AP Photo/Lionel CironneauForget the Bastille, the latest thing to storm in France is Brangelina's château.
A pair of paparazzi determined to get snaps of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and, one guesses, new twins Knox and Vivienne, were taken into police custody Thursday afternoon after getting into an altercation with guards at the Jolie-Pitt's Miraval residence in southern France.
Proving just how far they'd go to get the exclusive pictures, the shutterbugs snuck onto the property in camouflage suits and, once found by two guards, got into a skirmish of Fight Club-like proportions.
That, however, is where the similarities between police and paparazzi accounts of the altercation end.
"We caught the two and tried to escort them off the property and the guy's just gone berserk, thrashing out, kicking and actually biting one of the security people, breaking his finger, drawing blood and screaming that he had hepatitis C," Tony Webb, head of the Jolie-Pitt guard squad, told Reuters.
For his part, Luc Goursolas, one of the freelance paparazzi busted in the incident, does admit to having broken a guard's finger and bitten another until he bled, but balks at the line that his behavior was unprovoked: he claims the guards not only hit him with a walkie-talkie but punched and kicked him, requiring three stitches in his head.
He also denies that he claimed he had hepatitis C, insisting instead that HIV was his fictional disease of choice.
"I was pouring blood," he told the Associated Press. "I threw myself at them, put blood all over them, and told them that I had HIV so they would stop hitting me."
Goursolas also claimed that he was not found trespassing on the Jolie-Pitt's property, but rather was in a nearby wooded area, a supposed free-for-all location he said he trudged five hours to get to.
"The forest belongs to everyone," he told the AP, adding that their covered location was the reason for their choice of militant wear. "I wasn't in their garden."
After Goursolas and fellow paparazzo colleague Marianne Saint-Arroman were caught, the talkative lensman claims Pitt himself came out to survey the scene (police, however, were apparently not present for his emergence and therefore could not corroborate that any meeting occurred).
"He told me, 'What you are doing is bad, I am fed up with my private property being violated'...and then he said, 'If you want war, you will get it.' "
The two cameramen, along with the two guards who caught them, were all taken to a station in a nearby village, where both groups filed complaints accusing the other of battery and causing injury.
While police Capt. Olivia Poupot did not speak specifically to the battery allegations, she did say that "no one was seriously hurt or had to be rushed to the hospital or anything, but they did all see doctors."
"There was a fight up at Chateau Miraval between the Jolie-Pitt's security and two paparazzi who had been hiding and taking pictures on the grounds on Thursday," Poupot told E! News. "The security called the police to intervene and arrest the paparazzi for trespassing and assault."
It was unclear how long the renegade paparazzi were on the property before being spotted, though another police source told E! News that the Jolie-Pitt's security team believed the duo may have been behind the illicit shots taken of the family earlier this week, which prompted Pitt to threaten legal action.
"The security team has been desperately trying to find the guys who they know had snuck onto the grounds over the weekend and taken a lot of photos with a long telephoto lens. When they finally found them hidden in a tree, tempers flared on both sides."
A source close to the famous family told E! News that the photos were particularly disturbing to Jolie.
"Angelina was very upset when she saw pictures of the children hardly wearing any clothes posted on a lot of celebrity blogs," the source said. "And Brad's instructed their security to keep all paparazzi away from them from now on."
As for the dual complaints, both parties will have to wait for a judge's ruling to determine whether they can move forward with their legal action or whether any charges will be pressed.
And there may be more legal action on the way.
"The family are really fed up that these people are trespassing so we're going to try to get restraining orders and use the law to do whatever we have to to keep them off the property," Webb said.
They'll be doing so, at least over the weekend, without the help of their two prize guards.
Poupot said that the two guardsmen involved in the altercation had rather quaintly received doctors' sick notes to get out of their next four days' work.
Still, the Jolie-Pitts might not want to hold their breath for a quick resolution of the problem—there are apparently much bigger fish to fry on the French Riviera.
"I won't hide for you that this kind of thing is really not the type of problem that interests us," Poupot told the AP. "There are, in my opinion, far more important things than paparazzi taking photos of a glamour couple."
(Originally published July 25, 2008, at 7:06 a.m. PT)