Free to read: Joe Jonas had to look after his own children? Diddums
The singer's divorce from actress Sophie Turner is being blamed on her 'bad mothering'. We're not fooled.
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It’s back to school week. For some that means shining your shoes or buying a new pencil case. Others make September resolutions and that’s exactly what I hope Sophie Turner is doing right now. Specifically: to give her soon-to-be ex-husband Joe Jonas enough rope with which to hang himself.
To be fair, Jonas doesn’t seem to need any help with that. The 34-year-old former boyband member (remember The Jonas Brothers? Like Hanson but worse) has filed for divorce from British Game of Thrones actress Turner, whom he married in 2019 and shares two daughters, aged three and one.
Which for most people might be enough to keep things amicable and as private as possible. That he has reportedly hired the big shot divorce lawyer who represented scandal-hit Tiger Woods suggests this may not be Joe’s angle.
We can’t know for sure, of course, because the only people speaking relentlessly to celebrity gossip websites like TMZ about the split are sources ‘close to the couple’ and ‘who have direct contact with Joe’ and at no point have been named as Joe himself. Got that?
What we can be certain of, because there’s paperwork, is that his court filing against Turner claims that their marriage is “irretrievably broken.” Which, on the surface, sounds sad and probably not the ‘united’ decision their joint Instagram posts announcing the split claim it is.
And yet. The PR narrative which has been leaking out this week, has those ‘sources’ explaining that Jonas has been desperately trying to save his marriage. Divorce was his last resort. But he couldn’t because apparently - brace yourself - ‘she likes to party, he likes to stay at home. They have very different lifestyles’.
Oh and that “he never wanted to break up his family, but he had to take what he felt was the best course of action for his girls”.
Which, naturally, is to stand by and watch as Turner - who has previously spoken about her mental health and reportedly struggled after the birth of their second child - is shamed as a bad mother. So bad, in fact, that it supposedly led to the breakdown of her marriage and their happy family home.
What will that course of action teach his girls, exactly? That in order to be a ‘good’ mum, you need to obliterate your entire self and remain glued to the family home? That you can’t possibly party (the only current evidence for which seems to be Turner having a cast night out in Birmingham after filming her latest TV series), as well as run a career and a domestic life?
And let’s not overlook the murky assertion from ‘multiple sources who have direct contact with Joe’ (them again) that it was something Turner said or did, which was captured on their ringcam doorbell, which made him realise the marriage was over. Which sounds about as enlightened as claiming that the final straw was the night she burnt his dinner.
Of course, we can’t know what really went on inside their marriage. But, to observers, it comes across as the sort of insidious messaging used by those men who resort to ‘as the father of daughters’ girlwashing to publicly convince us that there's not a sexist bone in their bodies.
What’s more, these ‘sources’ seemingly want us to feel sorry for Jonas because - as TMZ reported - “over the last 3 months Joe has been caring for their two young children ‘pretty much all of the time’ even as his band was touring”. He “kept a happy face for the kiddos, making them smile and trading high-fives as everyone ate and chatted.”
All together now: diddums. Poor old Joseph, having to actually do some parenting at the same time as working so that his wife - who has spent a significant part of the last four years pregnant and postpartum - can pick up her career. How terrible. What hardship. Someone give the guy a Blue Peter badge for babysitting his own children.
We’ve not been fooled though. The ‘bad mother’ rumours being spread about Turner are so predictable - like a pop song from the Jonas Brothers playbook - that we’re seeing straight through them. We’ve read it before. There was even a novel last year by Jessamine Chan called The School for Good Mothers, in which women deemed to be failing their children are sent to an institution and taught that motherhood must subsume their own personalities in order to be perfect. It was a dystopia, by the way. We know how this story goes, especially when it’s written by men. We’re not buying it. Mum-shaming is a giant red flag… as is asking out 13-year-old Gigi Hadid when you’re a 19-year old man. Which, incidentally, Jonas is alleged to have done.
Frankly, we’re fed up with carrying the weight of expectation on our backs when it comes to what a woman ‘should be’ and ‘should do’. I don’t know about you but my spine bloody hurts - and I’m willing to bet Turner’s does, too.