Brad Pitt won a key appeal on Wednesday June 24 when the California Court of Appeal reversed a lower court ruling and kept Yuri Shefler in his winery lawsuit over Angelina Jolie’s sale of her shares. The court also said Pitt and Mondo Bongo may recover appeal costs.
The ruling matters because it changes the shape of a fight that has been moving through the courts since 2022, when Pitt sued Jolie over the sale of her shares in the French winery. He has said that when she sold those shares to Tenute del Mondo in 2021, he ended up facing an unwilling partner in Shefler. The appeal court did not decide the whole case, but it did decide that the dispute belongs in California and that Shefler cannot walk away at this stage.
The court said the agreement to buy Jolie’s shares was governed by California law and found that Shefler’s contacts with California were enough to keep him in the case. In the court’s view, he had purposefully availed himself of the benefits of a California forum, and the controversy arose from those contacts. It also said his dealings tied back to the purchase of a California company from a California resident, and that connection caused the injury at the center of the lawsuit.
That is the part of the ruling Pitt will use, but it is not the whole story. Jolie’s attorney, Paul Murphy, said Thursday June 25 that the decision has no impact on the merits of the case and “certainly has no impact on Ms. Jolie’s case.” He said she is looking forward to defeating the case at trial next year so the family can focus on healing and moving on. That leaves the core dispute unresolved: whether the sale violated an alleged agreement that Pitt says required his approval, or whether no two-party consent agreement ever existed, as Jolie has previously argued.
For now, the appellate win gives Pitt a procedural advantage and keeps pressure on the defense team heading toward trial next year. It does not end the winery fight. It does, however, ensure that the next round will be fought with Shefler still in the case and with California law still at the center of it.
