Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas’s split last year was messy from Day 1. Joe seemed to have a plan in place, and he began executing it quickly over Labor Day weekend last year. Stories about how Sophie “likes to party” and how Joe is the one left taking care of their daughters while Sophie bar-hops and, you know, works. Joe filed for divorce and the smear campaign continued for several more weeks before Sophie pushed back in a big way, suing Joe for keeping their daughters’ passports and refusing to bring the girls to her in the UK. It looked like it was going to be a long, drawn-out international custody battle with plenty of mud-slinging in both directions. Thankfully, after a few months of back-and-forth and the good work of some sensible mediation, they hammered out a temporary custody agreement and Sophie is now living in the UK, and she and Joe share custody of the girls. Sophie is now telling her side of the chaos of the past eight months. She covers British Vogue and this is a long-ass piece – you can read it here. Some highlights:

The bad-mom stories about how she “liked to party”: “I mean, those were the worst few days of my life. I remember I was on set, I was contracted to be on set for another two weeks, so I couldn’t leave. My kids were in the States and I couldn’t get to them because I had to finish Joan. And all these articles started coming out… It hurt because I really do completely torture myself over every move I make as a mother – mum guilt is so real! I just kept having to say to myself, ‘None of this is true. You are a good mum and you’ve never been a partier.’”

Whether or not she was aware that Joe would file for divorce: “I mean, it’s unfathomable the amount of people that will just make sh-t up and put it up based on a picture. A picture might tell a thousand words, but it’s not my story. It felt like I was watching a movie of my life that I hadn’t written, hadn’t produced, or starred in. It was shocking. I’m still in shock.”

Fans rushing to support her online: “If something like this had happened to me 10 years ago I don’t think I would have had the same support. I just feel very lucky to be alive in a time when people are open-minded. Thank f-ck for Gen Z.”

Fighting for custody: “There were some days that I didn’t know if I was going to make it. I would call my lawyer saying, ‘I can’t do this. I just can’t.’ I was just never strong enough to stand up for myself. And then, finally, after two weeks of me being in a rut, she reminded me that it was my children I was fighting for. Once anyone says to me, ‘Do it for your kids,’ I’m doing it. I wouldn’t do it for myself, but I’ll find the strength for them.”

She was 24 years old when she learned she was pregnant while on a retreat in Bali. “Maybe because I was so young, I sat on it for a week. Thankfully there were therapists there to help me talk things through. I told my husband when I got back. I remember throwing the pregnancy test at him, saying ‘What do you think we should do? Do you think we should have it?’ When you’re in your early 20s, life is so frivolous. At that point, I really didn’t know if I wanted to be a mother, but something changed in me that day. I just knew I had to have her.”

Her second daughter was planned: “Because my ex and I travel so much, I wanted Willa to have a sibling. I wanted them to have each other. They’re so much fun, total girlie girls and absolute rays of sunshine in my life.”

She’s no longer taking medication for depression or anxiety: “Not since I moved back to the UK. Which is great and also surprising, because I anticipated that I’d need to – now perhaps more than ever. There’s something about a community and a support system that I’ve never realised is so important up until now. And I think the reason I was on medication for so long is because I didn’t have those people with me. Now that I’m back home, I’m actually the happiest I’ve been in a really long time. I’m starting over again, rediscovering what I like to do, who I like to be with.”

Marrying young, living in LA: “It was really surreal, like a fever dream. Because he was older than me, I just felt like I was really taken care of, to the point I came back home and didn’t know how to do anything for myself.” She found her new life in LA to be quite isolating. “You can’t just bump into someone at a bar there, you have to drive 40 minutes with an intention of seeing someone. There was a lot of attention on the three [Jonas] brothers, and the wives. Well, we were always called the wives, and I hated that. It was kind of this plus-one feeling. And that’s nothing to do with him – in no way did he make me feel that – it was just that the perception of us was as the groupies in the band.”

When they moved to Miami in 2021: “We were in this community full of 50-year-old men, so imagine trying to make friends on the dog walk. I just felt like a little bird trapped in a gilded cage. It was amazing, yes, but I didn’t have any friends there.” As a parent, she was also increasingly unsettled by America’s gun violence epidemic. When news of the Uvalde killings broke in the spring of 2022, she was overwhelmed. “I couldn’t fathom being a mother of one of those children knowing that this was something your country could fix, that they’d rather have rights to guns than give kids a right to life. Meanwhile, women in the US are being stripped of their rights, left, right and centre. It all contributed to this feeling of I have to get out, I have to get out.”

Her friendship with Taylor Swift: “Taylor was an absolute hero to me this year.” When she found herself in New York last September without a place to stay, she reached out to Swift in hopes the pop star might know someone renting. Swift immediately offered up her place for free. “I’ve never been more grateful to anyone than I am for her because she took my children and me, and provided us with a home and a safe space. She really has a heart of gold.”

Her boyfriend Peregrine Pearson. “I am having fun dating. It’s very fun. I mean, it’s strange when you get married so young. It’s like you never really learn how to date. So it’s all very new to me.”

[From British Vogue]

Considering all of the sh-t that went down, I found her attitude towards Joe to be very mature. She complimented him as a father throughout, she did not bad-mouth him once, she avoided blaming him directly for his “Sophie is a bad mother who loves to party” divorce campaign. Maybe they truly worked out their sh-t in mediation, or maybe she just knows that it won’t help to bitch about her ex in print.

There’s something she’s sort of hinting around at, which she’s probably working on in therapy – she partially blames herself for falling for Joe’s charms when she was so young, and for putting herself in the “bird in a gilded cage” position. That’s not really her fault though – Joe pursued her because she was young and inexperienced. He wanted to put her in the gilded cage. He wanted to isolate her. As soon as she began stepping out of his gilded cage and finding her wings, that’s when he filed for divorce.

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Cover & IG courtesy of British Vogue.