The history of Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas: How a Hollywood power couple collapsed

As rumours, and divorce attorneys, circle Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner like vultures, the power couple’s matrimony-turned-acrimony has accelerated into an all-out legal war.

Once a reliably vanilla presence on fashion week red carpets everywhere, the couple’s split and custody battle over their two children now closely resembles Turner’s own bloody Game of Thrones war scenes.

Every Hollywood power couple invents a new language for their divorce, from Gwyneth’s “conscious uncoupling” to the “speculative narratives” that have fuelled Turner and Jonas’ demise, but this couple’s collapse has played out through especially vivid court documents and media headlines.

Turner and Jonas’ romance began in the tradition of the best Hollywood love stories – with an impromptu Las Vegas wedding.

The Stark sister and Jonas brother wed in 2019, after becoming engaged in 2017, having dated for a year. The couple have two daughters from their four-year-long marriage, and were one of Hollywood’s most visible couples (Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard, amongst thousands of others, mourned the curt joint Instagram statement of their split with the refrain: “NO. NO NO NO NO NO NO!”).

So began the year’s strangest PR blitz against Turner, as Jonas’ team sought to discredit her in one of the most ill-advised smear campaigns in recent memory.

In Jonas’s telling, Turner was too busy to care for their children, with Pop Crave reporting that Joe Jonas has reportedly been caring for their daughters “pretty much all the time”. This tabloid spin reeked of a creaky old 90s PR machine, and fans weren’t buying it.

The Daily Mail reported that its sources had claimed the reason for the split was Turner’s “penchant for partying”. Observers started to read more into the wording of the pair’s joint divorce statement, which insisted on their amicable separation.

A public relations consultant specialising in crisis communications even told the New York Times that with her clients: “every single time I am asked to add the word ‘amicable’ or ‘amicably’ to a statement, it’s because it isn’t amicable”.

Now, as Turner has sued Jonas for “the immediate return of children wrongfully removed or wrongfully retained” amid the couple’s separation and impending divorce, one unlikely ally has emerged as a new star of proceedings – Taylor Swift.

Jonas has something of a habit of ending relationships indirectly (he famously broke up with Swift in a brief phone call, a gesture that was appropriately shaded by one of Swift’s songs).

With the rumour that Turner had to find out about their divorce through media reporting, she chose to do the funniest thing imaginable – team up with Jonas’ ex, Swift, to present a united front. In fact, such is Taylor Swift’s almighty power that 2023’s most high-profile public divorce has ended up as more viral promo for her Eras Tour.

This week, however, the couple’s rancour was escalated. But this week, Turner has filed suit for “the immediate return of children wrongfully removed or wrongfully retained” (Jonas’s representatives called this “an unfortunate legal disagreement about a marriage that is sadly ending”). Even in the gladiatorial ring of celebrity divorces, it culminating with an accusation of “child abduction” is in the more extreme realm.

“The Father has possession of the children’s passports,” the documents claim. “He refuses to return the passports to the Mother and refuses to send the children home to England with the Mother.”

Turner wishes for the couple’s daughters, 3-year-old Willa and the 1-year-old identified in their divorce filings as D., be taken immediately back to her native England, which she described in the court filings as their “forever home”.

As the relationship unravels, Turner has opted to stay silent – other than their joint statement, she hasn’t spoken to any press, and her PR machine kept to a low hum in stark contrast to the loudly whirring machinations of Jonas’ libel campaign.

The campaign started with rumours that Jonas had seen something on their home’s Ring camera that Turner had done, and prompted him to file for divorce (the Daily Mail went hard on this angle, reporting that she had “partied ‘without a care in the world’ just days before Joe Jonas divorce.”)

This spin backfired, as Jonas seemed to be suggesting it was at best radical and at worst unethical for a father to be looking after the children while the mother spent time socialising.

Instead, sympathies have swung towards Turner amid the wholly transparent spin. Turner is now enjoying the perfectly timed PR campaign of her revived friendship with Taylor Swift, while Jonas still seems to be smarting from the split, thumbing his ring in public and tearing up during his current tour.

The solidarity symbol of Turner and Swift’s outing seems to reflect the internet’s position on the pair – one where those in the know have sided, or at least sympathised with, Turner.

For those wishing for a pop anthem to soothe their anxieties around the break-up, you can always stream Swift’s ode to Jonas himself – Mr Perfectly Fine.