Angelina Jolie spent a good decade transforming her image from a wild child who wore vials of blood around her neck to a latter-day Mother Teresa, ministering to refugees and war-zone orphans. But St. Angie’s halo has well and truly slipped.
“It doesn’t matter how much charity work you do,” said a source with knowledge of the Jolie-Pitt family. “If you drive a wedge between a father and his children, you’re an a–hole.”
Over the past few weeks, Jolie, 43, and her lawyers have claimed that Pitt, 54, has failed to pay any “significant” support for their six children. (Pitt’s camp insists that the actor has paid out $9.3 million since the couple’s 2016 split.) Jolie has, as a Hollywood source close to the Jolie-Pitts told The Post, tried to paint her ex as a “deadbeat dad” and created a rift between the actor and his kids.
In court documents, Pitt’s lawyers called out Jolie and her lawyers for filing papers that are “calculated to increase the conflict” and are a “thinly veiled effort to manipulate media coverage.”
Just this month, she was playing mind games. Around August 1, Pitt asked Jolie, through lawyers, to end the marriage as soon as possible, even before the high-profile couple has worked out a custody schedule and financial agreement.
Through her team, Jolie asked her ex to wait a week to consider his request — then filed her own motion, requesting the exact same thing.
“Angelina filed with the judge to make it look like she wanted the early divorce before Brad [did],” said Los Angeles divorce attorney Peter Walzer, who has cases up against one of Jolie’s lawyers, Laura Wasser.
Some say it’s an act of revenge by Jolie, who was, of course, the first to make the public strike in the split.
“She doesn’t want Brad to move on,” said the family source.
“She’s furious that he’s not chasing after her — and [that fury is] now ruining her image.”
Jolie’s latest round of fire also comes this month when she hired two new attorneys — Hollywood bigwig Joseph Mannis, who has represented celebrities Halle Berry and Dennis Hopper in contentious family cases — and San Francisco-based Samantha Bley DeJean.
They join Wasser, who, according to the family source, advised the star not to go nuclear on Pitt.
“I think Angelina thought, ‘I don’t like where this is going, let’s get tough,’ ” Walzer said of the actress’ decision to bring in more hired guns. “Several things have happened that have caused [her] to say ‘I better . . . hire some lawyers in who are going to be aggressive.’ ”
The Hollywood source said Jolie was also provoked to wage war by two of her friends: Lady Arminka Helic, a Bosnian foreign-policy expert and a member of the UK House of Lords; and Chloe Dalton, who worked as former UK Foreign Secretary William Hague’s speechwriter.
The trio all met through Hague, who a close confidant of Jolie’s, and with whom she set up a sexual-violence-prevention initiative for women in Bangladesh.
“They played a big role in all of this, telling Angelina, ‘You’re the greatest’ ” the Hollywood source said of the friends.
Part of Jolie’s strategy to protect her own persona, insiders say, has been to publicly shame Pitt since they announced their divorce in September 2016.
“She filed for divorce out of the blue, then people connected to her floated information to the media that [Pitt] had punched one of their kids on a flight in a drunken, high rage,” said the family source. According to TMZ, Jolie told a social worker that Pitt had struck their son Maddox, then 15, on a private jet.
The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services investigated and cleared Pitt of the child-abuse allegations. In November 2016, Pitt was also cleared by the FBI of any wrongdoing.