Angelina Jolie is claiming in a new legal filing that ex Brad Pitt’s abuse “started well before” a highly publicized 2016 incident, in which the actor was allegedly violent toward his then-wife and children while aboard a private jet.
“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,” reads a Thursday court filing by Jolie’s lawyers obtained by USA TODAY.
The motion to compel seeks communications from Pitt and his company Mondo Bongo related a nondisclosure agreement Jolie’s team says the “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” actor wanted her to sign as a condition of buying her shares. It was filed as part of the former power couple’s ongoing legal battle over Château Miraval, the French winery they once owned and where the former couple married in 2014.
Jolie’s attorney also accused Pitt of “unrelenting efforts to control and financially drain” her, as well as “attempting to hide his history of abuse, control, and coverup.”
“Mr. Pitt refused to purchase Ms. Jolie’s interest” in the winery “when she would not be silenced by his NDA,” Jolie’s lawyer, Paul Murphy, said in a statement to USA TODAY Thursday.
“By refusing to buy her interest but then suing her, Mr. Pitt put directly at issue why that NDA was so important to him and what he hoped it would bury: his abuse of Ms. Jolie and their family.”
Read more here from USA Today.