Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner – he has filed for divorce, saying the relationship was ‘irretrievably broken’. Photo / AP
Opinion:
When Sophie Turner married Joe Jonas in an impromptu ceremony in Las Vegas in 2019, it seemed like a transatlantic match made in heaven. Now, in light of their impending divorce, they face the mother of all dilemmas: which one of them will allow their children to be raised in another country?
Turner, 27, a British actress best known for playing Sansa Stark in the TV series Game of Thrones, and her estranged husband face an impossible legal battle. She is suing Jonas, 34, a pop singer, for the “wrongful retention” of their two daughters in the United States. The couple have been based there for much of their four-year marriage, but Turner claims they decided to make England their permanent base in April this year. On Thursday, she filed a petition with a federal court in New York to demand their daughters return to the UK.
Transatlantic couples who divorce face an unthinkable compromise: either one must stay behind in a country in which they no longer wish to live, or they must face leaving their children behind.
This tragic situation is an example of how an international marriage can so quickly turn sour, says Caroline Korah, Head of Children at Vardags, a leading London family law firm. She deals with cases almost exactly like this “day in, day out”.
There are certainly other celebrity examples, such as that of Madonna and Guy Ritchie in 2016, where Madonna claimed their then-15-year-old son Rocco had been illegally retained in Britain after visiting his father. They reached a settlement and Rocco remained living with Ritchie in London.
This scenario even recently cropped up on the Archers, in a storyline where physiotherapist Lee Bryce, boyfriend of Helen Archer, considered taking legal action against his ex-wife to prevent her relocating their children to San Francisco.
While Turner and Jonas are a particularly “glamorous” example of “an international family with a transatlantic lifestyle and international careers”, says Korah, it is not uncommon for a couple who married across borders to disagree over where their children will be raised following their divorce – and legally, they can quickly find themselves in muddy waters. If one parent wishes to move, they need the other parent’s consent to relocate their children. Unsurprisingly, they rarely reach an agreement. A breach of this – if, for example, one parent were to take the children abroad without consent – is treated as abduction.
Such cases take place across Europe and beyond; internet forums for expats are filled with “stuck parents” who moved abroad and are now grappling with a foreign legal system in an attempt to return their children to the UK. One extreme case was that of Baroness Meyer, who faced a decade-long legal battle after her German ex-husband refused to return their children following a summer holiday to Germany in 1994. She was reunited with them in adulthood; both still live in Germany.
In the case of America and England, it is particularly difficult, says Korah – partly because of the “significant amount of travel – it’s not just packing up a weekend bag and going” – and also because of the international law that governs both countries, the Hague Convention, which has 91 member countries. If a country is signed up to it, it means that if a court rules a child has been wrongfully removed or retained, the other parent can demand the child be returned, as is the case for Turner and Jonas.
It is not difficult to see how such cases are intensely legally complicated. The couple’s daughter Willa was born in 2020; a second daughter, whose name has not been released to the press, was born last year. The children have been temporarily living with Jonas in a Manhattan hotel after the couple agreed they could travel with him on his US tour. Turner has been working in England.
Court documents state that the children are “both involved and integrated in all aspects of daily and cultural life in England”. Jonas filed for divorce on September 1 in the US court in the state of Florida; court documents claim Turner did not know about this until media reports emerged several days later. Turner has since filed a petition with a federal court in New York under Hague Convention clauses relating to child abduction, seeking their return to the UK. The petition says: “The Father has possession of the children’s passports. He refuses to return the passports to the Mother and refuses to send the children home to England with the Mother.”
A statement released on behalf of Jonas said: “This is an unfortunate legal disagreement about a marriage that is sadly ending. When language like ‘abduction’ is used, it is misleading at best, and a serious abuse of the legal system at worst. The children were not abducted… Sophie is making this claim only to move the divorce proceedings to the UK and to remove the children from the US permanently.”
Jonas’s previous filing in Florida includes an order restricting both parents from relocating the children, explains Korah. This “appears to be an attempt to circumvent that Florida decision. This is likely the reason why she has applied under the 1980 Hague Convention because it is a multilateral treaty of which England and the US are member states, and it provides a process by which a parent may seek the return of a child to their home country,” she says.
Turner’s lawyers may be taking inspiration from a similar celebrity case that played out last year, Korah suggests. It was a custody battle between the American actor and comedian Jason Sudeikis and the actress and filmmaker Olivia Wilde, who at the time was dating the British singer Harry Styles. Sudeikis applied for custody of the couple’s two children to move them to New York. His petition was denied when the New York court ruled that jurisdiction for the case lay with the California court, as that was the children’s home state.
For Turner and Jonas, this will be almost impossible to solve. “Relationships – especially transatlantic ones like this – can be very complicated,” says Korah. “It is natural to want to move closer to family and a support network… Very sadly, when a marriage breaks down, it’s not unusual for a parent to say, ‘I might have moved here for love, but now the relationship has ended, I want to go home,’ and to try to take the children with them. It’s a huge decision and often not one that parents agree on.
“Relocation cases are among the most difficult and challenging for a court or couple to decide, because it inevitably means one parent refuses to consent to this and may feel ‘left behind’ and deprived of day-do-day involvement in a child’s life.”
While she doesn’t have “the full history or background”, Korah says that although Turner’s application “is not impossible, it is going to be a challenging one for her… from what I’ve read, I don’t know that she’s able to say that the UK has jurisdiction for the return application she’s making.”
This is because, legally, a child’s “habitual residence” is different to their nationality or right to reside: it is where a person has “established their centre of interest… where the children are registered for their GP, education or childcare.”
Korah has “seen a number of them and they’re not generally successful because you’re looking at what the children’s best interests are. They’re very difficult to decide,” she says.
“What application I think she probably should be making is a relocation, for permission to relocate to England, and if [Jonas] won’t consent to that she needs the court’s permission.” This is likely to be a lengthy, expensive process, so she would advise anyone in a similar position to seek specialist legal advice.
The court may decide in the interests of the children, but for the parents, in cases like these, there are no winners.
'We never get to see anyone who beats the government.'