Angelina Jolie's former investment company, Nouvel, is suing Brad Pitt over years of “pugnacious” actions aimed at destroying the wine business the couple previously owned, according to a complaint filed in California on Monday that Fortune reviewed. The complaint called Pitt a “petulant child” who gaslighted Jolie and her business partners, shoveled millions of euros into the trash out of spite, and made xenophobic claims about a business affiliate. (Pitt's lawyer did not respond to Fortune's request for comment.)
Jolie and Pitt bought the 1,300-acre French winemaking estate Chateau Miraval together in 2008. The property encompasses a winery and a 35-room château surrounded by vineyards and olive groves, and specializes in making rosés. The actors, then husband and wife, purchased the château (where they were married in 2014) through their holding companies. The couple each owned 50% of the property and wine business at the time, and the wine brand became internationally successful, turning tens of millions in profit, the complaint explained. But Jolie's former holding company alleges that Pitt has been trying to destroy the business and has become a “hostile actor” since his acrimonious divorce with Jolie in 2016.
“Brad Pitt has been engaged in a vindictive campaign to dominate and loot the wine business that the couple had built and owned together,” the complaint read. “Pitt masterminded a so-far-successful plan to seize de facto control of Chateau Miraval, despite lacking a controlling ownership interest. He has frozen Nouvel out of Chateau Miraval and treats it as his personal fiefdom.”
Nouvel is Jolie’s former holding company through which she bought the winery, and Pitt’s holding company, which he still owns, is named Mondo Bongo. Nouvel accuses the actor of “hijacking” his own business by intentionally wasting millions of dollars and trying to siphon off its assets to his other businesses and friends.
Pitt trifled away millions of Chateau Miraval’s dollars on vanity projects at the estate to ensure that the previously highly profitable wine label did not make Jolie and Nouvel any money, according to their complaint. The projects included a €1 million pool renovation, a multimillion-euro recording studio restoration, rebuilding a staircase four times, €3 million on “garment work,” and €1 million annually to perpetually rebuild stone walls with Croatian stonemasons.
Media woes
Jolie sold Nouvel, which owns 50% of Chateau Miraval, in 2021 to the spirits business Stoli Group, owned by Russian exile Yuri Shefler. The complaint claims that Pitt was “incensed” by this, as he had wanted full ownership of the vineyard. Jolie offered to sell her stake to her former spouse, but the deal fell through because Pitt would only buy under the condition that Jolie could not publicly criticize him and their marriage.
Since Shefler purchased Nouvel (and thereby 50% of Chateau Miraval), Pitt has engaged in a xenophobic campaign to besmirch his reputation, according to the filing. He has accused Shefler of being an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Shefler’s lawyers contend that this is completely false, as Shefler is a Russian exile in open legal conflict with Putin’s regime and was once subject to a kidnapping attempt by the Russian state. The complaint then presented a searing criticism of Pitt’s media presence and attempts to shape the Chateau Miraval narrative.
“Pitt has shifted his public relations campaign, claiming that Shefler and the Stoli Group are trying to evict him from his “family home” and eject him from the business that he ‘built.’ Talk about fantasy,” the defendant attorneys wrote. “This is a fight about money and corporate control, not a fight over a family home…The chateau is no one’s ‘home.’ Pitt is not a French citizen who keeps the chateau as his domicile. And the notion that Chateau Miraval was the Pitt-Jolie family home died back in 2016 when Pitt terrorized his wife and children in a drunken rage while en route from the chateau to Pitt’s true home—Hollywood.”
The complaint also accuses Pitt of damaging the winery’s commercial value with an unstable reputation, just as he had accused Shefler. The lawyers bring up Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, which constructed shoddily built houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that were replete with mold, gas leaks, and structural damage. They also accuse him of associating closely (by collaborating on movies) with disgraced predator Harvey Weinstein, claiming that Pitt ignored warnings about Weinstein from Jolie and his previous ex-girlfriend, Gwyneth Paltrow.
Nouvel and Jolie also claim that Pitt has transferred millions of assets to his other business ventures and close friends, including secretly giving majority ownership of Chateau Miraval’s winemaking subsidiary Miraval Provence to his close friend, winemaker Marc Perrin. The filing calls Pitt’s actions “outrageous” and worthy of “a script that may play in Hollywood but not in a court of law.” The defendants are suing for $350 million in damages.
“Pitt is an actor, not a winemaker. He deals in illusions, not dirt and grapes,” the complaint read. “While he no doubt visited the vineyards to admire the work of the French laborers who actually made the business successful, Pitt is no vigneron.”
Editor's note: This report has been updated to clarify that only Nouvel has filed the cross-complaint against Pitt and related companies. Jolie is not a plaintiff in the cross-claim.
