The shock felt by actress Alice Evans when her husband Ioan Gruffudd left her in January 2021 was palpable.
She wrote on Twitter, now X: ‘My beloved husband/soulmate of 20 years Ioan Gruffudd has announced that he is to leave his family starting next week. Me and our young daughters girls [sic] are very confused.
‘We haven’t been given a reason except “he no longer loves me”. I’m so sorry.’
Alice Evans and Ioan Gruffudd – here before their split three years ago – signed a pre-nuptial agreement before they married in 2007, when he was said to have had a net worth of £2 million
Ioan Gruffudd with fiancee Bianca Wallace. ‘Thank you for making me smile again,’ he wrote when he announced their relationship on Instagram in October 2021, after his split with Evans
When that tweet disappeared, she posted another, saying that he had deleted her announcement. She wrote: ‘Hell yes when I am being gaslit and mentally tortured then hell yes I will wash my linen in public.’
And boy, was she as good as her word on that. She wrote a bombshell account of the end of the marriage and how she felt ‘dead’ with grief. She wept on ITV’s Lorraine.
The drama whipped up to a crescendo when Welsh actor Gruffudd announced in October 2021, on Instagram, that he had a new girlfriend. Pictured with 31-year-old aspiring actress Bianca Wallace he wrote: ‘Thank you for making me smile again.’
Evans, 55, says that this was the first that she and her daughters, then aged 11 and seven, knew of the romance.
Woundingly, it appeared that Gruffudd and Wallace’s paths had crossed when she was an extra on the Australian TV series Harrow which was filmed in Brisbane — and Evans and Gruffudd were still very much married.
In February 2022, Evans was made subject to a restraining order by her estranged husband after she posted a number of messages about him and his new girlfriend on social media and allegedly sent him more than 100 texts.
Some appeared to threaten him. Evans denied abusing or harassing him. The order was extended for three years so she remains forbidden from posting about either of them until August 2025. So for more than three years now, this protracted and messy divorce has raged on. Two months ago, a ‘stipulation’ was signed which meant the pair had reached agreement — but, as it turns out, only over custody of their two daughters.
Now Evans has filed a further document, which is actually a request for money, since she claims she has none. And what’s contained within the 150 pages of the Request For Order, or RFO, might just make some people revise their view of her.
For, while it’s undeniably true that her behaviour back in 2021 and 2022 was quite wrong, not everything laid out in the RFO fits the ‘mad bad Alice’ narrative that prevailed on social media at the time. In fact, quite a lot of it suggests the opposite.
Take, for instance, the question of custody. Gruffudd wanted it split 50/50 and claimed — as was widely reported — that Evans was a bad parent who was damaging the children. There was much to and fro about ‘reunification therapy’ (re-establishing connections between parent and child) and custody visits.
Evans, who lives in Los Angeles, says in her bombshell court papers that she earns £235 a month and has drained her savings, leaving her struggling to afford to feed her daughters
Evans with Gruffudd and their daughters in 2018. The pair settled interim and child support last year, but she has now accused her ex of not paying spousal or child support since April
It now emerges that in 2023 a Child Custody Evaluation was carried out. These evaluations take months and involve a highly qualified expert — in this case, one nominated by Gruffudd — who will interview the children, the therapists, the teachers and the friends of the divorcing couple, and the couple themselves, at length.
The findings of the evaluator remain sealed. However the fact is, as revealed in the RFO, that following expert intervention, Evans has 100 per cent custody and Gruffudd has signed off on it. Not only that, but she complains that Gruffudd has seen the children only twice this year, and hasn’t had any of his mandated thrice-weekly phone calls with Ella, now 14, and Elsie, ten, leaving them ‘in limbo’ and ‘confused’ — more of which later.
Meanwhile, Evans appears to have been under immense financial strain and both she and her lawyer say that Gruffudd has paid her nothing at all in either child or spousal support since April this year. Bluntly she is broke, can’t pay her rent or utilities and is urgently asking for funds.
B ut, perhaps most significantly, she is also very sorry for the way she behaved in recent years.
In her statement, included in the court document, she says: ‘I understand why the Court issued the DVRO (restraining order), and I wish I had never sent the messages or published the social media posts.’
She adds: ‘I was acting out of emotional anguish caused by the unexpected end of our marriage and Ioan’s rather quick public announcement of a new romantic relationship on social media, which our eldest daughter discovered via an Instagram post.’
The end of the marriage has beyond any doubt damaged the images of both actors.
It all started with such promise. They were a golden couple: he handsome and charismatic; she known as ‘la belle Anglaise’ after a romance with Picasso’s grandson Olivier. They signed a pre-nup before their wedding in Mexico in 2007. At the time, Gruffudd said he had a net worth of £2 million; Evans had just $40,000 (£31,400) in various accounts.
The pre-nup is complex but essentially the parties agreed to leave the marriage with what they brought into it. In terms of spousal support, it gives Alice Evans 20 per cent of his earnings in the event of a split, or ten per cent if they have children, which seems quite extraordinary. She is now challenging it.
After the wedding he pursued his career, starring in the hit film Fantastic Four, while she raised their daughters. She had struggled to conceive and had gone through IVF. In her recent filing she says that in some good years he would take home $1 million (£784,000), in others more like $500,000 (£392,000). Life was sweet.
Then came the split.
Now Gruffudd says his average monthly income has been $21,000 (£16,400); Evans says she earns around $300 (£235) in royalties. Her lawyers say that he also received ‘approximately $390,000 (£306,000) from the sales proceeds’ of their Californian home in December 2023.
He also continues to work in films, including Bad Boys: Ride Or Die which was released last month. In the filing Evans writes: ‘As it stands, I have very little money coming in each month. I earn approximately $300 (£235) per month. I have drained all of my personal savings paying my prior attorneys in this case and paying for my expenses.
‘I have some personal property, such as vintage designer items, held in storage, that I could possibly sell, but they are in danger of being sold at auction because I cannot pay the monthly storage fee (Ioan stopped paying post-separation even though our daughters’ childhood mementoes are stored there.)’
She adds: ‘As it stands, I am behind on rent and utility payments, and friends have started dropping off groceries and food so the children and I can eat. I will be applying for food stamps and welfare.
Evans alleges Gruffudd bought ‘an expensive engagement ring’ for his fiancee Bianca Wallace
She also claims that both Gruffudd and Wallace have both recently ‘bought new Rolex watches’ (Wallace is seen modelling what appears to be a green Rolex in May this year)
‘While I am struggling to put food on the table for our children, Ioan is jet-setting around the world. Ioan could not appear at his noticed deposition [to give evidence in court] for custody issues because he travelled to the UK.
‘Since April 2024, according to his Instagram page and Press releases, he has been in the UK, Cardiff, Sardinia, Rome, Spain and Seattle. Based upon stories in the media, Ioan purchased an expensive engagement ring for his fiancee and they recently bought new Rolex watches.’
Lawyers also suggest that his financial records show he gave $77,000 (£60,300) to Bianca in December 2023.
At the end of 2023, interim spousal and child support was settled. The agreed payment was $3,000 (£2,350) a month in interim child support and $7,000 (£5,480) a month in spousal support.
Evans, who lives in Los Angeles, says that Gruffudd only paid the spousal support from December 2023 to April 2024 and has paid nothing since. She says that child support also ceased in April.
It was initially understood that the financial issues would go to trial by April this year, but that has now been put off until August. She is asking the court to pay her attorneys and alleges that Gruffudd has been paying two different law firms and a forensic accountant.
‘Alice is applying for public assistance because she is unable to support herself and the children,’ her lawyer states in the latest legal filing. ‘It appears that the financial trial will be several months away and Alice will not be able to survive without the receipt of guideline spousal support.
‘Ioan has the ability to pay spousal support based upon his greater ability to earn income and his ongoing lavish lifestyle. For these reasons, Alice requests guideline child and spousal support.’
Her lawyer Janina Verano also says that since May 2023, Gruffudd has not seen the children outside of reunification therapy, nor has he ‘exercised his court order right’ to have a telephone call with them three times a week. Reunification therapy ended in February this year.
‘Ioan has not telephoned the children or returned their text messages since May of 2023,’ Evans says. She adds: ‘The children have been left in limbo and are completely confused about when, or if, they will see Ioan.’
Through an order filed by her lawyer, Evans says she does not agree to the sealing or keeping private of their legal stipulation or custody agreement in its entirety, which is what Gruffudd has requested — accusing him of being ‘disingenuous’ in his request to seal the legal proceedings in order to ‘protect the children’.
Gruffudd and Wallace met on the set of the Australian TV show Harrow, in which she featured as an extra (seen together on set)
What is clear is that there are three people trading hostilities in this divorce battle.
Evans complains that Gruffudd’s girlfriend Bianca made a ‘completely false’ and highly defamatory attack on her on Instagram in April this year.
In the post, the Australian said she had been contacted by thousands of people who said that Evans had abused or threatened them and declaring that she was going to ‘stand up’ to ‘bullies’.
This contention, according to Evans’s lawyers, means that Bianca was in breach of a custody stipulation, which forbids either of them from being negative about the others in front of the children.
E vans’S lawyers emailed Gruffudd’s legal team to ask for his girlfriend’s Instagram post to be removed, but received no response.
In the papers, Evans adds that Ella was very upset when a school friend told her about the post and ‘cried out she never wants to see Ioan again’.
The Mail approached Gruffudd’s team for comment but had no response. Friends of the actor insist that he has paid ‘more than what the court ruled’ and they say that Alice Evans’s pleas of poverty are ‘just nonsense’.
One told the Mail: ‘If anything, Ioan has overpaid Alice what the court ruled.
‘He wants to ensure the best for his children and would never not make sure they were looked after entirely as they should be.
‘The divorce part is over, but it feels very much like Alice is using the girls against Ioan.
‘He has tried to get them help and to ensure that they are looked after properly. He has pushed for them to have therapy. Those girls are what matter the most to Ioan and it is really devastating for him to see this happening.’
Might this last, desperate throw of the dice by Evans persuade Ioan to settle with her financially, 42 months after he walked out?
All must, surely, long for an end to the drama, but Gruffudd’s friends say they fear the fall-out will ‘never go away’ and will continue to plague the fractured family for the foreseeable future.
