Sophie Turner Isn’t a Bad Mom. You’re Just a Misogynist
Joe Jonas appears to be weaponizing the press against his soon-to-be-ex, and it’s working
RECENTLY, I GOOGLED a keyword associated with the media coverage of Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas, the millennial power couple who recently announced they were ending their four-and-a-half-year marriage on Instagram following weeks of speculation.
There was a story attributing the split to the couple’s “very different lifestyles,” with a “source with direct knowledge” telling TMZ: “She likes to party, he likes to stay at home.” There was a story, also on TMZ, describing Jonas as being in “dad mode,” taking his two young daughters out to breakfast in L.A. with a woman in a ponytail, described as a “friend helping to take care of the girls.” And there was another story, also on TMZ, quoting “multiple sources” saying that the marriage ended because Jonas’s Ring camera “captured Sophie saying and/or doing something that made him realize the marriage was over.” (The “saying and/or doing something” is doing a lot of work there: Was she cheating? Was she slamming DNCE’s 2022 comeback single? Was she caught watching the season finale of And Just Like That… when she had promised Joe she would wait for him to catch up?)
Apart from the fact that someone at TMZ has likely been taking a lot of calls from Jonas’ crisis PR team, what do these Google search results teach us? They came up as the result of Googling the phrase “bad mom.”
Amid a slew of other news stories about bad mothers — about a woman who got yelled at on the internet when she breastfed after getting a spray tan, or a single mother whose 14-year-old was arrested for stealing a car — Turner has ended up with the same label as countless maligned maternal figures throughout history, from Medea to Mama Rose. Except her only crime, as far as the public knows, is being young, hot, famous, and in a high-profile marriage that appears to not be working out.
Over the course of the past few days, Jonas’ PR team has presumably been working overdrive planting seeds in the media accusing Turner of being a bad mother, without being seen actively accusing her of being one. Understanding this requires some working knowledge of how the celebrity media ecosystem works when a celebrity is in crisis, which usually involves highly paid crisis PR professionals giving tabloids information that pushes their side of the story, usually being cited as an “unnamed source” or a “source close to” the individual so as not to arouse suspicion. (TikToker Molly McPherson, a celebrity crisis PR professional, has a few pretty good videos explaining this playbook.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/sophie-turner-joe-jonas-divorce-motherhood-misogyny-media-gossip-1234820043/