Breaking down the Joe Jonas-Sophie Turner divorce timeline
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Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: a pop star’s divorce gets worse, another pop star’s divorce gets better, and Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively brag about their hot married life.
This week, paid subscribers got a look at Taylor Swift’s involvement in the Jonas-Turner divorce drama. Click here to catch up.
Sophie Turner has finally responded to Joe Jonas’s divorce filing, and it’s a doozy. The morning after having a girls’ night out with Jonas’s ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift in Manhattan, the 27-year-old British actress filed a lawsuit in New York alleging that Jonas, 34, has been illegally keeping the couple’s two young daughters in the U.S. and refusing to return them to her in England. The petition was literally filed under the child abduction clauses of the Hague Convention. Eep!
Now that we have Turner’s side of the story via this lawsuit, all of Jonas’s tabloid machinations and seemingly random Florida divorce filing make a lot more sense. It looks like he was trying to file for divorce first, in a friendly U.S. state, to prevent Turner from taking the kids back to the U.K., where, according to Turner’s suit, they have been living since April. Let’s take a close look at the timeline.
According to Turner’s suit, Turner and Jonas made a decision to raise their children in England while visiting over Christmas in 2022. They sold their home in Miami in April 2023, rented a home in England the same month, enrolled their three-year-old in nursery school, and entered into a contract to buy a home in Oxford in July. Turner says she agreed “with some hesitation,” however, to send the kids on tour with Jonas in the U.S. this summer, as she was filming a “time-consuming” TV series in the U.K. The plan then was to collect the kids in New York in September and bring them back to England. (It’s worth noting that the Jonas Brothers tour will move to Europe in February.)
Things went awry “suddenly” when the couple had an argument on August 15, Turner says in the suit. Left unsaid: August 15 was Jonas’s birthday. It’s possible this argument had something to do with the Ring camera footage of Turner that Jonas sources can’t stop talking about, but Turner doesn’t say anything about the nature of the argument in the suit.
By September 3, Jonas sources were leaking to TMZ that he was planning to file for divorce. Right off the bat, the sources framed the situation as a case of Jonas being a dutiful father caring for his children in the states, while Turner was “absent,” working and “partying” in the U.K. Then, Jonas filed for divorce in Florida, even though, as Turner’s suit notes, the couple had sold their home there months earlier. Turner says she found out about the filing through the media.
Jonas contested much of the lawsuit in a statement from his attorney released yesterday. Both parties agree that they met in New York this Sunday to discuss their custody arrangement. Jonas says the meeting was “cordial”; Turner says in her suit that Jonas hid the kids’ passports and refused to let them go back to England. Jonas is now claiming he can’t return the passports because that would be in violation of a Florida court order not to relocate the children while divorce proceedings are ongoing. Jonas’s attorney also claimed in the statement that “Joe has already disavowed any and all statements purportedly made on his behalf that were disparaging of Sophie.” (Okay, who did it then? Your mom?)
Unfortunately, legal experts seem to agree that neither side has a slam dunk case here. Since Turner and Jonas move around frequently for work, both will have a difficult time claiming that the children have a permanent home in the U.K. or Florida. For now, it looks like the two are stuck in New York until they figure something out.
Turner had dinner with Swift again last night at the Hotel Barriére Fouquet, while Jonas was photographed dining outside at the Waverly Inn with his brother Nick Jonas. My best to everyone in this difficult time, and thank God New York has plenty of pap-friendly restaurants.
Ariana Grande picked a convenient week to finally file for divorce from her estranged husband Dalton Gomez. The 30-year-old pop star, who is being represented by top Hollywood divorce attorney Laura Wasser, filed docs on Monday, and Gomez responded with his own similar filing within the hour. Both listed the couple’s date of separation as February 20, which is a bit later than what sources connected to Grande previously told the tabloids, and both acknowledged the existence of a prenup. TMZ reports, however, that Grande will still cut Gomez some kind of check. A small price to pay to finally do a pap stroll with her new married boyfriend Ethan Slater?
On a related note, Hugh Jackman has yet to officially file for divorce from his wife of 27 years, Deborra-lee Furness, but sources are telling the tabloids he’s very sad about the whole thing. “Their lives were so interwoven, so it’s an extremely tricky and gut-wrenching process dividing everything up and figuring out who gets what in terms of assets and finances,” a source told Us Weekly this week.
While Jackman carries out that gut-wrenching process, it appears he’s leaning on a famous friend: Ryan Reynolds. The two did a pap stroll together in New York this week.
Lest you think that indicates anything about the state of Reynolds’s marriage, a new Us Weekly report says otherwise. Yes, everyone else in Hollywood is getting divorced, but Reynolds and his wife of 11 years, Blake Lively, are still freakin’ it like it’s the first time.
“They’re very romantic together,” a source told the tabloid yesterday. “They’re always holding hands — you’d think they were newlyweds.”
“Blake and Ryan have this unbreakable bond as a couple,” another source concurred. “They are still head over heels for each other.”
Glad to hear it.
STUFF BY HILARY DUFF: In an interview with MindBodyGreen.com, Hilary Duff revealed what her perfect day looks like:
“Waking up, opening all the doors in our house, having the dogs running in and out, going for a swim, ordering a delicious coffee, and getting a workout in.”
That does sound nice.
Finally, I’ll leave you with the news that Kylie Jenner has a photo of herself snuggling with Timothée Chalamet as her iPhone’s lock screen:
As my dear friend Mariah Smith has noted, this is quite a statement coming from a mother of two young children.
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