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Sophie Turner Sues to Force Estranged Husband Joe Jonas to Turn Over Children’s Passports 

Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner attend the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party following the 94th Oscars at the The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California on March 27, 2022. (AFP)
Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner attend the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party following the 94th Oscars at the The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California on March 27, 2022. (AFP)
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Sophie Turner Sues to Force Estranged Husband Joe Jonas to Turn Over Children’s Passports 

Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner attend the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party following the 94th Oscars at the The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California on March 27, 2022. (AFP)
Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner attend the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party following the 94th Oscars at the The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California on March 27, 2022. (AFP)

Actor Sophie Turner sued her estranged pop star husband Joe Jonas on Thursday to force him to turn over the passports of the couple’s two young daughters so she can take them to England.

Turner, who was served with divorce papers this month after four years of marriage to Jonas, said in her petition that the couple had planned to raise their daughters in her native England. It also said that the girls, ages 3 and 1, “are both fully involved and integrated in all aspects of daily and cultural life in England.”

Best known for playing Sansa Stark on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” Turner filed her petition in federal court in New York under the child abduction clauses of the Hague Convention, an international treaty aimed at compelling the return of a child taken from their country of “habitual residence.”

Turner, 27, says that she and Jonas, 34, made a mutual decision to raise their daughters in England and to relocate there in April of this year.

During part of August and September, while Jonas began a tour with his band the Jonas Brothers in the United States, Turner would be working long hours filming a television series in England. So, Turner said she and Jonas had agreed that the children would travel with Jonas and a nanny.

The plan was for Turner to travel to New York after filming wrapped on Sept. 14 to collect the children, but in the meantime “the breakdown of the parties’ marriage happened very suddenly,” Turner said.

According to Turner, Jonas filed for divorce in Florida on Sept. 1 and she learned about it through the media on Sept. 5. The pair issued a joint statement on their Instagram accounts on Sept. 6 saying they had mutually decided to amicably end the marriage.

Turner says she and Jonas saw each other on Sept. 17 — and she asked him for the children’s passports so she could take them back to England, but Jonas refused to turn over the passports of the girls, who were born in the United States, and have dual US and British citizenship.

The court filing says the girls are temporarily living with Turner in a Manhattan hotel. The Jonas Brothers were scheduled to perform in Philadelphia on Thursday and in Baltimore on Friday.

Jonas said in a statement that he is “seeking shared parenting with the kids so that they are raised by both their mother and father” and that he is “okay with the kids being raised both in the US and the UK.”

“This is an unfortunate legal disagreement about a marriage that is sadly ending,” he added. “When language like ‘abduction’ is used, it is misleading at best, and a serious abuse of the legal system at worst.”

Jonas said he did not surprise Turner with divorce papers but rather filed for divorce after what he said were “multiple conversations with Sophie.”

Jonas has been a pop idol since he and his brothers Nick and Kevin formed the Jonas Brothers in 2005. He and Turner met in 2016 and married in 2019.

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JoJo Was a Teen Sensation. At 33, She’s Found Her Voice Again

Singer Joanna Levesque, who rose to fame as “JoJo” when she was 13, poses for a portrait to promote her memoir, “Over the Influence,” on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, in New York. (Invision/AP)
Singer Joanna Levesque, who rose to fame as “JoJo” when she was 13, poses for a portrait to promote her memoir, “Over the Influence,” on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, in New York. (Invision/AP)
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JoJo Was a Teen Sensation. At 33, She’s Found Her Voice Again

Singer Joanna Levesque, who rose to fame as “JoJo” when she was 13, poses for a portrait to promote her memoir, “Over the Influence,” on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, in New York. (Invision/AP)
Singer Joanna Levesque, who rose to fame as “JoJo” when she was 13, poses for a portrait to promote her memoir, “Over the Influence,” on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, in New York. (Invision/AP)

Joanna Levesque shot to stardom at 13. Two decades later, “JoJo” — as she’s better known — has written a memoir and says the song responsible for her meteoric rise, “Leave (Get Out),” was foreign to her. In fact, she cried when her label told her they wanted to make it her first single.

Lyrics about a boy who treated her poorly were not relatable to the sixth grader who recorded the hit. And sonically, the pop sound was far away from the young prodigy's R&B and hip-hop comfort zone.

“I think that’s where the initial seed of confusion was planted within me, where I was like, 'Oh, you should trust other people over yourself because ... look at this. You trusted other people and look how big it paid off,’” she said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

“Leave (Get Out)” went on to top the Billboard charts, making Levesque the youngest solo artist ever to have a No. 1 hit.

“I grew to love it. But initially, I just didn’t get it,” she said.

Much of Levesque’s experience with young pop stardom was similarly unpredictable or tumultuous, and she details those feelings in her new memoir, “Over the Influence.”

With “Leave (Get Out)” and her several other commercial hits like “Too Little Too Late” and “Baby It’s You,” Levesque’s formative years were spent in recording studios and tour buses. Still, she had a strong resonance with teens and young people, and her raw talent grabbed the attention of music fans of all ages.

“Sometimes, I don’t know what to say when people are like, ‘I grew up with you’ and I’m like, ‘We grew up together’ because I still am just a baby lady. But I feel really grateful to have this longevity and to still be here after all the crazy stuff that was going on,” she said.

Some of that “crazy stuff” Levesque is referring to is a years-long legal battle with her former record label. Blackground Records, which signed her as a 12-year-old, stalled the release of her third album and slowed down the trajectory of her blazing career.

Levesque said she knows, despite the hurdles and roadblocks the label and its executives put in her path, they shaped “what JoJo is."

“Even though there were things that were chaotic and frustrating and scary and not at all what I would have wanted to go through, I take the good and the bad,” she said.

Levesque felt like the executives and team she worked with at the label were family, describing them as her “father figures and my uncles and my brothers." “I love them, now, still, even though it didn’t work out,” she said.

With new music on the way, Levesque said she thinks the industry is headed in a direction that grants artists more freedom over their work and more of a voice in discussions about the direction of their careers. In 2018, she re-recorded her first two albums, which were not made available on streaming, to regain control of the rights. Three years later, Taylor Swift started doing the same.

“Things are changing and it’s crumbling — the old way of doing things,” she said. “I think it’s great. The structure of major labels still offers a lot, but at what cost?”

As she looks forward to the next chapter of her already veteran-level career, Levesque said it’s “refreshing” for her to see a new generation of young women in music who are defying the standards she felt she had to follow when she was coming up.

“'You have to be nice. You have to be acceptable in these ways. You have to play these politics of politeness.’ It’s just exhausting,” she said, “So many of us that grew up with that woven into the fabric of our beliefs burn out and crash and burn.”

It’s “healing” to see artists like Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish play by their own rules, she said.

In writing her memoir and tracing her life from the earliest childhood memories to today, Levesque said she’s “reclaiming ownership” over her life.

“My hope is that other people will read this, in my gross transparency sometimes in this book, and hopefully be inspired to carve their own path, whatever that looks like for them.”