This case has been covered as a celebrity divorce; it is really a story about abuse,” says a source familiar with the matter.
Quotes not for attribution obviously don't carry as much as weight as those on the record. The author's paraphrases don't carry as much as weight as a quote.
They did not want any source on or off the record to be specifically identified with Angelina -- but they were there. They wanted the focus to be on Brad.
The recurring theme in what Pollaro, Bradbury and even Bove said is
love: love between them and Brad's love for Angelina and the kids. Her approval meant a lot to him. He wanted the children to enjoy their time in Miraval and he wanted the family to be happy:
Bove says Pitt then added, “This is the first place we visited where Angie is smiling.”
After Pitt toured the shop, Pollaro retrieved a bottle from his cellar. “This is the finest wine that can be made in the region where you are living,” Pollaro told Pitt, handing him the bottle. “It’s Château de Beaucastel, Chateauneuf-du-Pape 1990, a wine of legend.”
A week or so later, Pollaro received an email from Pitt. “He wrote, ‘That wine sure was terrific, and Angie loved it, too.’
"She let him talk,” says Bove. “From my side she was very gentle. You read all this stuff now, but they were a very nice couple, very sweet and obviously in love with each other.”
a wildly expensive lacquered desk inspired by a 1920s French design, ordered long-distance by Pitt as a birthday present for Jolie. Inside one of its drawers was a special inscription by Pitt and a constellation in inlaid mother-of-pearl honoring Jolie’s Gemini birth sign.
Jolie was delighted by the desk, the latest exhibition of affection from Pitt. It went into her office, which Pitt had painstakingly redesigned. “He wanted it exactly right for her,” says Gary Bradbury, a Miraval director and head of security. “He thought the world of that woman.”
“Miraval was a love letter to his wife and his children, providing a beautiful life for Angelina and the kids and shielding them from the intense pressures of celebrity,” says Pollaro.
On a wall outside the master bedroom, Pitt installed 30 small screens that flashed with images and videos of the children in various stages of development. He built a petting zoo and filled it with rabbits, goats, chickens, and peacocks. “He was just completely committed to making Miraval as great as it could be,” says Pollaro.
“At one o’clock, he’d tell me to give him a knock so he could get the quads ready for the children to ride on the estate. Or he would take the kids fishing on the lake. He made sure he was available for his children at all times.” Often Pitt and Bradbury would put in long days of manual labor. “Angie would come out and bring lunch and we’d all sit there and have a picnic. It was very lovey-dovey, quite romantic. I used to take my sandwich and walk away. It was their time.”
signs of the happy life they lived here remain in an all-white bedroom with furniture designed by Pitt.
“This is for the kids. Everything was for the kids and the family,” says someone in the château, leading the way into the magical bedroom, located inside a building where the children were privately schooled by teachers who traveled with them from the US. Three of the children are now over 18, but the rest live with their mother, and Pitt shares custody and visits them. But their memory remains in this room, with its circle of white bunk beds adorned with teddy bears and other reminders of another time.
While the writer apparently visited Chateau Miraval, he was not allowed to take and post photos. Other than the photo of Brad "with Marc Perrin walking in Miraval's vineyards. Courtesy of Miraval", all the others are
old agency stock photos of the estate from before renovations started in 2012.
The article seemed to downplay the fact that the writer was in Miraval. Only the line "leading the way into the magical bedroom" revealed that he had been shown around. That all-white bedroom in the building where the children were tutored --
not their bedrooms in the main house -- was the only room he reported on. The other descriptions of what was in the Chateau including the "30 small screens" and the petting zoo appear to have been from Pollaro.
Outside of references to what he put in for Angelina and the children,
Brad did not want Chateau Miraval to be the focus of the article
There was no mention of Miraval Provence. A glaring omission for an article purportedly investigating the "fight for Miraval." The article instead dwelled on the period before Miraval Provence was formed and Pollaro's role in getting Perrin, a close friend, involved.
I think at that moment, Brad wasn’t really interested in making wine,” Bove says. “He liked the idea that he’d have a vineyard, but he really left the wine thing to me.
“What wines did Brad like at that point?” I ask.
“I think he liked Heineken.”
“I thought Miraval was special and Brad had enough money, and he should maintain the quality of the wine we were producing,” Bove says today. “When he bought Miraval, we were doing 150,000 bottles of high-quality wine sold in very high-quality restaurants. Brad and Marc Perrin take that 150,000 bottles and run it up to 10 million.”
He sighs. “Anyway, vineyards are like your babies and you always think your babies should go in a certain direction. Looking at the success that Miraval has had, commercially speaking, it was a brilliant idea to combine Brad and Angelina’s star power and the distribution skills of Perrin. It just wouldn’t have been my choice.”
Under Pollaro’s guidance, Pitt assembled a wine cellar of around 300 bottles from French vineyards. Soon, he confided in Pollaro about the state of Miraval’s winemaking operations. “We’re losing close to a half million euros a year,” Pollaro says Pitt told him. (Tom Bove insists that the wine operation was profitable when Pitt and Jolie bought it.)
Even more surprising to Pollaro was what Pitt said next: He wanted Pollaro to help find a solution. Pollaro assembled a list of prominent French winemakers who might serve as consultants. “I told Brad, ‘I’m going to call these people, but they’re not going to come to Provence to see Frank Pollaro, the cabinet maker. I need you to be there in person.’ And he said, ‘No problem. I want to make a world-class wine.’ ”
“Let’s approach it like a film, and let’s make something we can be proud of,” Pitt said after he and Jolie had tasted a variety of French rosés with Perrin to determine the flavor profile they wanted for Miraval.
and a hint of an intended shift
He had a vision of turning Miraval into something beyond wine: an artist’s colony centered around Miraval Studios.
Despite acknowledging that the cases had already been covered by "a wave of headlines" and "went viral", the author proceeded to regurgitate those same public filings.
This article would not exist without Brad's cooperation and support. They've been burned before so @MarkPSeal would have been very carefully chosen. Brad knew the article had to mention the cases.
Brad did not want any source to discuss the wrangling. To fill the void, the author turned to tabloid reports. (That does not amount to much of an investigation.)
The article omits to mention that Bradbury is a cross-defendant in the cross-complaint filed by Nouvel.
Some of the most significant statements come at the end of the article:
“This case has been covered as a celebrity divorce; it is really a story about abuse,” says a source familiar with the matter.
That is their story.
Divorce is not an accurate characterization of the proceedings that took place.
That was the only mention of divorce by any source.
Brad is taking the first steps towards emerging from under the false narrative of the past seven years.
Tensions between Pitt and Jolie had been boiling for about a year. They tried to keep their arguments between themselves and had made a point to never argue in front of the children. Until the plane.
(This lines up with what he told GQ in 2017: "I mean I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family. But even this last year, you know—things I wasn't dealing with. I was boozing too much. It's just become a problem." And with what Angelina told VF in 2017 "By the time First They Killed My Father was in postproduction, in the summer of 2016, “things got bad,” says Jolie. “I didn’t want to use that word. . . . Things became ‘difficult.’ ” )
Even though associates say they’ve never seen Pitt intoxicated—“and I’ve been there for 15 years,” says Bradbury—on the plane he was drinking quite a bit.
After takeoff, Pitt allegedly “accused [Jolie] of being too deferential to the children.” A source close to Pitt says he felt Jolie “was trying to drive a wedge between him and his kids.”
According to a source close to Pitt, “Brad was drinking, and the confrontation got out of hand. He was absolutely wrong in how he behaved but immediately apologized and acknowledged that he had crossed a line, which he will always regret, and right away took steps to address this and try to make amends.”
“I hope you’ll give some grace to somebody who had a breakdown,” says one person who knew the family. “Everybody was shocked by the eruption on the plane, because Brad is not an abusive person. But even more devastating was what came afterwards: Brad being alienated from those he loves most—his children
Pollaro and Bradbury spoke at length about his great love for Angelina and were so determined to get that message of love across that it was sometimes oddly inserted: "It was very lovey-dovey, quite romantic." Brad and Angelina were never estranged The alienation and estrangement in the wake of Brad's eruption was
only between him and the kids. It was the family reunification, reconciliation and healing Angelina worked on.
"Everybody was shocked" includes Angelina. Brad had apparently become irascible and paranoid in the year that he had developed an alcohol addiction. But there was never anything like his breakdown before which was why Angelina told the FBI it "didn't feel real." Unlike her guarded responses in interviews since, the FBI already knew what transpired so she was open and forthcoming.
The author wrote
Jolie’s attorney telling CNN that Pitt “has never publicly denied” the accusations of assault on the plane. (“Brad has owned everything he’s responsible for from day one, but he’s not going to own anything he didn’t do,” says Pitt’s attorney Anne Kiley.)
right before the quote acknowledging his "breakdown" for the first time. Elsewhere, the author had already presented it as fact:
Pitt knew he had fucked up.
Alone in Los Angeles, Pitt vowed to stop drinking.
His playground had become a battleground, and his passion for wine had become his poison.
He slept on a friend’s floor. He looked in the mirror and didn’t like what he saw.
It exposed Kiley's attempts at deflection and the lies that went with it. You are given leave to dismiss anything Kiley and the other lawyers ever said in or out of court on this matter.
This line
Three of the children are now over 18, but the rest live with their mother, and Pitt shares custody and visits them.
even if it doesn't give the full story, already concedes that they spend time together, debunking much of the wrangling and the supposed fight. It would also be the explanation for why Brad is going in and out of the De Mille.
Other than the line from the FOIA judge's decision denying Jane Doe's request to seal the case, there is no mention of trauma and the therapeutic process.
The family has been healed for some time. This hints at what they are waiting for
In the years since the plane incident, Jolie has shifted her focus, according to a source familiar with the matter: “In addition to continuing her global humanitarian work, she began advocating for survivors of domestic violence. She spoke before members of the Senate and House and campaigned on behalf of the Violence Against Women Act; the Justice for All Act, which protects the rights of crime victims; and Kayden’s Law, also known as Keep Your Children Safe From Family Violence. She also partnered with Amnesty International to write a book for young people called Know Your Rights and Claim Them.”
Paul Murphy said she is "advocating to fix the very broken domestic violence
response system in America" which is why the policies and procedure of the FBI are important to her.
Only direct quotes from them really matter. For now,
Pollaro and Bradbury serve as proxies for Brad. Both made a point to highlight their long, close connection to Brad that establishes their standing and authority to speak of and for him. There is little doubt that Brad prepped them on what he wanted them to say. Their emphasis
on his love for Angelina and the kids while ignoring the divorce and the wrangling says it all.
This was part of the first Mon Guerlain campaign that included a video co-directed by Terrence Malick shot in Miraval. This looks like it could be her office but it may not be her birthday desk.
HOUSE: AP PHOTO/LIONEL CIRRONNEAU. MIRAVAL CHAPEL: BACKGRID.
The "moat" in the photo that accompanied the article above, has since become a pool. The shutters are now brown. Photo below, current from Google maps.
While the vineyard has been greatly expanded since they purchased it, so has the area devoted to olives and lavender.
(An interesting stat:
Miraval Studios has 36.5K followers on Instagram,
Miraval which has been around since 2016 has 112K,
Le Domaine has 10.7K.
Atelier Jolie with just 6 posts has 188K or more than all three combined. Also interesting but not surprising, while Miraval Studios continues to post photos from inside the Studios and around the estate, there have been no further photos taken in Miraval in Le Domaine's account.)
In a video
posted on Google maps from March, 2019, a fence can be seen around the grounds fronting the main house and the sign "Prive" hangs on the barrier blocking access to the road leading to it. Even before opening the estate to the public with the launch of Miraval Studios, they were already very careful about security and access around the main house
In case there was any doubt that Pollaro was speaking at Brad's behest, he just posted ostensibly about Le Mans but with the hashtag "miraval".
Pitt with Marc Perrin walking in Miraval’s vineyards. COURTESY MIRAVAL.
Part 1: The Miracle
The call came in to the concierge at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the fabled luxury hotel on the French Riviera. It was spring 2007, and an assistant to Angelina Jolie said that Jolie and her fiancé, Brad Pitt, were seeking a sizable property in the South of France to rent.
So began a glorious holiday, away from the spotlight, for Jolie, Pitt, and their four children in a sprawling château with a staff of 12 in the leafy glades of southwestern France. It was so idyllic that they decided to find an even bigger and more secluded property, not to rent but to buy.
Now, in June 2007, Brad Pitt sat in a twin-engine helicopter, his blue eyes scanning the verdant Provençal landscape. He and Jolie were “helicopter-hopping” with Jonathan Gray, the real estate broker recommended by the hotel. “There were six of us: two pilots, Brad and Angelina, their daughter Shiloh—who was one at the time—their American Realtor, and myself,” says Gray, who had arranged a top secret three-day tour of the region. They spent their days flying from one address to the next, searching for what Pitt would later describe as “a European base for our family…where our kids could run free and not be subjected to the celebrity of Hollywood.”
They touched down at more than a dozen properties, from cozy châteaux to vast estates, from the Riviera to Provence. Finally, on the morning of the third day, they flew over a magnificent 1,000-acre château and vineyard nestled in its own valley. Its name reflected its grandeur: Miraval, French for “miracle.”
They were 50 miles east of Aix-en-Provence and just outside of the tiny town of Correns, population 830. “Brad and Angelina took one look and immediately said, ‘Yeah, let’s go see it!’ ” says Gray.
Wine has been made at Miraval for centuries. The privileged domain of an Italian noble family for five generations, it was sold in 1972 to the French jazz musician Jacques Loussier. He produced red, white, and rosé wine on the estate and converted an ancient water tower into a recording studio, which attracted the likes of Sting, Sade, and Pink Floyd, who recorded their 1979 hit album The Wall there.
In 1992, Miraval was purchased by a US Naval Academy engineering graduate named Tom Bove and his family for approximately $5 million. Bove had made a fortune in water treatment before catching what he calls “the wine bug.” He ramped up the estate’s winemaking operation, turning out a small selection of vintages, including Pink Floyd rosé, which he launched in 2006.
Now Miraval was on the market. Bove, whose wife had died, was ready to move on. Suddenly, a helicopter descended and out stepped two of the world’s biggest superstars.
Pitt extended his hand for a shake. Jolie had Shiloh in her arms and “asked for a place to change the baby,” says Bove. Then Jolie, Pitt, and their brokers scouted the vast estate, a wonderland of olive and oak trees, lavender fields, a lake, vineyards on stone terraces, and ancient stone buildings, including a 35-room manor house.
Bove sensed that Jolie was allowing her husband to take the lead. “
She let him talk,” says Bove. “
From my side she was very gentle. You read all this stuff now, but they were a very nice couple, very sweet and obviously in love with each other.”
And obviously in love with Miraval. So much so that, as the morning stretched into afternoon, Bove invited everyone to stay for a meal. “Brad and I moved the tables around in the garden, and we had lunch,” says Bove. “Drank the wines of Miraval, which were very good. And then we toured the rest of the property.”
Before the party climbed back on board the helicopter, Pitt told Bove, “We’ll be back.” Bove didn’t doubt it. “It seemed like they wanted to buy it right then.”
Bove says Pitt then added, “This is the first place we visited where Angie is smiling.”
Not so long ago, there was no couple in the world bigger than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. From the moment they met, on the set of the 2005 action romance Mr. & Mrs. Smith, their attraction was magnetic, fiery, passionate, incendiary, almost insane. Their divorce would be even fiercer in its intensity.
At the center of it all is Miraval. Conceived as a family retreat, it became a high-end commercial enterprise, producing honey, olive oil, a skin care line, and music from Miraval Studios. It all began with a signature wine, Miraval Côtes de Provence rosé, whose revenues reached $50 million in 2021.
“Even now impossible to write this without crying,” Jolie would say of Miraval in an email she sent Pitt in 2021, four years after she filed for divorce. “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.”
The story of Miraval parallels the story of Jolie and Pitt. As their legal battle stretches ever onward, their dueling lawsuits offer competing versions of a dark and disturbing saga. In Jolie’s telling, it’s a tale of alcohol abuse and financial control. For Pitt, it’s one of vengeance and retribution. Neither can deny its sheer dramatic force. There are echoes, even, of the movie that brought them together, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which they played a “married couple” per IMDB, “surprised to learn that they are both assassins hired by competing agencies to kill each other.”
Soon after Pitt and Jolie’s visit to Miraval, Bove heard from their brokers, then from lawyers and more lawyers. The overtures became even more urgent when Jolie learned she was pregnant with twins. “They wanted to be in ahead of the birth,” says Bove. Through their respective holding companies, the couple purchased the property on May 8, 2008, for
25 million euros.
The vineyards at Chateau Miraval. FRANCIS SPECKER / ALAMY STOCK PHOTOl
Eight days before the deal was signed, Jolie’s business manager suggested adding a doomsday clause stipulating that, should the couple ever split, each would have the right to buy the other’s share of Miraval. Pitt rejected the idea, according to her cross-complaint, telling his business manager it “wasn’t necessary for two reasonable people.” However, as a by-product of their supposedly everlasting love, he would insist that he and Jolie later made a pact agreeing never to “sell their respective interests in Miraval without the other’s consent.” It was a promise Jolie would deny, claiming “no such agreement ever existed.”
Bove agreed to stay on and continue running Miraval’s wine operation. He retained 220 acres to operate on his own. “
I think at that moment, Brad wasn’t really interested in making wine,” Bove says. “He liked the idea that he’d have a vineyard, but he really left the wine thing to me.”
From his office, Bove watched an armada of vehicles deliver the family’s possessions. “Vans and vans arriving with furniture, incredibly packaged by the finest movers,” all of it orchestrated by Pitt, says Bove. “He came more often because he wanted to get things started with the renovation.”
Along with the possessions came the staff: “nannies, from Vietnam, the Congo, and the U.S.,” according to one published source, along with two personal assistants (not always in residence); “a cook; a maid; two cleaners; a plongeur, or busboy; [and] four close-protection bodyguards.” Extensive renovations began immediately. “More Californian as opposed to Provençal,” says Bove. The ancient stone chapel became a parking area for the four-wheel all-terrain vehicles the family used to traverse the massive property.
And finally came the movie stars and their growing brood of children. They joined an invasion of celebrity home buyers in Provence that would come to include, just within a 100-mile radius of Miraval, Johnny Depp and his then wife Vanessa Paradis, George Lucas, George Clooney, John Malkovich, and many more.
For a time, leading the pack, were the most famous of them all — the couple known worldwide as Brangelina.
Before the fights, before the combustible court documents, before the lawsuits that have crawled through the courts for seven long, increasingly toxic years, there was a desk. Not just any desk, but a
wildly expensive lacquered desk inspired by a 1920s French design, ordered long-distance by Pitt as a birthday present for Jolie.
Inside one of its drawers was a special inscription by Pitt and a constellation in inlaid mother-of-pearl honoring Jolie’s Gemini birth sign.
The desk was so special that its designer, Frank Pollaro, flew from New Jersey to Miraval in May 2008 to install it personally. A furniture maker to billionaires (David Geffen, Larry Ellison) and stars (Jerry Seinfeld, Robert De Niro), Pollaro is also a longtime wine enthusiast. The night before the installation of the desk, he had dinner at his Provençal hotel, ordering a bottle of Miraval red to accompany his rustic roasted pigeon.
The next morning at Miraval, Pollaro saw a four-wheeler roaring down the ancient Roman roads. It looked like “a dust tornado” swirling toward him. When it finally came to a stop, the cloud parted, and there, from the back of the four-wheeler, stepped Brad Pitt and his and Jolie’s son, Maddox.
“Hey, I want to thank you for coming all this way,” Pitt said as they went inside. Pollaro couldn’t help noticing a sketchbook filled with hundreds of Pitt’s furniture drawings. As Pitt helped Pollaro install the ornate desk, they discussed their shared passion for furniture. And, inevitably, they talked about wine.
When Pollaro said he’d had a bottle of Miraval the night before, Pitt asked what he thought of it. “I said, ‘It’s a decent sort of rustic wine. It worked well with the roasted pigeon, but I don’t think you’re going to win any medals.’ And he kind of chuckled and said, ‘Well, I don’t know much about wine, but I’d like to learn more.’
“I said, Rhône Valley wines are made out of the same grapes that you’re using at Miraval,” Pollaro recalls. “I’m going to send you a bottle of wine from the Rhône Valley that would be a wonderful starting point for you to explore what could be done on your property.”
“Oh, that would be wonderful, but don’t send it,” Pitt replied. “I’ll get it from you when I come back over to the US.”
In 2009, Jolie took a role in the movie Salt, which was shot in New York City. One day Pollaro’s phone rang. “ ‘Hey, it’s Brad. I’d like to take a drive out to see your shop.’ And the next day he drove himself out in a rental car by himself.”
After Pitt toured the shop, Pollaro retrieved a bottle from his cellar. “This is the finest wine that can be made in the region where you are living,” Pollaro told Pitt, handing him the bottle. “It’s Château de Beaucastel, Chateauneuf-du-Pape 1990, a wine of legend.”
A week or so later, Pollaro received an email from Pitt. “He wrote, ‘That wine sure was terrific, and Angie loved it, too.’ ”
“What wines did Brad like at that point?” I ask.
“I think he liked Heineken.”
Jolie was delighted by the desk,
the latest exhibition of affection from Pitt. It went into her office, which Pitt had painstakingly redesigned. “
He wanted it exactly right for her,” says Gary Bradbury,
a Miraval director and head of security. “
He thought the world of that woman.”
“
Miraval was a love letter to his wife and his children, providing a beautiful life for Angelina and the kids and shielding them from the intense pressures of celebrity,” says Pollaro.
On a wall outside the
master bedroom, Pitt installed
30 small screens that flashed with images and videos of the children in various stages of development. He built a
petting zoo and filled it with rabbits, goats, chickens, and peacocks. “He was just completely committed to making Miraval as great as it could be,” says Pollaro.
Under Pollaro’s guidance, Pitt assembled a wine cellar of around 300 bottles from French vineyards. Soon, he confided in Pollaro about the state of Miraval’s winemaking operations. “
We’re losing close to a half million euros a year,” Pollaro says Pitt told him. (Tom Bove insists that the wine operation was profitable when Pitt and Jolie bought it.)
Even more surprising to Pollaro was what Pitt said next: He wanted Pollaro to help find a solution. Pollaro assembled a list of prominent French winemakers who might serve as consultants. “I told Brad, ‘I’m going to call these people, but they’re not going to come to Provence to see Frank Pollaro, the cabinet maker. I need you to be there in person.’ And he said, ‘No problem. I want to make a world-class wine.’ ”
And so the stars of the French wine world made pilgrimages to Miraval to meet the movie star.
When the meetings were done, one name rose to the top: Marc Perrin, the producer of Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape 1990, the “wine of legend” that Pollaro had initially given Pitt. Perrin, CEO of the fifth-generation Perrin wine family company, not only makes superb wine, but he and his family also oversee an extensive global distribution network.
Arriving at Miraval, Perrin had the same sensation as everyone else. It was, he says, “heaven.” Awestruck by Miraval’s majestic setting in its own valley, he told Wine Spectator, “A winemaker could never own this unless it was in the family for something like twenty generations.”
Pitt invited Perrin to sign on as a consultant. The Perrin family countered by proposing a joint venture.
Pitt and Pollaro drove 100 miles north to the Rhône Valley to meet with the Perrin family at their fabled and ancient Château de Beaucastel. They toured the estate, and Perrin hosted a dinner with the family’s 90-year-old matriarch, who opened a bottle of Château de Beaucastel from 1963, Pitt’s birth year. As they got in the car to drive home, Pollaro recalls, “Brad said, ‘I think this is it.’ ”
Soon after that, Perrin said what would turn out to be the magic word: rosé.
Once the neglected stepchild of the wine world, rosé was poised for a revolutionary rise. It had started two years earlier, in 2006, when Sacha Lichine, son of the legendary Bordeaux winemaker and marketing wizard Alexis Lichine, bought an estate in the heart of Provence called Château d’Esclans.
Lichine had long wondered why rosé Champagne sold for a premium while still rosé was considered “cheap and cheerful.” He began experimenting with producing high-quality rosé on his estate. Late one night, he and an American friend were “glowing after enjoying some rosé,” he says, when they experienced a transcendent moment in the château’s 19th-century chapel. Two stone cherubs, their heads close together, loomed high on the wall above them.
“Look, they’re whispering,” said the friend.
“I thought Miraval was special and Brad had enough money, and he should maintain the quality of the wine we were producing,” Bove says today. “When he bought Miraval, we were doing 150,000 bottles of high-quality wine sold in very high-quality restaurants. Brad and Marc Perrin take that 150,000 bottles and run it up to 10 million.”
He sighs. “Anyway, vineyards are like your babies and you always think your babies should go in a certain direction. Looking at the success that Miraval has had, commercially speaking, it was a brilliant idea to combine Brad and Angelina’s star power and the distribution skills of Perrin. It just wouldn’t have been my choice.”
“Let’s approach it like a film, and let’s make something we can be proud of,” Pitt said after he and Jolie had tasted a variety of French rosés with Perrin to determine the flavor profile they wanted for Miraval. “Most rosés are just light,” Perrin would tell Wine Spectator. “Our idea was that it also had to be juicy and fleshy and fresh.”
On March 6, 2013, the first 6,000 bottles of Miraval Rosé 2012 were offered for sale on the Miraval-Provence website. In five hours, the offering was completely sold out. “It was like strapping yourself to a rocket,” Pollaro says of the Perrin family’s global distribution network.
Every bottle came stamped with a sign of the winemakers’ solidarity. “Bottled by Jolie-Pitt & Perrin,” the label read.
Their union, initially so fruitful, would quickly sour. On September 19, 2016, Jolie filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences and petitioning for custody of their six children. It was the opening shot of a war seemingly without end, and at its center was their most prized asset: Miraval.
They were “our last great Hollywood couple,” the New York Post eulogized after the breakup. “Their lineage was Bogart and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracy, Liz and Dick—golden megastars all, with outsize love stories.”
They began as mere mortals. The daughter of Midnight Cowboy star Jon Voight and actor Marcheline Bertrand, Jolie was a wild child who collected knives and aspired to be a funeral home director. At age five, she reportedly said she intended to become “an actress, a big actress.” She won raves for her performance in the 1998 HBO movie Gia, whose tagline—“Everybody Saw the Beauty, No One Saw the Pain”—seemed apt in light of her fraught relationship with her father. The following year, she broke big in Girl, Interrupted, riding a wave of acclaim to the Oscar podium, where, all of 24 years old, she accepted the award for best supporting actress.
By then, William Bradley Pitt was already a star. He’d arrived in Los Angeles from Springfield, Missouri, in a battered Datsun with $325 in his pocket. The astonishingly handsome son of a trucking company dad and a stay-at-home mom, he had dropped out of college two weeks short of graduating with a journalism degree. He told his folks that he was moving to LA not to act but to “go into graphic design, so they wouldn’t worry.”
Unlike Jolie, he had no movie-star dad, no contacts, nothing but a dream. He stood in the streets in a yellow El Pollo Loco chicken costume, waving a sign to beckon diners inside, and drove exotic dancers to their Strip-a-Gram appointments. Then Billy Baldwin dropped out of the 1991 feminist road picture Thelma & Louise to do the firefighting movie Backdraft. Tapped as a last-minute replacement, Pitt set his scenes ablaze as a hunky hitchhiker who hooks up with Geena Davis before taking off with her cash.
In May 2000, Jolie, then 24, married 44-year-old Billy Bob Thornton in Las Vegas. That July, Pitt married Friends star Jennifer Aniston in a $1 million wedding in Malibu.
By the time Jolie and Pitt met four years later on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Jolie and Thornton had divorced, though not before she adopted an orphaned baby boy from Cambodia, whom she named Maddox. Pitt and Aniston were still very much a couple—until he collided with Jolie.
Pitt and Jolie’s chemistry, on- and off-screen, was too combustible to contain. Rumors of an affair swirled from the set and for months after filming wrapped. In January 2005, Pitt and Aniston issued a joint statement announcing plans to split. On the weekend Aniston filed for divorce, Pitt and Jolie posed for a W magazine portfolio, shot by Steven Klein, portraying them as a Mad Men–era married couple, complete with fictional children. In one image, Pitt pins Jolie to the bed during what appears to be an alcohol-fueled argument. “We’re divorced, and you can see why,” Aniston would later tell VF. “There’s a sensitivity chip that’s missing.”
The next month, a photographer for Us Weekly magazine snapped Jolie and Pitt walking the Diani Beach on the coast of Kenya with Maddox, then three years old. (“He just out of the blue called him Dad,” Jolie would tell Vogue in 2007. “So that was probably the defining moment when he decided we would all be a family.”) “Brad & Angelina Secret Love Trip,” screamed the cover line of the May 9, 2005, issue of Us. “We had the worldwide scoop, and the debut of Brangelina,” Us publisher Jann Wenner would later write. “The tipster was Angelina.”
“Jolie and Pitt did everything big,” the Post reported, adding that, while they were each massive stars, “together, they were an epic force multiplier.” And when they had sex, well…it “sounded like a wounded animal, like someone being killed!” read a tabloid report about their Kenyan getaway, when the noise emanating from their $2,000-a-night suite was supposedly so loud that “worried guards grabbed weapons” and rushed to their door.
Not content merely to succeed at the box office and on the awards circuit, they became international crusaders for a better world. Jolie became a special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, making dozens of field trips to global hot spots, and together they founded the Jolie-Pitt Foundation to fund children’s causes around the world.
After moving through a succession of mega-mansions and remote hideaways, they at long last found a family retreat at Miraval. They decamped to this sublime estate when it was time for Jolie to give birth to what the media would call “the wonder twins”: Knox and Vivienne. They were born at 6:27 and 6:28 p.m. on July 12, 2008, at Lenval, a seaside pediatric hospital in Nice.
Almost immediately, the paparazzi descended. Magazines were waging a bidding war for rights to the first official photographs of the twins, which People and Hello! magazines would share for a combined $14 million (donated to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation). Meanwhile, paparazzi surrounded the hospital, vying for the first pirated photos.
Just before 4 a.m. on July 19, 2008, Jolie, Pitt, and the newborn twins snuck out of the hospital in a gray Volkswagen minibus. That sent the paparazzi rushing to Miraval to await their arrival. “The front gate was like the Cannes Film Festival,” says Gary Bradbury. “Packed with paparazzi.”
Some photographers, clad in camouflage battle apparel, snuck onto the sacred grounds, determined to get a shot of the couple and their twins.
As the photo op turned into an invasion, Pitt came outside to investigate. “What’s going on, guys?” he asked, according to Bradbury.
The French and British security squad swept the woods, where they found two photographers hiding beneath the dense brush. A brawl ensued with one of the photographers, who later claimed self-defense. Bradbury says he was trying to defuse the situation when the photographer bit him: “He was screaming, saying he was HIV positive, and nearly bit the top of my finger off.”
That summer, a film director arrived at Miraval: Quentin Tarantino. He brought along the script for his World War II movie, Inglourious Basterds, hoping to talk Pitt into playing Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the tough-talking leader of a troop of Nazi-hunting soldiers.
Pitt was prepared to say no. But first he broke out a bottle of wine for Tarantino.
“We talked about the backstory, we talked about movies ’til the wee hours of the night,” Pitt would later say at the Cannes Film Festival. One bottle led to another. “And all I know [is] I got up the next morning and I saw five empty bottles of wine lying on the floor—five!... And apparently I agreed to do the movie.”
Five bottles of wine might have been unusual, but the drinking was not. Pitt once said he couldn’t remember a day “since I got out of college when I wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something. Something…. And I’m running from feelings. I’m really, really happy to be done with all of that. I mean, I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family.”
In May 2013, Jolie opened up about undergoing a preventative mastectomy in The New York Times. A little more than a year later, she and Pitt were married in Miraval’s ancient chapel before 20 friends, family members, and their six children—Maddox, then 13; Pax, 10; Zahara, 9; Shiloh, 8; and Knox and Vivienne, 6. The children wrote the vows, decorated their mother’s dress, and threw rose petals to celebrate the union. Miraval rosé was served at the reception, where Jolie sipped nonalcoholic Bosnian rose petal juice.
Before the wedding, as yet another token of his devotion, Pitt had given his bride something close to his heart.
When they bought Miraval, Pitt had taken a 60 percent stake in the winemaking enterprise and the estate while Jolie took 40 percent. Pitt had poured millions into Miraval, riding the rosé wave and expanding the business. Sales had grown 300 percent. There were waiting lists for the wine. The estate would soon have an estimated worth of $164 million.
By the time of the wedding, Jolie had “stopped investing,” according to Pitt’s court declaration, though Jolie would deny this. Nevertheless, Pitt transferred 10 percent of his share to her in December 2013, “for the sum of €1 (never paid),” according to the court documents. Now they were equal partners.
Part 2: The War
Very few locals in Correns, the village outside Miraval, actually met the movie stars, but they talk about Pitt as if he were one of their own, won over by his passion for toiling in the vineyards alongside his workers, not as the boss but as their equal.
For Jolie, Miraval was “a place for us to visit together, and a place to hold diplomatic and humanitarian meetings,” she would write. She spent much of her Miraval “time in her office or in her bedroom,
doing UN work,” says Bradbury.
Pitt, meanwhile, was increasingly absorbed in winemaking and improving their historic property. “I’m a farmer now,” he would tell Wine Spectator. He reveled in his fields, sometimes grabbing a chain saw and helping his team of laborers cut down dead trees and trim vines.
During the reconstruction of the ancient château, he’d spend 8 to 12 hours a day with architects, designers, stonemasons, plumbers, and electricians, says Bradbury. “At one o’clock, he’d tell me to give him a knock so he could get the quads ready for the children to ride on the estate. Or he would take the kids fishing on the lake (which Sting had stocked with carp during his Miraval recording sessions). He made sure he was available for his children at all times.” Often Pitt and Bradbury would put in long days of manual labor. “
Angie would come out and bring lunch and we’d all sit there and have a picnic. It was very lovey-dovey, quite romantic. I used to take my sandwich and walk away. It was their time.”
Miraval became Pitt’s secret garden, a place where he could be himself instead of the global phenomenon known as Brad Pitt. He’d hike and jog through Miraval’s roads, fields, and forests. Or he’d sit on a rock with his guitar and a smoke, his vineyards spreading out in all directions before him. He had a vision of turning Miraval into something
beyond wine:
an artist’s colony centered around Miraval Studios.
On Tuesday, September 13, 2016, the family gathered for what
someone on the estate would call “the Last Supper.” That week, Pitt and Jolie had each flown in from far-flung locales: Pitt from the coast of Croatia, where he was developing a multibillion-dollar “ecologically responsible” luxury resort; Jolie from a three-day visit to a camp in Jordan housing 60,000 Syrian refugees.
Now they were both back with their kids in
the place they loved most. The family came together on the lawn overlooking the
new soccer field, beneath the gaze of stone cupids and ancient olive trees. They ate dinner at a long outdoor table.
The next day, they flew off into ruin.
Jolie and the children rode in their 12-passenger luxury bus to the private jet terminal in Nice, where Pitt, who had been in meetings that day on Miraval business, was waiting. After swiftly being cleared by police and customs officers, they boarded a chartered silver Bombardier Global Express. It departed at 7:42 p.m., headed for Burbank, California.
Roughly eight hours after takeoff, the plane touched down in International Falls, Minnesota. The single-runway
Einarson Field/Falls International Airport, a 10-minute drive from the Canadian border, is a favorite spot for private jets from Europe and Asia to quickly refuel and clear customs and immigration before continuing on to their final destinations.
It was in this remote location, at 9:12 p.m. on September 14, that the Brangelina comet fell to earth.
Tensions between Pitt and Jolie had been boiling for about a year. They tried to keep their
arguments between themselves and had made a point to never argue in front of the children. Until the plane.
Even though associates say they’ve never seen Pitt intoxicated—“and I’ve been there for 15 years,” says Bradbury—on the plane he was drinking quite a bit.
It would be years before details of what happened on the plane came to light. For now, only a few key facts were available: The plane landed in International Falls. Pitt had been drinking. Husband and wife had a fight in which he became aggressive. The interior of the plane was damaged, wine and beer were spilled, the wife and children were frightened, the family was instantly torn apart.
And the authorities were alerted. By whom, nobody seemed to know.
News of the altercation quickly went viral. “Brad Pitt Under Investigation for Child Abuse,” TMZ reported on September 22. Added People: “Pitt is accused of getting verbally abusive with one of the couple’s kids, as well as getting ‘physical,’ said a source with knowledge of the situation.” An anonymous caller identifying herself only as “
a woman dating a guy who worked on the tarmac” told a Minneapolis radio station
her boyfriend could hear the screaming “even before the doors opened.”
Pitt knew he had fucked up. Just how badly soon became clear. His wife and kids checked into a hotel, and now he went home alone to the 6,700-square-foot home he’d shared with his family in LA’s Los Feliz neighborhood. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) had opened an investigation about his behavior during the flight. Because the incident occurred on an airplane, the FBI launched a similar investigation.
Then, on September 19, 2016, five days after the plane incident, Jolie filed for divorce. She cited irreconcilable differences and asked for full custody of their six children, with Pitt granted visitation rights. Although an FBI agent provided the US Attorney’s Office with “copies of a probable cause statement related to this incident,” according to a redacted FBI report, Pitt was never charged and the investigation was closed. “After reviewing the document, [a] representative of the United States Attorney’s Office discussed the merits of this investigation with the case agent,” the FBI report read. “It was agreed by all parties that criminal charges in this case would not be pursued due to several factors.”
The matter seemed to be done. No further details of what happened on the plane emerged. Until, six years later, someone identifying herself only as Jane Doe filed several Freedom of Information Act requests to access the FBI’s incident report. “Several years ago, while plaintiff, her then-husband, and their children, who were all minors at the time, were traveling via private aircraft, the husband allegedly physically and verbally assaulted plaintiff and the children, who have ‘experienced lasting physical and mental trauma as a result of the assault,’ ” a judge’s summary of the FOIA request reads.
A judge rejected Jane Doe’s request to keep the entire FOIA lawsuit sealed. News outlets then began speculating that Jane Doe was in fact Jolie. An attorney for Jane Doe, while refusing to reveal her client’s identity “to preserve the family’s privacy,” told a reporter for Politico, “Our position is that victims and survivors should be able to access federal agency records of crimes they experienced or reported, as is common at the state level, so they can advocate for help and trauma care and legal protection for their children and themselves.”
In August 2022, a redacted version of the 53-page FBI report surfaced in the media. A wave of headlines followed as news outlets sifted through the explosive allegations.
By then, the legal war over Miraval was underway. On February 17, 2022, Pitt sued Jolie and Nouvel, the company that held her shares of the Château Miraval estate, and amended the complaint four months later. In October, Jolie filed a cross-complaint against Pitt and his holding company, Mondo Bongo, named after the song he and Jolie so seductively danced to in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Jolie said she had never before publicly revealed her reasons for divorcing Pitt and selling her share of Miraval. “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,” the cross-complaint said. In it, she laid out her side of the story—including “what happened on that plane on September 14, 2016”—in graphic terms.
The scene that follows is difficult to fathom. Jolie would reportedly tell the FBI it “didn’t feel real.”
Her complaint and the redacted FBI report suggest that the fuse was lit before they arrived at the airport, when Pitt had a “confrontation with one of the children,” believed to be Maddox. After takeoff, Pitt allegedly “accused [Jolie] of being too deferential to the children.” A source close to Pitt says he felt Jolie “was trying to drive a wedge between him and his kids.”
On the plane, Jolie had a glass of wine. Pitt didn’t appear incapacitated, Jolie would tell the FBI, adding that he could drink a bottle of vodka without losing functionality. Ninety minutes into the flight, her cross-complaint says, Pitt told Jolie to “Come here,” and directed her to the back of the plane away from the children. There, he “pulled her into the bathroom and began yelling at her.”
He allegedly “grabbed Jolie by the head and shook her, and then grabbed her shoulders and shook her again,” pushing her into the bathroom wall. Pitt also punched the ceiling four times.
The commotion caught the attention of one or more of the children.
“Are you okay, Mommy?” they asked.
“No,” Pitt allegedly responded. “Mommy’s not okay. She’s ruining this family. She’s crazy.”
When one of the kids confronted him, he “lunged” at the child, according to the complaint.
Jolie “grabbed him from behind” to hold Pitt back, but he threw himself into the airplane’s seats to get her off him, the complaint says. As a result, she suffered injuries to her back and elbow. “The children rushed in and all bravely tried to protect each other. Before it was over, Pitt choked one of the children and struck another in the face. Some of the children pleaded with Pitt to stop. They were all frightened. Many were crying,” according to Jolie’s complaint.
Over the remainder of the flight, Pitt continued to rant, and at one point poured beer on Jolie and the children as they tried to sleep under blankets, Jolie claimed, adding that he caused $25,000 worth of alcohol damage to the interior of the plane.
When the plane landed in International Falls, Jolie told Pitt she and the children were going to a hotel to rest, and they could resume their flight to California the next day. But Pitt wouldn’t have it, according to her complaint. Nobody was getting off the plane, he allegedly said, although he did reportedly disembark to smoke a cigarette before the plane continued on to Burbank.
He eventually fell asleep, giving Jolie time to devise a plan. She spoke to her children first, asking them not to intervene, no matter what Pitt did. She then woke her husband up.
As the plane landed in Burbank, Jolie told Pitt that she was taking the kids to a hotel, but Pitt allegedly refused to let the family leave the plane for 20 minutes. “You’re not taking my fucking kids,” he yelled, according to the FBI report. And he “shook Jolie by the head and shoulders.”
“Don’t hurt her,” one of the children begged. He let her go, but not without calling Jolie a “bitch,” her complaint claims.
And the authorities were alerted. Representatives of DCFS were reportedly waiting on the tarmac when the plane arrived. Who contacted them, no one can confirm.
According to a
source close to Pitt, “Brad was drinking, and the confrontation got out of hand.
He was absolutely wrong in how he behaved but immediately apologized and acknowledged that he had crossed a line, which he will always regret, and right away took steps to address this and try to make amends.”
Alone in Los Angeles, Pitt
vowed to stop drinking.
His playground had become a battleground, and his passion for wine had become his poison.
He slept on a friend’s floor. He looked in the mirror and didn’t like what he saw. He found a lifeline in fellow leading man Bradley Cooper, who had spoken out about his recovery from drug and alcohol abuse and was known for helping others. “I got sober because of this guy and every day has been happier ever since,” Pitt would declare while accepting an award in 2020. He attended a “private and selective” Alcoholics Anonymous men’s group whose members he could trust not to reveal details of his addiction and, soon after, his divorce.
It began with a fight over custody rights. Jolie wanted sole physical custody of the children. Pitt wanted joint custody.
Less than a week after the plane incident, TMZ quoted Pitt as saying that Jolie had “unleashed hell” by allegedly “spinning” stories about his “anger issues fueled by weed and alcohol” that attracted unwelcome attention from the paparazzi.
On September 30, 2016, the couple reached a temporary agreement. Jolie would have full custody. Pitt could visit but only on several conditions. He had to agree to counseling and testing for alcohol and drugs, and the first meeting would be monitored by a therapist.
That December, Pitt’s lawyers filed a motion to keep the documents in the escalating custody case sealed. Jolie “appears to be determined…to put in the public eye any allegations she can, without regard to the impact on the minor children,” his lawyers wrote.
In January, Jolie agreed to keep court documents sealed, but protested that the move was intended to prevent her from speaking publicly about his behavior. Pitt was “terrified that the public will learn the truth,” she was quoted as saying in court documents.
Eighteen months passed.
In June 2018, a judge in the divorce set a schedule for Pitt to spend more time with his children, advising, according to court papers, “The children not having a relationship with their father is harmful to them.”
Still, the legal tug-of-war continued. That August, Jolie’s attorney, the prominent divorce lawyer Laura Wasser, left the case. The situation had “gotten too venomous,” TMZ reported.
Just days after Wasser’s departure became public, Jolie accused Pitt of not paying “meaningful” child support. According to a
source close to Pitt, he paid $3 million in initial bills and pays millions more per year in child support, and also loaned Jolie $8 million of the $25.4 million she spent on director Cecil B. DeMille’s former home.
On April 12, 2019, the couple were ruled legally single, but they continued to wrangle over custody. After many delays, they finally agreed to a private trial overseen by John Ouderkirk, the retired judge who had married them at Miraval. The proceedings lasted months and featured a “f--k ton of witnesses, experts, therapists and other people who have been with the kids and around them,” a source told the New York Post.
Jolie offered to have three of the children, each over the required age of 14, testify about their father’s behavior. The offer was declined. In May 2021, Ouderkirk made a tentative decision to award Pitt joint custody of their five minor children. (The eldest, Maddox, was now 19.) According to Pitt’s lawsuit, Ouderkirk also issued a detailed report finding Jolie “not credible,” though
a source familiar with the matter says he never used those words.
“Jolie was livid,” a source would tell the Daily Mail. She said Ouderkirk failed to “adequately consider” evidence of domestic abuse or fully disclose recent professional relationships with members of Pitt’s legal team. A panel of three judges later removed Ouderkirk from the case and vacated his rulings.
As the war over the kids dragged on, an equally nasty custody battle erupted: over Miraval.
“Dear Brad,” Jolie emailed Pitt on January 21, 2021. “I have reached a painful decision, with a heavy heart.” She began with the good: how excited she’d been to buy Miraval, her fond memories of the place. Then she zeroed in on the bad: how it marked the beginning of the end of their family, and “a business that is centered around alcohol.”
“I have tried to stay open to the business, to see it as something that could be positive for our family, and have therefore not walked away,” she wrote. “I see now how you have really wanted me out and will most likely be pleased to receive this email.”
Jolie had enlisted Christophe Salin, former CEO of the venerable Bordeaux wine brand Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite), as her adviser and representative, but her frustrations mounted all the same. “Over time, [Pitt] completely froze her out,” her attorneys would claim in court papers, adding that he “categorically refused Jolie’s requests to distribute any portion of the winery’s profits” to her, even though she said she had invested some $60 million of her own money into it over the years. (“Her investment was actually $38 million,” says a
source close to Pitt. “All dividends were reinvested back into covering costs and further improving the property and the business.”)
Since their separation, she wrote in the email to Pitt, she had “seen lots of inconsiderate behaviour, money spent in ways that I would not have approved, and decisions made that I was not consulted on.” She was especially “shaken by the recent imagery that was released to sell the alcohol,” presumably referring to a Miraval ad campaign featuring a black-and-white photo of Pitt asleep on a lounge chair. “It reminded me of painful times.”
Their visions of the company were incompatible, and she wanted out. She would join him in selling the whole thing off, or she would accept “a complete buy out of my share in the property and business.” She asked him to decide one way or another within two weeks.
“Miraval for me died September 2016,” she wrote, referring to the date of the plane meltdown, “and everything I have seen in the years since has sadly confirmed that.”
Pitt opted to buy her half of Miraval, and in February 2021 they agreed that he would pay Jolie $54.5 million for her entire interest, including undistributed profits.
The deal might have happened if not for a dispute over a nondisclosure agreement. Jolie’s cross-complaint claims that, after she filed a sealed document offering to prove her allegations of domestic violence as part of the child custody proceeding, Pitt demanded an NDA to “prohibit Jolie from discussing outside of court any of Pitt’s personal conduct toward her or the family.” She called it an “unconscionable gag order.” A
source close to Pitt says the NDA was strictly about Miraval, merely a “standard” precaution intended “to ensure the seller doesn’t damage the value of the asset after being paid for it.” According to Jolie’s cross-complaint, “Pitt walked away from the deal” when she wouldn’t agree to the NDA, while Pitt’s lawsuit blasted Jolie for breaking off the negotiations in retaliation for Ouderkirk’s joint-custody ruling.
Jolie petitioned the court to lift a restraining order so she could sell her stake to a third party. She quickly found an eager buyer: Tenute del Mondo, the wine division of the SPI Group, which produces and distributes Stoli vodka and 379 other brands in 170 countries.
On October 5, 2021, she sold her holding company, Nouvel, to Tenute del Mondo for $67 million. The buyer quickly issued a press release stating, “We are thrilled to have a position alongside Brad Pitt as curators of their extraordinary vintages.”
Tenute del Mondo, it soon emerged, is controlled by a Russia-born billionaire by the name of Yuri Shefler.
For Jolie, the sale was a business transaction she had every right to make. “In an effort to preserve her own mental health and well-being, she looked for and found what she believed would be a good business partner for Pitt,” according to a
source familiar with the matter.
For Pitt, it was a betrayal. “It is not a coincidence that she sold her interest in Miraval to an adversarial party, and part of the family home to a stranger, right after a judge granted Brad a huge win: 50-50 custody,” says
a source close to Pitt.
Even before the divorce, Yuri Shefler’s associates were already in Provence, seeking a foothold in the rosé boom.
In
2016, Sacha Lichine had received a call from Dmitry Efimov, the CEO of the SPI Group. “We represent Yuri Shefler, and we hear you’re looking for a partner,” Lichine says Efimov told him. Lichine invited Efimov to the 10th anniversary party of Château d’Esclans, where he produces
Whispering Angel.
Shefler’s representatives were keenly interested in a partnership. “
Mr. Shefler didn’t demand the majority stake immediately, but wanted to see a clear path to it,” says Efimov. Which Lichine wasn’t willing to offer.
Pitt had no knowledge of Jolie’s decision to sell until it was reported in the press. He was “shocked” by the news, Pitt would say, but he too was familiar with Shefler. His people had approached Pitt just after the announcement of the divorce, offering 60 million euros for Miraval, according to Pitt’s lawsuit. In a side deal that Pitt described as “bizarre,” they also offered to throw in “a €50 million private jet [for the] discounted price of €23 million.” Pitt “rebuffed” the offer. (A Stoli Group spokesperson says the company “made inquiries about acquiring Château Miraval in 2016” but adds, “Stoli is unaware of any offer involving a private jet.”)
On February 17, 2022, four months after the sale was announced, Pitt filed a lawsuit against his ex-wife and Nouvel. Shefler, SPI, and Tenute del Mondo were later added to the suit. Filed in California, the suit sought to nullify the sale of Jolie’s 50 percent of Miraval. In a separate suit, filed in Luxembourg, Pitt claimed that the transfer of 10 percent of Miraval to Jolie in 2013 should be null and void because she never paid the one euro price—and even if she had, it wouldn’t be an admissible amount under Luxembourg law. In both suits, Pitt insisted she had no right to sell 50 percent of Miraval since they had each agreed not to sell without the other’s consent and were entitled to a right of first refusal over any sale. He argued that Jolie’s sale of her half of Miraval was “unlawful,” and he demanded damages “in an amount to be proven at trial.”
What Jolie had sold wasn’t merely a vineyard, his lawsuit said, but “Pitt’s passion—and a profitable one, as Miraval, under Pitt’s stewardship, has grown into a multimillion-dollar global business and one of the world’s most highly regarded producers of rosé wine.” As for Jolie, the lawsuit claimed, she “had contributed nothing to Miraval’s success.”
A source familiar with the matter disputes this, saying that Jolie made many contributions, financial and otherwise, and her “role in marketing the wine was instrumental in increasing sales.”
In the California suit, Pitt complained of “a Jolie-led conspiracy,” which included selling her stake without his knowledge in order to “inflict harm on Pitt.” The sale, he charged, “sought to force Pitt into partnership with a stranger, and worse yet, a stranger with poisonous associations and intentions.” It added that she “knew and intended that Shefler and his affiliates would try to control the business Pitt had built and to undermine Pitt’s investment in Miraval.”
But who was Shefler, really? As with everything, the two sides have opposing views.
In his lawsuit, Pitt insists Shefler “gained notoriety through cutthroat business tactics and dubious professional associations” and said “the U.S. Treasury Department designated Shefler as ‘an oligarch in the Russian Federation.’ ” (A spokesperson for Stoli Group says the Treasury list identified “high net worth Russians and explicitly states that it does not indicate sanctionable conduct or involvement in malign activities,” adding, “Shefler categorically rejects the suggestion that his business practices or professional associations are anything other than reputable.”)
Pitt argued that “the purported sale Jolie orchestrated behind Pitt’s back poses an immediate threat to Miraval’s business and carefully honed brand” by aligning it with a brand so “synonymous with Russia” that pouring Stoli vodka down the drain became a symbol of solidarity with Ukraine, according to Pitt’s complaint.
For Jolie, as outlined in her cross-complaint, the sale was about freedom: “After Jolie filed for divorce, everything changed. Pitt kept all the properties” and “Jolie’s assets were largely tied up in Chateau Miraval.... Not only did Stoli pay substantially more ($67 million) than Pitt was willing to pay ($54.4 million), Stoli…could readily increase the prestige, distribution, and profitability of Chateau Miraval, financially benefiting Pitt and ultimately their children.”
One year after Jolie sold her share of Miraval to Stoli, the new owners of Nouvel filed a scorching cross-complaint against Pitt, Perrin, their associates, and companies, seeking damages “for the illegal and malicious actions of Pitt and his allies to injure Nouvel by devaluing its investments and depriving it of its proper role in the management of Chateau Miraval, the world-famous producer of rosé wine.”
“Ever since his former wife, Angelina Jolie, filed for divorce from him in 2016, Brad Pitt has been waging a vindictive war against her and Nouvel, her former investment company,” the complaint began. As for Shefler, the cross-complaint insisted that he wasn’t in any way aligned with Russian president Vladimir Putin; he was a leading critic. He and Putin were in such “open conflict” that “Putin’s people once even tried to kidnap Shefler.”
“From exile, Shefler has repeatedly stood up to Putin and his regime,” the cross-complaint noted, adding that he had publicly condemned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and had financed meals for the Ukrainian people through the World Central Kitchen. As for his company’s reputation in the wine and beverage world, the cross-complaint cited its partnerships with everyone from PepsiCo to Pernod Ricard and Diageo.
Decrying the claim that Shefler is a Putin ally as “categorically false,” the suit demanded “damages in an amount to be proven at trial of at least $250 million.”
Pitt’s demonization of Shefler was “an effort to further distract from—and excuse—his own misconduct,” Nouvel’s cross-complaint said. “It’s not Stoli Group or Shefler whose reputation poses commercial risk to Chateau Miraval—it is his own.”
A
source close to Pitt says Stoli’s “allegations are completely without basis.”
A month later, on October 4, 2022, Jolie filed a cross-complaint of her own in which she addressed not only their embattled rosé empire but the fateful airplane incident that had driven the couple apart.
She began with the Miraval estate. Like all couples, they divided their responsibilities. Jolie said she had made her career as an actor/director “secondary to her primary responsibility of raising the children,” while Pitt continued “his Hollywood career and took primary responsibility for renovating the chateau.” The original idea was to transform “the chateau into a family home and a place to…host retreats and meetings to support the couple’s humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors.” Still, along with her money, Jolie “used her name and image to help elevate the winery’s status and prestige” in hopes that it would serve as a loving
home for their children as well as provide for their “long-term financial security.”
Regarding Pitt’s claim that neither party would sell their share without the other’s consent, she said, “That premise is false…no such agreement ever existed.”
Pitt’s beloved rosé operation was now “under constant attack,” his lawsuit claimed. Jolie’s sale to Shefler’s company had “wreaked havoc on its affairs [and] exposed its confidential information to exploitation by a hostile competitor,” who had set about “destabilizing Miraval’s operations and seeking access to Miraval’s confidential and proprietary information for the benefit of his competing enterprise.” It was a “multi-pronged offensive,” the suit claimed, designed “to seize control of Miraval.” (“The Stoli Group never attempted a hostile takeover of Château Miraval,” says a spokesperson for the company.)
The new owners of Jolie’s share demanded access to “documents [that] would allow Nouvel to seek redress in France for Pitt and his allies’ mismanagement.” To Pitt, as spelled out in a memorandum, it was a blatant ploy to “intimidate them into surrendering the business they built.”
On March 4, 2022, Miraval was under siege.
Two court officers and an IT expert, armed with the French equivalent of a search warrant, drove through the gates and down the 2.5-mile road to Miraval. They had been dispatched by Nouvel’s new owners to conduct what French law, translated literally, calls a “spontaneous interpellation.”
To Pitt and his partners, it was nothing short of a raid, although the Stoli Group disputes that characterization. “It was not a raid,” the spokesperson says, but rather a “bailiff’s mission…precisely and narrowly foreseen by the judge.”
Lawyers for Shefler’s wine division had petitioned a commercial court in Provence to invoke article 145 of the Code of Civil Procedure, which enables businesses to enter the premises of their adversaries and seize evidence of suspected malfeasance. The filing before the court cited “mismanagement,” “misuse of corporate assets,” and a “blocking mechanism” by its other 50 percent shareholder, Mondo Bongo, the company that held Pitt’s Miraval shares, in conjunction with two associates at the winery.
“Given the existing links between the different protagonists, it is to be feared that they will consult each other in order to conceal” evidence, the petition read. It went on to say that only a “spontaneous interpellation, without the recipients of it being notified in advance,” would enable the court to collect the relevant evidence.
When their first request was denied, the lawyers petitioned the court again. In February 2022, the bailiff granted an order to proceed. Now the court’s emissaries entered the offices of the historic wine estate. They seized Miraval’s files and copies of “contracts, invoices, correspondence (including emails),” and turned it all over to the court, which would investigate and decide whether or not to pass the materials on to Nouvel. Neither Pitt nor Perrin were at Miraval at the time.
In March of this year, the president of the commercial court issued a ruling to “retract the order” for the search and ensure “the restitution of the documents.” Nevertheless, Miraval’s records remain in the hands of the court, as yet unopened. “This procedure is pending before the Court of Appeal of Aix-en-Provence,” says a Stoli spokesperson.
Pitt and Jolie’s Vista Jet.BACKGRID.
In the years since the plane incident, Jolie has shifted her focus, according to
a source familiar with the matter: “In addition to continuing her global humanitarian work, she began advocating for survivors of domestic violence. She spoke before members of the Senate and House and campaigned on behalf of the Violence Against Women Act; the Justice for All Act, which protects the rights of crime victims; and Kayden’s Law, also known as Keep Your Children Safe From Family Violence. She also partnered with Amnesty International to write a book for young people called Know Your Rights and Claim Them.”
Coverage of Jolie’s account of the plane incident prompted an outcry on social media as fans of both parties digested the shocking details. And yet, in Hollywood, Pitt remains golden. In 2019, he reteamed with Quentin Tarantino in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, costarring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio as a handsome, aging stuntman trying to make sense of the swinging ’60s. Pitt’s laid-back charm earned him critical acclaim and an Oscar for best supporting actor.
The battle rages on. On June 1, Pitt filed an amended complaint against his ex-wife and Nouvel’s new owners, continuing his campaign to have Jolie’s sale to Shefler’s company reversed. That kicked off another round of headlines, with Jolie’s attorney telling CNN that Pitt “has never publicly denied” the accusations of assault on the plane. (“Brad has owned everything he’s responsible for from day one, but he’s not going to own anything he didn’t do,” says Pitt’s attorney Anne Kiley.)
“
This case has been covered as a celebrity divorce; it is really a story about abuse,” says a
source familiar with the matter.
For some, it’s simply a human tragedy. “
I hope you’ll give some grace to somebody who had a breakdown,” says
one person who knew the family. “Everybody was shocked by the
eruption on the plane, because Brad is not an abusive person. But even
more devastating was what came afterwards: Brad being alienated from those he loves most—his children.”
In May, Miraval was named the “Most Desirable Provence Rosé Wine in the World,” number one in a Le Figaro magazine ranking of 33 top Provençal vineyards. And while the family that created modern-day Miraval is gone, signs of the happy life they lived here remain in an all-white bedroom with furniture designed by Pitt.
“
This is for the kids. Everything was for the kids and the family,” says
someone in the château, leading the way into the magical bedroom, located inside a building where the children were privately schooled by teachers who traveled with them from the US.
Three of the children are now over 18, but the rest live with their mother, and Pitt shares custody and visits them. But their memory remains in this room, with its circle of white bunk beds adorned with teddy bears and other reminders of another time. Six bunk beds now lying empty where six kids once slept. None have returned to Miraval since they left in September 2016.
