It feels like it’s been a while since someone getting a divorce has been publicly messy about it. At this stage of the game, most celebrities call their publicists or crisis managers right after their divorce lawyer, which has led to the ever-so civilized “joint statement” announcing a divorce, a public promise to keep the kids out of it, and quiet negotiations out of court. But not for Alice Evans and Ioan Gruffudd. I think Gruffudd would probably love to issue a joint statement and keep the drama down to a minimum. But Alice does not. Alice wants to pour her messy heart out on Instagram. We learned this week that Ioan filed for divorce from Alice, a filing which came about six weeks after he apparently told her that he wanted a divorce anyway. Alice has been keeping us updated about how she’s feeling about all of this:
The Fantastic Four actor, 47, filed a divorce petition on Monday in Los Angeles, PEOPLE previously confirmed, and on Tuesday night, Evans shared a news article about the divorce on Instagram, implying that she found out about it online: “Oh. Ok. Thanks for letting me know. I guess?” she wrote.
Evans — who met Gruffudd on the set of their 2000 film 102 Dalmatians and married him in 2007 — followed up her initial reaction with a pair of lengthy Instagram captions on Wednesday reacting to the divorce, candidly expressing how she is dealing with the split.
“I can’t sleep. Not a wink. I am terrified for what tomorrow will bring. Oh don’t worry, I’m fully aware of how pathetic that sounds,” she began. “I’ll make it worse. Do you what I’m mostly scared of? It’s who the girl is. I know! Why? Why would it even matter?”
The actress, 49, who shares daughters Ella Betsi Janet, 11, and Elsie Marigold, 7, with Gruffudd, then said she worries her “little girls will be disappointed by their Dad’s behavior and model that in their future relations with the opposite sex.”
Evans wrote that she’s “scared” of how Gruffudd will respond to her speaking out about “his sudden decision to serve me.”
“I couldn’t believe how many people told me to accept it ‘with dignity’. What is dignity? I think ‘dignity’ is a way of covering up our own hurt,” Evans said. “I think dignity is a way of others telling us to shut up, because THEY don’t want to think about our hurt.”
Evans went on to share that she decided to be upfront with her kids and tell them about the divorce filing. “… I imagine some mothers who DONT believe in telling their kids the truth about everything will object,” she added, then claiming of Gruffudd, “That’s fine. My ex-husband believes in lying rather than harsh truths.”
In a subsequent post, Evans called the filing “very sad and out [of] the blue,” adding that she is “heartbroken.”
“I’m sorry but f— your discomfort about my lack of dignity. F— your cheap quips about how ‘she didn’t know! Ha ha ha what a load of bollocks.’ I come here to share an experience that has all but broken me (but won’t) ….” she wrote. “LET WOMEN TALk! !!WE ALL HAVE RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH, not just he men.” Evans ended the message: “Love all round, not hate.”
I’ll be generous for a moment – I think divorce is tough for many people, and many people are undignified about divorce and heartbreak privately and publicly, at home with friends, on social media, out in a bar getting hammered. I think Alice has every right to feel whatever way she wants to feel. She’s a grown woman and if she wants to wallow, so be it. All that being said, I do think it’s a terrible idea for grown people to use social media as some kind of confessional hub to “perform” their sad, messy lives. I also think Alice is being kind of gross to use her daughters as pawns in her little performance too.
Photos courtesy of Instagram, Avalon Red.
Any ideas who the other woman is? Has he been in any movies with possible suspects?
I don’t think its ever been confirmed that there even is another woman. I think there were pictures of him holding hands with someone, after all this drama started. We don’t know when exactly Ioan and Alice separated, as he spends most of his time in another country.
He might be seeing someone else, either as an affair or because he and Alice separated awhile ago and she just doesn’t accept that. I think it’s kind of gross that people are speculating about his female co-stars, as in “surely he’s sleeping with one of them.” Like, they’re women in proximity to a man getting a divorce so one of them *must* be the cause of it? No thanks.
Apparently it was Ella Newton who plays his daughter on Harrow (who is 30)
She has been with the same guy for years .Let’s not buy in to Crazy Alice territory as blame some random wonan for this
The Sun who said this before then went back and said they had no proof
“Let’s not buy in to Crazy Alice territory as blame some random wonan for this The Sun who said this before then went back and said they had no proof”
I missed this, did Alice accuse her too?
So hard to keep up with this story lol.
Yes she did . In the screed yesterday she brought up this selfie .
Bear in mind who Alice’s buddy is (Mrs Piers Morgan)
That’s an unfair assumption. Normally I’m very suspicious of the motives of men, but in this case I don’t think there needs to be another woman. And surely if there was Alice would have told us every last bit of it.
He seems professional and low key, she seems very extra and tiring. They have lived apart for the better part of 2 years. Until something else surfaces I will give him the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, it’s probably 50/50, I can totally buy it that she is horrible enough for him to leave her even if there is no other woman, especially since he got used the past years to live apart from her and spending now all of a sudden all the time together in quarantine might have opened his eyes.
Him filing so quickly for divorce and not telling her does make me a bit suspicious though. Usually there is no hurry unless you have already plans (new girlfriend, buying a new house, etc.), but maybe he just wants to be free to be happy again as soon as possible rather that he already has somebody lined up.
As you said we also don’t know how long they are actually seperated. This whole drama goes back to last september, with Alice indicating (and deleting) multiple times that he doesnt love her. They may be already for months seperated but he only moved out last month.
If you know someone is emotionally unstable at worst or a raging drama queen at best, I can see avoiding the arguments and just filing.
Also, she says he didn’t tell her – I suspect he’s been telling her he’s leaving for years and she’s either been ignoring him or attempting to emotionally blackmail him into staying.
He was living in Australia for a large part of the year .He was in The Guardian about 2 years ago explaining their difficulties
Is September to March sudden ?
He hold her IN SEPTEMBER .Because she when of a posting spree at that point
yeah, Lady Keller is right.
she would have named the woman publicly if there was one. she’s clearly not above doing that…that is, IF there were, in fact, another woman, I think she’d have no problem naming her in order to shame her and possibly get “fans” to harass her.
There might be one or not, but she’s not garnering any sympathy from me, because she is trying to alienate her daughters from him in retaliation for an imaginary wrongdoing.
Some women cannot stand the concept that the ‘love part’ is over, it is drilled into them that once people get married it is forever.
Unfortunately the “forever love” is mostly a myth and people stop loving their partners, it is life.
My mum was unfortunately like that and it took her 36 years to separate from my father although by the time they did he was together with another woman for 10 years.
I’m very sad for their daughters. Divorce is always a difficult thing, and one parent dumping everything out there very publicly doesn’t help.
That was my immediate thought. Seriously, this seems what therapy and journaling is good for.
One of those diary books with a little lock would be perfect.
Oh, the days before social media…
Honestly?
She comes across as using emotional manipulation, perhaps not on purpose (I suspect there’s something else going on health wise) but “I just can’t live without you” isn’t always romantic. “He’s leaving our family” is another one that sticks out.
No one should be guilted into staying
This completely. I’m sure it says a lot about her mental state but it’s so far from healthy and I’m sure she will regret it in time but the damage will already be done. She perhaps doesn’t realise that she’s probably doing as much damage to her kids with her behaviour as he is by leaving, if not more.
Exactly. She’s like “I refuse to be dignified.” And everyone responds “Yeah, we see that.”
It doesn’t make her bold or courageous. It makes her look like she lacks emotional regulation, she’s more concerned about herself than her kids, and it’s probably a relief to get away from her. This year, it’s her husband, in a little over a decade, it will be her kids. People this self centered in one aspect of their lives generally are that way in all aspects of their lives.
“He’s leaving our family.” No, Alice. He’s leaving YOU.
Hey, I totally get it.
If my current husband cheated on me like the last one did, which resulted in our divorce, you can BET I would make it known what he did. I’d tell ya mama, ya brother, ya neighbor, the mail carrier and all them.
I’m of the mindset that if he is stupid enough to make those decisions or throw away our family, then he needs to own it both publicly and privately.
This. I had one friend describe it to me as “my silence conveniences him.” Like, the husband gets to pretend he’s the good guy and just gets to go on with his life, and if the wife speaks out it humiliates them both. Because that’s how society works. Men treat their wives and families abysmally, and if women cry or yell or tell tales it’s “she’s being pathetic, I can see why he left her.” Being a woman, even in 2021, isn’t for the faint of heart. And it’s often other women who excuse men’s behavior and condemn how their partners “handle it” with the most vitriol.
I get what you’re both saying but turn it around and imagine that actually your relationship was terrible and you just couldn’t hold on anymore so you decide to leave. We don’t know whats happened or what drove the split but I do understand that right now she is feeling like the victim.
I’m kind of on the other side of this. I left a toxic and abusive relationship with my three kids in tow. I was destroyed as a person but almost a decade later, I don’t regret walking away. My ex went on the rampage, telling anyone that would listen what a terrible person I was, how I’d broken our family. So many people took his side. He felt he was the victim. I know I’d blindsided him by leaving because I’d put up with so much for so long that I guess he thought it would just continue. As far as he was concerned, our relationship was troubled but ok. If I’d stayed, I don’t think I’d be here today.
I don’t know these people, or exactly what’s happening here, but do know it’s true that no one–NO ONE–can really know what goes on inside a marriage beyond the people who are in, and if that relationship ends, they often leave with very, VERY different stories.
When women tell me they left an abusive partner, I believe them. When men tell me their ex was “crazy,” I for the most part don’t. You can call that sexist, but it’s also my lived experience, 9 times out of 10. Is that what’s happening here? No clue. But I’ve met a lot of “nice, normal guys” and their second wives who have absolute horror stories about how “nuts” the guy’s ex is/was. And, guess what, when he decides to leave wife No. 2, she suddenly becomes “crazy,” too. It’s quite the coincidence.
No one knows how to manipulate your personal shortcomings and insecurities, which all humans have, better than your life partner. This doesn’t excuse anything Evans has done or said and, as I said elsewhere, this isn’t me caping for a women I do not know and might legit be an exhausting mess, at best. But I tend to work within the framework that I wouldn’t want anyone to judge my entire persona based on the worst moments in my life and, whatever else is going on, I trust that Evans is in genuine distress, so I’m willing to give her more leeway, at least based just on the stuff I’ve seen here (which is all I’ve seen), than most of the commenters.
Can’t tell you if that’s just my age (old), or my own personal experience–which, by the way, is happily married to one person, not a “bitter divorcee,” lest that be the assumed as the only way one could relate. What I see in those posts are raw pain, and my instinct is to try to sympathize with anyone feeling that kind of hurt, even if they’re not handling things exactly as I hope I would.
As the child who lived through this situation, it’s not just about you and your pride and your hurt. As the child who lived through this situation, the embarrassment from your actions that people still remember gets to stay with me to this day. But glad the mailman knowing your man’s a dog means so much to you…
There are many ways for her to vent her feelings and her truth without using her children as her therapy and emotional crutch. I’m sorry she’s so hurt, but she is acting in a way that could be detrimental to her children (who knows what’s she’s really telling them, hopefully it’s all for the ‘gram). Her personality seems exhausting, which to me means she’s incredibly needy, and that probably stems from some kind of insecurities. And I understand that! But not when it affects other’s growth.
If the man is a dog then its gonna come out sooner or later. Mailman be damned. By that point I’m sure any children are already beyond privy to what went on behind those closed doors.
Yes, why isn’t she more concerned about their kids?
Also, the reason we need friends and community (and therapists) is to have people we can vent and act a WHOLE ENTIRE fool with while we fall apart. Without making self destructive choices from that space.
Where are her friends? Where is her crew? A woman who has limited close adult relationships, who also repeatedly prioritizes her own personal public emotional expression over her kids’ well being is a woman who has probably earned getting dumped, imo.
“If my current husband cheated on me like the last one did, which resulted in our divorce, you can BET I would make it known what he did. I’d tell ya mama, ya brother, ya neighbor, the mail carrier and all them.”
Probably 50%+ of people who’ve been cheated on would totally feel like doing this regardless of consequences.
Alice, however, should be objective. He isn’t a high earner in HW but maybe makes a decent 150K, 200K a year. (? totally random guess)
She doesn’t work as far as I know, but sells odd bits and bobs online. They have two young kids.
My point is this: Taking down his reputation by naming and shaming won’t help with child support payments and alimony, which she’ll need.
I get the need to go scorched earth on someone who broke your heart but when you have kids it’s important to shield them from this type of thing. She needs a therapist, not an Instagram post.
Agreed 100%. Her kids are old enough to see her posts – as are their friends. It’s too much for them to deal with it this way. It sounds like she’s bombarding them with it in person as well.
Honestly, she may be a terrible person, but all I feel for her reading this is sympathy. Is it a bad idea to dump all this publicly when talking about a high profile partner? No question. But that level of raw, human pain and grief is relatable. And if you don’t relate to it, you fear it, which is one reason people are so disdainful of those they find “messy”—it’s a way to feel safe and superior. To believe nothing like that could happen to you, because you would never do ____ which clearly must be what brought this on.
I mean, I would never do this exact thing (social media oversharing), but I have seen friends blindsided by their husbands whom I also knew and loved and are suddenly acting like cruel monsters who never cared about them. I’ve seen strong, capable, kind women broken emotionally and acting in ways I, and they, never would have predicted. Many of those men say later they were horrified by their own actions and couldn’t take seeing their wife’s raw pain, which is what “made them” lash out.
My reaction was similar. She does seem like a bit of a nutter and definitely should step away from social media but I saw a raw truth in her words that made me realize how terrible people can be in processing and reacting to strong emotions. Life is complicated and messy and we work so hard to pretend it’s not.
thank you!!
Her IG, if you scroll through it, seems to have been a lonely cry for help for months and months.
The last photo just screams “he’s not that into you”.
It’s hard to go through that in the dating world, so it has to be even worse to experience emotional checking out in a marriage.
She may wear her emotions on her sleeve, but he likely knew that going into the marriage. It also appears that things were on thin ice for some time.
Is she trying to jump start a career in post-divorce “something”?
That woman needs to log out from the internet and find some self-worth. If that is how she behaves on the internet in front of strangers, how is she privately? The emotional manipulation towards her kids must be so bad. Cheating is bad and disgusting, but that wife is a handful.
She said he actually changed her Twitter password so she can’t spew forth on Twitter. He’s probably trying to guess her IG log-in details; she still has access to that.
She’s dumping all her messy feelings on her children? Dear God.
I’d divorce her too.
Not a clue who these people are or what the situation is but I applaud her declaration. Don’t know about anyone else but there’s been a couple times in my life I’d have enjoyed going apeshit.
I know Alice as a lead from one movie – The Christmas Card, with Ed Asner portraying her father. It is replayed every holiday season.
I watch it every year (along with the Nine Lives of Christmas cat movie).
She also was in Lost and possibly one of the least memorable characters, lol.
I think she is hurting and using social media as her outlet. My first husband (together for 10 + years) abruptly left me. He didn’t have the balls to tell me it was someone else (of course I found out) and tried to blame me for being a bad partner and crazy. If her husband pulled the trigger for a divorce I think someone else is involved. Most people have a jump off when they end long term relationships. Maybe I’m just sent I’ve to the situation but I think he has some shadiness around this and it’s not just “my wife is crazy so I have to divorce her now.”
He told her last year he was leaving .
So you buy that he is abusing his chidren then as you buy the best of her crap
This is woman who went after fan sites back in the day
In addition the common sense that everyone is delivering, I’ll add that “getting it all out” on social media never, ever is the path to personal peace. It keeps you hyped up, you get addicted to the responses and the attention and instead of dealing with the crisis at hand. A lot of people even take a break from social media when in a hard place.
Yes, she lost my sympathy when she proudly dragged her children into it.
There are a lot of ways to get your feelings out online without revealing your identity. Just go to reddit. Whenever I see friends and family doing embarrassing stuff on social media I always think they should save it for reddit. You get the dopamine hit of upvotes without the quasi-public humiliation. That’s what this is about really. Likes and views on social media for the neuro feel-goods. You can get that anonymously too.
I still have no clue who these people are!
she has now started last night to comment back old posts on her Instagram.
Here she says for example that her husband is nicer if he drinks but he isnt drinking since they have kids lol https://www.instagram.com/p/B6zFPQcl3BK/
those are from the time where he came back grumpy from Australia last August, supposedly where the issues started
https://www.instagram.com/p/CED3yPllmue/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CED-12-FJGQ/
“It’s just all over everything. He was back but he didn;t want to be back. I was slowly crumbling inside because I’d been waiting for this re-relationship for years. Finally we’d hit the light at the end of the tunnel. And yet…
He wasn’t happy. I still don’t; know if it’s beause he met someone or because he just changed his mind about me.
What I need to work on is not letting my self-eteem go so dangerously low as it did in these initial few weeks.”
Let’s hope for her and the kids sake that she is getting better
I have no doubt she is in pain, but her behavior and language points toward narcissistic rage, emotional manipulation, and parental alienation. This is beyond messy and into the realm of inflicting long term harm on herself and everyone around her. Barring abuse, a spouse should have every right to leave a relationship without being shamed for it by their ex-partner.
The post where she talked about showing her 7 year old the articles about the divorce and she ran away crying?! Truly monstrous behaviour.
WTF?!?!? That’s just cruel and unnecessary.
I know she has said she has no family in LA (that’s rough) and no close friends in LA (None? After living there for over a decade? Uhhhhh), but Zoom and the telephone exist. She doesn’t have to play the “deepest respect for each other” game, but a LOT of this should be vented to girlfriends (or a trusted cousin?). NOT to your 7 year old!!
That’s exactly when she showed her true colours in my opinion. How do you “playfully” show your seven year old a headline about your divorce?!
ugh this really triggers me, when I was a kid my Dad left my Mom. And she went nuclear. If she was miserable we were all going to be miserable. And told me details no 7 year old should know. It’s affected me to this day. She’s punishing him through the kids in a bid to get him to come back. It’s sad and F her.
While I have some sympathy for the fact that she’s clearly hurting, I have a real problem with her (or any other parent) sharing divorce filings with their children under the guise of “well, I’m just being honest! I’m not going to lie to my children!” That’s b.s. and it’s damaging to the children. If you want to vent about your divorce to your friends, your mom, your book club, whatever, go for it. But children should not be a sounding board or an emotional crutch for parents. It’s unfair to them and it is extremely stressful for a child to be essentially put in a position of having to comfort a parent.
There is something very wrong with this woman and I hope the court mandates therapy for everyone.
Short and sweet and 100% true IMO.
I know what she’s going through. It’s acutely painful for a long time. She should explain dad leaving to her young girls but in basic and age appropriate terms and with a lot of reassurance. The urge to vent in public is understandable but it won’t help her, the girls or the situation. As Chumplady says, “If it feels good don’t do it”. Alice should vent to her close friends and her therapist as much as she needs to. It’s a rough road.
I agree.
She’s in a terrible place, needs empathy and help; the kids need major support. Obviously the friends and family support is not there or never was, and that’s a sign that a lot went wrong in this poor woman’s life, mostly very early on- childhood- before hubby was on the scene. Nevertheless, he had two children with her, he left the children for long periods with her and probably knew she was mentally unwell. So he‘s a slimeball.
That post with an old picture of her and Ioan…she seems slightly unhinged to me beyond being brokenhearted. I can’t deal with people who air their dirty laundry on social media (or write a novel in the captions about anything, tbh). I hope their kids have the support they need right now.
If this is way she handles things regularly, I’m surprised that he hung around this long. She seems like a lot and while it is her right to be upset and wallow, it’s NOT okay for to drag her children into this and try to alienate them from their other parent. She needs a friend to tell her to pull herself together.
Welp, I have a mother like this. She never could ever centre anything but her own dramas, trials, and tribulations. Never could hide a thing from her kids. Never could set something aside for the good of others. Nope, if she felt it, she had to put it out there. I believe this is pathological. It’s one thing to wallow amongst your best girlfriends. It’s another thing to wallow amongst internet strangers, airing every thought in your head with no regard to how it impacts your children–what they feel while being burdened with adult emotions that they lack the skills to navigate or contextualize.
Honey, I don’t think it was the selfie that caused it…😬😬😬
As an aside, “Elsie Marigold” is a great name! And my $.02 – don’t poison your kids against your partner. If he’s that much of a fuckwit, he’ll do it all by himself.
How exactly is he a fuckwit ?
She said “if” as in they will figure it out themselves if he ain’t shit
I’ve had friends lose their minds over a divorce, and said and done some out-of-character things, which i completely understood. It’s an unstable time. But what she’s doing and saying is probably also part and parcel of her personality anyway. From what I’ve read on here by others about her in an earlier thread on this split and by some of the histrionic things she is saying, he’s probably wanted to leave her for a couple of years. He probably stayed because of the kids. Even if you aren’t happy, divorce is a huge step when you have your children and love them. Being away as much as he has for work certainly didn’t help the marriage, but on the other hand, maybe it allowed the marriage to survive a little longer. If he had had to spend a normal amount of time with Alice, maybe the breakdown would have come sooner, because the cracks in the marriage couldn’t be ignored or that he just didn’t love her anymore.
I do feel for her. She loves him. That doesn’t mean she isn’t a high-strung, exhausting person to be married to, seemingly narcissistic, and as an actor, he is also probably narcissistic and a pain to deal with.
Has he met someone? Probably. But I don’t believe the new woman , if there is one, was the cause of the marriage breakdown, just the catalyst for him to finally leave. I saw a post by someone on the Daily Mail that said he had a fan website, but that he had to close it down because Alice had a habit of coming on there and getting into arguments with fans.
I feel for the children. They’re hurting and confused. What she did to her daughter after she came home from a nice time with daddy was disgustingly selfish and cruel to her own child.
I agree with your take on this. Several things can be true at once.
The incident she described involving the younger daughter may bite her during the custody portion of their divorce.
I’ve not seen a single picture where he seems into her at all. They all look like she’s photobombing him.
I mean, this is all very sad. While I don’t doubt she’s probably got some serious personality issues, she clearly has no friends or support and the Instagram oversharing is symptomatic of that.
I feel sorry for their kids, both parents seem like assholes. I hope they’ll at least get the girls some good therapy.