The judge Angelina Jolie is seeking to remove from her divorce case is the same judge who married her and Brad Pitt.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt

Angelina, 45, recently filed court documents asking for Judge John W. Ouderkirk to be disqualified from the proceedings, because she claims he failed to disclose his business relationships with her ex-husband's attorneys but Brad's team have hit back, saying this is just a "thinly veiled attempt by Jolie to delay the adjudication of long-pending custody issues in this case".

The papers, filed by Brad's legal team and obtained by the New York Post's Page Six, continued: "Judge Ouderkirk has had a well-documented history with the parties to this proceeding their counsel, including, without limitation, being hand-selected by Jolie to preside over the couple's nuptials in 2014 and serving as a neutral in several matters involving attorneys on both sides of this case.

"Judge Ouderkirk has also accepted additional new engagements involving opposing counsel during the pendency of this action - a fact fully disclosed to Jolie, and still she has never objected to his continued involvement in this proceeding until now.

"On the contrary, Jolie has stipulated three times to extend Judge Ouderkirk's appointment. [This is] an abrupt cry of judicial bias [that] reeks of bad faith and desperation."

And Brad's lawyers added that his and Angelina's six children are "the individuals hurt most by Jolie's transparently tactical gambit as they continue to be deprived over a resolution to these custody issues. Therefore Jolie's motion should be denied".

Angelina's motion to dismiss the judge, came after her lawyer Samantha Bley DeJean discovered that he had an "ongoing professional and financial relationship" with Pitt's attorneys Anne C. Kiley and Lance Spiegel.

It is claimed that the judge worked on a number of cases for Pitt's lead attorney Spiegel and one for his other attorney Kiley, which were not disclosed.

Brad, 56, and Angelina were in a relationship for a decade before they got married in 2014. They were declared legally divorced in April 2019, but parts of their case remain unresolved.

Angelina and Brad opted to pay for a private judge in their divorce case in order to keep the details out of the public domain.

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