Inside Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Exhaustingly Long Divorce Battle

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Reach Divorce Settlement After 8-Year Legal Battle

Just in time for 2025, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can finally turn the page.

On at least one thing.

While inquiring minds had long since turned their attention to the fallout from the lawsuit Pitt filed against Jolie over the French winery they once shared, her legal team has now confirmed that the parents of six signed off on a divorce settlement Dec. 30.

"More than eight years ago, Angelina filed for divorce from Mr. Pitt," Jolie's attorney James Simon told NBC News in a statement Dec. 31. "She and the children left all of the properties they had shared with Mr. Pitt, and since that time she has focused on finding peace and healing for their family. This is just one part of a long ongoing process that started eight years ago. Frankly, Angelina is exhausted, but she is relieved this one part is over."

Pending litigation aside, it's still the end of an era, if not the one where Pitt and Jolie made for one of the most lyrical celebrity couple portmanteaus.

That ship sailed more than eight years ago, too.

It was soon obvious that something more complicated than an allegedly toxic altercation aboard a private jet had prompted Jolie—who cited their separation date as Sept. 15, 2016—to leave Pitt.

Pitt was "terrified that the public will learn the truth," Jolie's legal team alleged in a January 2017 court filing responding to a motion from Pitt's camp to seal the documents pertaining to their custody case, charging that Jolie's filings were revealing too much private information, such as the identities of their kids' therapists.

After this inauspicious beginning to their uncoupling, Jolie and Pitt did reach a custody agreement in November 2018, days before they would've had to go to trial if they hadn't settled their differences.

"Brad is hoping the worst is behind them and that they can move on from the fighting and painful past," a source told E! News at the time. "He knows in the long run the kids are best with both their mom and dad in the picture. He can now move forward and try be a stable and constant positive influence in their lives."

Though Jolie eventually relented on her original 2016 request for primary custody, in May 2021 she pushed back on a judge's tentative ruling that granted Pitt joint custody, arguing in a filing at the time that she had been denied "a fair trial, improperly excluding her evidence relevant to the children's health, safety, and welfare, evidence critical to making her case."

From the beginning, Jolie has maintained that she filed for divorce in the first place because it was in her kids' best interest and she's never wavered from that undescriptive-yet-pointed explanation.

While she has never openly discussed, outside of legal filings, her harrowing allegations about what took place aboard that fateful flight in 2016, she told Vanity Fair for its September 2017 cover story—her first in-depth personal post-split interview—that "things got bad" in the summer of 2016.

Back in 2016, authorities confirmed that child services and the FBI investigated Pitt over an alleged altercation he had with then-15-year-old Maddox aboard a private jet en route from France to Los Angeles days before Jolie filed for divorce. Both investigations were closed that November without further action being taken against Pitt. 

The now 61-year-old actor has never commented publicly on the matter, but he did file for joint custody before either investigation was resolved. His first response to the divorce filing was to say he was "very saddened, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids."

Pitt first sat down with GQ Style in the spring of 2017, candidly discussing therapy (new to it, loved it), sobriety (six months in, tough but necessary) and how his habit of not processing his emotions had contributed to the demise of his 12-year relationship with Jolie, barely two years after they got married at their chateau in France.

"A breakup of a family is certainly an eye-opener that as one—and I'm speaking in general again—but as one needs to understand, I had to understand my own culpability in that, and what can I do better. Because I don't want to go on like this," Pitt reflected to NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday in 2019, his turn in Ad Astra as an emotionally adrift astronaut haunted by the end of his marriage while on an interstellar mission almost impossible to separate from his real-life saga.

"I had family stuff going on," he told the New York Times when asked if his own experiences helped shape the character. "We'll leave it at that."

Accountability was a good look for the actor, and his stock proceeded to skyrocket, culminating in his pre-pandemic Best Supporting Actor Oscar win for Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. And what a view through rose-colored glasses it was for old-school fans when he and first wife Jennifer Aniston warmly interacted at the 2020 SAG Awards.

Meanwhile, after making the promotional rounds in 2017 for First They Killed My Father, the based-on-a-true-story film she directed (and Maddox produced) about Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia, Jolie took a more extensive break from work, more likely to be spotted at Whole Foods, Toys R Us or Target than on a set.

"I don't enjoy being single," Jolie told London's Sunday Telegraph in September 2017 during her press tour. "It's not something I wanted. There's nothing nice about it. It's just hard."

"Sometimes maybe it appears I am pulling it all together, but really I am just trying to get through my days," she continued. "Emotionally, it's been a very difficult year and I have had some other health issues. So my health is something I have to monitor." (She told Vanity Fair she had a bout with Bell's palsy, which caused temporary facial paralysis, and developed hypertension in 2016.)

She returned to acting in 2019's Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, which made almost $492 million worldwide, and—after starring in the old-school action thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead and Marvel's The Eternals—is back in the Oscar conversation (and nominated for a Golden Globe) for her portrayal of opera legend Maria Callas in 2024's Maria.

Jolie previously acknowledged that she felt she had no choice but to alter her career priorities.

"I love directing, but I had a change in my family situation that's not made it possible for me to direct for a few years," Jolie told Entertainment Weekly in April 2021. "I needed to just do shorter jobs and be home more, so I kind of went back to doing a few acting jobs. That's really the truth of it."

Her kids are used to being on the go, their globetrotting mom having always been intent on her children being true citizens of the world. Yet having to stay close to home for most of 2020 was much more of a challenge for their mother than for them.

"Pitt’s narrative is that this case is just about a 'business dispute,'" read an court filing from Jolie's team obtained by E! News in August. "But that is Pitt’s theory. Jolie’s theory is that this case is about Pitt’s attempt to use Miraval as leverage to control and enforce her silence. The jury will decide what the evidence shows, but for now, Jolie is entitled to gather the evidence she needs to support her theory."

His attorneys previously called her efforts a "sensationalist fishing expedition" in a July court filing.

Jolie dropped a lawsuit against the Department of Justice and FBI seeking documents pertaining to the federal investigation in September.

Pitt, who most recently reteamed with George Clooney for the caper flick Wolfs, notched a legal win in November when a judge ruled he had a valid claim regarding their implied contract in the winery lawsuit that merited going to trial.

But as 2025 approaches, Jolie is back in the spotlight for a preferable reason—her work—and while promoting Maria she has cracked a window into what she was going through during her break from making movies, when she "just needed to be home more."

"I went very dark for reasons I’d rather not explain, but I didn't have a lot of light and life within me," she told Vanity Fair in an interview published Dec. 19. "Your light's dim."

Jolie explained, "I wasn't myself for a while, so I wasn't able to give as much to my work for a few years. To feel like I could work again and communicate and to be with nice people—so much of what I do is collaboration with other artists. When it goes well, you’re creating together. When you’re with nice people and creative people, you learn so much about yourself and about life."