Brad Pitt has challenged ex-wife Angelina Jolie's custody win of their five children in court.
At the end of July, the actor was stripped of a 50-50 agreement and now he has petitioned the California Supreme Court to review its recent ruling that his legal team said can cause "irreparable harm" to their kids. The filing comes after the California 2nd District Court of Appeals granted Jolie, who has accused Judge John W. Ouderkirk of failing to disclose business relationships with Pitt's attorney, the major win.
At the time, the appeals court called Ouderkirk's behavior an "ethical breach" but Pitt's legal team stated in the filing that the ruling "effectively upended the constitutionally authorized temporary judging system in California and generated widespread confusion, uncertainty, and instability for judges, litigants, and the California judicial system as a whole," according to E! Online.
The petition further states that "after more than four years of contentious litigation, every day of which has harmed the children and their father, an important and considered custody decision will be entirely undone as a result of an administrative error that is wholly unrelated to the merits of the custody dispute itself."
Commenting on the ruling in a statement to Newsweek, Pitt's lawyer, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., said that Ouderkirk was "improperly disqualified" and that the lower court's ruling "will reward parties who are losing child custody cases, and condone their gamesmanship, by allowing them to wait and see about the likely direction of the case before seeking the disqualification of the judge."
He added that "condoning the use of this type of strategic 'lie in wait' disqualification challenge will cause irreparable harm to both the children and families involved in this case, and other families in other cases, by unnecessarily prolonging the resolution of these disputes in an already overburdened court system."
Pitt and Jolie announced the end of their two-year marriage in 2016. They were officially declared divorced in 2019 and have been locked in a long-running custody battle over their children, sons Maddox, 20, and Pax,17; daughters Zahara, 16, Shiloh, 15, and 13-year-old fraternal twins Vivienne and Knox.
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Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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