Angelina Jolie has been ordered to hand over years worth of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) amid her ongoing battle with ex-husband Brad Pitt over the winery they co-owned.
On Thursday, May 16, a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge granted Pitt’s motion to compel Jolie, 48, to produce every NDA agreement that she signed with a third party between 2014 and 2022, according to documents obtained by Us Weekly.
The actress was given a 60-day deadline to produce the relevant documentation. A source tells Us that the ruling is a crushing legal blow for Jolie.
NDAs became a key component of the exes’ dispute over the Chateau Miraval winery when Jolie claimed that she backed out of selling her stake in the company to Pitt, 60, after he requested that she sign a mutual non-disparagement agreement.
Jolie, who sold her Miraval shares to Russian billionaire Yuri Shefler in 2021, argued in a previous motion that Pitt’s request rendered their agreement not to sell their shares without each other’s permission “unconscionable” and “void.”
Pitt’s legal team, however, argued that Jolie’s defense is undermined by her own routine use of NDAs. His attorneys claimed that Jolie made the claims about Pitt’s proposed NDA being controlling “in an effort to rationalize” her “wrongful sale” of her Miraval stake.
“If Jolie has required others to sign NDAs that were at least as broad as the one she claims was so ‘unconscionable’ here, it would severely undermine her claimed excuse for terminating negotiations with Pitt,” the filing argued.
Pitt’s lawyers also claimed that Jolie asked Pitt to sign “an even broader mutual non-disparagement clause” related to “resolving the couple’s divorce” less than six months after she sold her Miraval shares.
Although Jolie hit back with a claim that the NDAs she’s been asked to produce are irrelevant to her legal battle with Pitt, Judge Lia Martin shut down the argument on Tuesday.
“Put simply, the Requests are reasonably calculated to lead to discovery of documents that will test whether Jolie was truly so offended by the proposed NDA and her claim that she was entitled to breach her contract with Pitt and sell to the Stoli Parties, or whether that defense is pretextual in nature,” the ruling reads.
Per the ruling, Julie must produce all NDAs she proposed, or that were proposed by others, within the agreed upon timeframe, regardless of whether they were finalized. She must also hand over NDAs entered into by companies she controls, along with documents reflecting the reasons she or her companies requested the agreements.
Us Weekly has reached out to Jolie and Pitt for comment.
The ruling is the latest chapter in Jolie and Pitt’s long and messy legal battle. Pitt first filed a lawsuit against Jolie in February 2022, claiming that she breached their contract by selling her Miraval shares to Tenute Del Mondo, the wine division of the Stoli group owned by Shefler, without his consent.
After ten years together, Jolie and Pitt tied the knot at the Miraval chateau in August 2014, years after they first gained a controlling interest in the wine company in 2008. After splitting in late 2016, they were declared legally single in 2019.
