Megan Fox says she suffered chronic health problems and stress after buying ‘mouldy’ house from Brad Pitt’s manager
MEGAN Fox says she suffered from “stress” and “chronic” health problems after buying a luxury Malibu home from Brad Pitt’s manager, which allegedly had a mould problem.
The Transformers actress filed a $5 million lawsuit claiming that she bought a property from a consortium led by showbiz manager Cynthia Pett-Dante after bad advice from various agents and lawyers, who are also being sued.
The case has been ongoing for the past two years but The Sun can reveal Megan’s deposition, filed earlier this year at Los Angeles Superior Court, for the first time.
Some 267-pages of deposition documents have come to light revealing that the 34-year-old claims she was not aware of the estate’s major defects when she agreed to buy it for $3.3 million from Cynthia, ’s long-standing manager, in May 2016.
, who was heavily pregnant at the time with her third child, says she failed to realise there was mould all over the property, water damage and that a "mini-zoo" had been built with no permit.
Bizarrely at one point during the proceedings, Megan asked the lawyers questioning her: "Am I going to be arrested?" to which the lawyer answered that he didn't have the power to arrest her.
In these exclusive images, The Sun can reveal the secluded property for the first time, as it had been an undisclosed sale, which shows a steep hillside where Megan says Cynthia stored her animals.
In the testimony, Megan says it was only after moving in that she realised the full scale of the damage, which would cost a minimum $500,000 to repair, and meant the cash-strapped star would have to go straight back to work after giving birth.
Under cross-examination by Cynthia’s lawyer, Megan said: “We went through a rainy season I believe it was that winter, and during the process of the rainy season - the house grew mould, or we became aware of a mould issue at the house.
“I knew there was mold. I had been exposed to mold before, and I was getting chronic headaches and having the same health issues.
"So I assumed there was mold, but there was a leak from the master bathroom to the bedroom below coming through the ceiling.
“I've worked in a lot of places over the course of the years that have had mould. I've been in trailers that have had mould. Usually it has to do with work. It wasn't necessarily a home that I was living in.”
Megan also said she had to go and see a holistic doctor and an acupuncturist to treat her ailments because she doesn't "believe in Western medicine."
She added: "[I had] chronic migraines, like I mentioned, but it's more of a endocrine system issue where the constant stress or the excessive stress, activates the adrenal glands which sets off the pituitary and the thyroid, and for me that acts in an overactive thyroid.
“My body metabolises itself. I eat my own muscle proteins. I lose a lot of weight. I get very sick.
"So it's a cycle that's stress induced, and that's what [the holistic doctor] treats… [the acupuncturist] that’s a different type of medicine, so it’s not phrased the same way, but it’s again just treating symptoms of stress.”
Megan says she was upset that the property was on a hillside that Cynthia had turned into a "mini-zoo" without the correct permits - leaving her liable to tear it down and restore the land.
She continued in the court papers.“I thought I had bought a house with over an acre of usable property, and so once I got the letter from the City of Malibu about the ESHA violation, I realised that I had purchased a house with very little usable property, and I had paid a price for the house that it probably wasn't worth.
“All of that work was done without permits. It wasn’t permitted, and that was not disclosed to me.
“At the point that we were getting the mould reports back, we also learned that the work that had been done on the side of the house where the kids' bedroom was, there was some foundation work that was done, that had not been permitted and not done by a proper contractor either."
She added: "So I guess you could say that I felt like I had been misled there and that wasn’t disclosed to me either.
“I had three little kids. It just wasn’t possible to live there.”
Megan, in her original complaint, called the situation a "nightmarish living hell.”
She added in her deposition: “I can't use the house that I bought because I have to tear out all of the things that sold me on the house in the first place, and we were going to have gardens and animals, and I have three boys.
“We were going to get the eggs from the chickens in the morning, make our own breakfast, and all of those things, those ideas that I had that caused me to buy this house specifically instead of any other house on that street, or in Malibu, or anywhere in Los Angeles, was that it was magical for those reasons, and I don't have access to that anymore.
"My kids don't have access to that anymore.”
The family - her husband at the time Brian Austin Green, 46, and their three children, Noah, seven, Bodhi, six, Journey, three - eventually moved out in October 2017.
Megan now lives with her three kids in a $15,000-a-month rental home in Calabasas while her recently spouse lives in Malibu.
Under cross-examination from a series of lawyers for the co-defendants, court exhibits showed that Megan had been told in emails there were major problems with the house - and she admitted she didn’t respond to many of the emails.
When asked if she read any of the inspection reports prior to buying the house she said: “No because I pay other people to read them and tell me what's in them and advise me on what I should do or not do.”
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She also admitted that she still hadn’t read the inspection reports before taking legal action.
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While the case continues is still ongoing, Cynthia's team have previously sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, saying Megan bought the house after a "three-month closing period and several inspections of the property".
The Sun reached out to Cynthia and representatives for Megan for comment.