Even if you’re not into celebrity gossip, you should pay close attention to the Joe Jonas / Sophie Turner divorce as a case study in botched PR. Joe’s PR operation is backfiring badly, and his whole gambit is creating serious risk of damaging his reputation and even alienating his fans. Some background: celebrity divorces always follow the same PR playbook, maybe because so many celebrities use the same handful of publicists. Phase 1 — nothing to see here, the spouses are posting pics showing wedding bands or taking paparazzi “candids” doing “normal” things like getting coffee and walking the dog. Phase 2 — it’s over, pics get deleted or wedding bands disappear. Divorce is announced with a bland, amiable joint statement from the couple. It’ll say they’ve agreed to move on, they’ll always have affection and respect for each other, and please respect their privacy for the sake of the kids. Phase 3 — immediate jockeying for the narrative as each person deploys friends and publicists to tell their side of the story, with one on offense and one on defense. If you want to see real combat comms, watch celebrity divorces. There will be a winner, and that’s whoever garners the most public sympathy and is able to preserve if not burnish their reputation. Basically, the winner will be the person who’s perceived to be wronged. So what happened here: since Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner’s divorce news became public a couple days ago, you can tell that Joe has been going on offense to control the narrative. Obviously he’s the one who filed for divorce, but on top of that, Today got an exclusive of the filing — look at the first screenshot. What it means is that the filing was leaked to them specifically with a promise not to share with other outlets until Today got to report (ie, shape) the story first. In that story, the key narrative points first emerge: Joe initiated the divorce and has been taking care of the kids. Within a day, more tea starts being spilled, from “sources” clearly on Team Joe: Sophie might be a neglectful mom, Sophie might party too much, Sophie did something shady. It’s obvious that Team Joe is trying to show him as the aggrieved party, the good guy. Three problems with the approach here. 1) Usually it’s good comms strategy to go on offense and get your narrative out first. But it’s much more dicey when your antagonist is the mother of your children, especially when she’s not fighting back! The new “revelations” about Sophie were too transparent (they could’ve only come from Team Joe), became too frequent (several in only two days), went too far (implying she’s a bad mom), and overall started to make Joe look like the aggressor. Attacking someone too much almost always backfires (ask anyone who saw the recent racist caricature of @garrytan which he brilliantly parlayed into a surge of support for his cause). 2) Joe Jonas’s fans are young women. One of the few things they like more than the Jonas Brothers? Sophie Turner. Young women identify with Sophie; they watched her marry an older guy when she was only 23, watched her become a young mother, and pretty much fell in love with her over the past few years. You’re not going to get millennial women to turn on Sansa Stark. 3) The line of attack is out of touch with the prevailing mood among the women that make up the Jonas fanbase. That demographic is all about respecting women’s personal choices, appreciating the challenges of motherhood, being conscious of power dynamics in relationships, and supporting women in their careers. We’re coming off the summer of Barbie. A young woman trying to balance motherhood with work and life is going to draw more sympathy than criticism. Read the room, Joe. This PR campaign to win the divorce is going off the rails. For now it’s mostly snark and gossip, but it’s going to become really damaging if he doesn’t manage to course correct quickly.