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If you were wondering if Joey Lawrence is still messy, the answer is…Woah! He sure is. Joey and actress Samantha Cope got married in May 2022 after meeting on set of the Lifetime movie, My Husband’s Secret Brother a year earlier. The movie was directed by Joey’s younger brother, Andrew Lawrence, and co-starred his (now) 18-year-old daughter Charleston. Late last week, news broke that Samantha had filed for divorce after two years of marriage and one daughter, Dylan, 19 months. What went wrong? Well, it sounds like Joey caught a case of FAFO. Joey allegedly cheated on Samantha with Melissa Alves, who was a writer, producer, and costar of his on the upcoming movie Socked In For Christmas.

“Joey met Melina Alves on the set of their movie, where she was a producer,” the source claims. “He then love-bombed her just like he love-bombed Samantha. He continued to date Melina even after Samantha found out about it and confronted him.”

When Cope, 37, “wanted to go to counseling,” the source claims, Lawrence “fooled their counselor” and would “get ready for dates with Melina while Sam watched, bawling her eyes out.”

On Aug. 22, TMZ reportedly obtained divorce filings by Alves’ estranged husband Edward Rider, which alleged he discovered in late March that Alves was having an affair with Lawrence. Rider’s divorce paperwork was filed in July, just a few weeks before Cope filed for divorce, per TMZ.

Rider alleged in the court filing that Alves and Lawrence were having the affair in California — where they were presumably located for the filming of Socked In For Christmas — and went on to engage in infidelity “at various other times and places,” according to TMZ.

PEOPLE has reached out to reps for Lawrence, Cope, Alves and Rider for comment, but they have not returned multiple requests for comment. On Wednesday, Aug. 20, PEOPLE confirmed that Lawrence and Cope — who met while filming Lifetime’s My Husband’s Secret Brother in 2021 before tying the knot in May 2022 — were separating after two years of marriage.

According to the divorce filing obtained by PEOPLE, Cope cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for their split and submitted the paperwork on Aug. 13 — two months after their date of separation, which was listed as June 7, 2024. She requested to block the court’s ability to award either side spousal support and is seeking full physical custody of their daughter Dylan, 19 months, while permitting Lawrence visitation at her discretion.

Per the filing, Cope has requested that Lawrence “not take [Dylan] for long, extended periods of time until she is old enough to specifically ask for the visitation time” and that Dylan not “be in the presence of any non-family members while with Joe unless agreed upon by Samantha.”
Eight months before Cope filed for divorce from Lawrence, he spoke to PEOPLE in December 2023 about how they met and why he didn’t initially expect their relationship to develop into a marriage.

“I never dated somebody that I’d worked with before. That was just very, very much out of the ordinary for me,” he told PEOPLE at the time. “I’ve never actually gotten into a serious relationship with somebody that I actually worked with, never. It was very unexpected. These wild twists and turns that you get to be our age. You just kind of go, ‘All right, well, I guess that’s what it is.’ You learn to accept the unorthodox way some things just sort of roll out and you’re thankful for — you’re thankful for it, even though it’s not what you expected.”

[From People]

Woah! (Sorry, couldn’t help but make the joke twice.) Cliché, thy name is Joey Lawrence. That crap about him saying that with Samantha, it was “out of the ordinary” for him to date someone he worked with? Uhh, I guess he liked dating with someone he worked with so much that he decided to do it again. Wild twists and turns, indeed. It’s pretty scummy to cheat on someone, lie through marriage counseling, and then go out with the other woman.

Samantha, for her part, is not going quietly. In addition to making sure everyone knows that Joey would get ready for dates with Melina while his wife would watch him, crying, a source also made it known that he “love-bombed” Melina just like he did to Sam. She also shared the following on Instagram Reels over the weekend:

“An amazing friend of mine recently told me ‘don’t be afraid of the tears. Let them flow. Because every tear is God gently squeezing the pain and devastation from your heart to make room for new beautiful feelings to come in. She also reminded me: ‘the more you cry, the less you pee. So let them flow. You got this. 🩵🙏🏻.”

I feel badly for what Samantha is going through, but honestly, she’s probably better off at this point. She’s filed for full custody of Dylan until she is three, and then, Joey can take her for two nights when he’s not working. I hope she’s able to gather all of her strength and let them figure out what’s best for the child involved in all of this. My other bit of advice to her would be to stop posting anything about her situation on social media. I know she’s hurting, but the less you say, the better. You don’t want to give an attorney any ammunition to make a case against you.

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