Angelina Jolie described her and estranged ex Brad Pitt's purchase of their jointly-owned French winery, Chateau Miraval, as the "beginning of the end" in a resurfaced 2021 email.
The former couple first visited the sprawling South France property in 2007 and made their purchase official May 8, 2008. However, following their tumultuous 2016 split, the exes have been locked in a series of heated legal battles over everything from custody of their children to the rights to sell their shares of the beloved French estate.
"Even now impossible to write this without crying," Jolie wrote in an email addressed to the Troy actor back in 2021, referring to Miraval.
"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," she continued in the heartfelt letter. "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."
In a recent interview, former owner Tom Bove — who initially bought the winery in 1992 for $5 million — revealed that he first sold the estate to the then Hollywood power couple because "Miraval was special and Brad had enough money" to "maintain the quality of the wine we were producing."
"Vineyards are like your babies and you always think your babies should go in a certain direction," he told the outlet. "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."
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As OK! previously reported, Pitt filed a lawsuit against Jolie in February 2022, claiming she'd sold her shares of the winery to a competitor without his permission.
They had allegedly agreed the Maleficent star would be allowed to sell her portion of the property as long as Pitt was given final approval over the new part-owner. In the suit, he claimed the mother of their six children — Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, as well as twins Vivienne and Knox — refused to sell the remaining shares to Pitt and secretly offloaded them to Yuri Shefler, the owner of SPI Group, which sells alcohol in over 100 countries.
"Her decision to terminate negotiations with Pitt was intentional and pretextual," recent court documents read. "As will be demonstrated at trial, Jolie’s actions were unlawful, severely and intentionally damaging Pitt and unjustly enriching herself."
Vanity Fair reported Bove's quotes as well as the contents of Jolie's email to Pitt.
