The texts are devastating – pleading, heartbroken, at times angry – and always deeply personal.
Actor Ioan Gruffudd has taken the extraordinary step of releasing a series of distressing messages sent to him by daughters Ella, 15, and Elsie, 11, as his divorce from their mother, Alice Evans, reaches its final bitter stages.
Gruffudd left his wife of 14 years in 2021 and is now married to aspiring actress Bianca Wallace, whom he met while filming the TV series Harrow in Australia while he was still married. The couple are expecting a baby.
In the texts, Ella – who filed for a domestic violence restraining order against the actor after a fracas at his home when she visited him and Wallace for the first time (which a judge dismissed) – angrily asks him to help fund a deposit on a place to live.
In one message, she complains he hasn’t given his daughters and ex-wife financial help, even though they are about to be evicted from their apartment in Beverly Hills, California, owing to non-payment of rent.
Today Alice, Ella and Elsie are living in the modest suburb of Encino in the San Fernando valley area of Los Angeles.
In recent months, Evans has been making appearances at fan conventions based on her previous acting roles in The Vampire Diaries and The Originals in order to earn money.
In another of the messages, contained within documents filed by Gruffudd to the Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday as part of his and Evans’ divorce settlement proceedings, 15-year-old Ella tells her father: ‘Mummy works very hard and also looks after us 24/7. You are avoiding the issue which is that you don’t want to work. It’s not mummy’s fault it’s yours. You left us and now you can’t provide for us.
Alice Evans and Ioan Gruffudd with their two daughters Ella and Elsie in 2018
Gruffudd and Evans met while filming 102 Dalmatians in 2000. They were married in 2007 and divorced in 2023
Gruffudd with new wife Bianca Wallace, whom he met while filming the TV series Harrow in Australia while he was still married
‘You need to get a job daddy. Looking after your girlfriend is not a job. You are a father who has abandoned his children and doesn’t see them or talk to them. You doesn’t even send Christmas presents. It’s pathetic and everyone sees you.
‘Ps, if there is enough money for us never to become homeless then why aren’t you helping us out? You hate mummy more than you love us.’
She also asks him to lend them the funds to allow them to put down a deposit on a new home. ‘Hi Dad. We could really use some help with getting a place to live,’ the 15-year-old texts. ‘We have found many we love under $4000 but we don’t have the credit score or enough to [put] down as security. Please can you think about helping us?’
In another, using often-ungrammatical text-speak, she pleads: ‘Could we borrow some money from you? It would be so amazing please daddy we just need some help. We are gonna be out of our apartment in 17 days. Please help us.’
In other texts, her younger sister Elsie becomes angry with her father, chiding him for criticising Evans in other, unseen, messages.
She writes: ‘Don’t talk down to me and don’t talk s*** about Mummy’. She adds: ‘Remember that is illegal in the courts to say me [sic] bad things about her to us but you always do it.
‘If you think me and Ella would ever come and live with you and Bianca you are ****ing crazy and thinking about everything you say about mummy makes us both sick she is the nicest kindest most beautiful person in the world and you just want to break her and us. I am disappointed with you.’
She also warns: ‘We need to find a home dad this is real how will you feel when you remember what you did to your children and their mum. All my friends are worried for us and trying to help us but not you.’
Gruffudd doesn’t include his responses to the girls in the documents filed to the court.
The actor says he is releasing the hurtful and disturbing texts to show that the children are being involved in his ex-wife’s ‘false and manufactured claim’ that she is in financial crisis. In a statement to court he writes: ‘I am mortified to report that I have received dozens of stressed messages from our minor children, in which they have parroted Alice’s false and manufactured claim of becoming homeless in the immediate future.
‘It is clear to me that Alice is orchestrating this situation and is doing so to manipulate me into giving in to her financial demands.’ The unravelling of the Gruffudd-Evans marriage has been a long and very public drama, often played out on social media.
Right at the start, in January 2021, when Welsh actor Gruffudd left her, Evans 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.’
Gruffudd announced in October 2021, on Instagram, that he had a new girlfriend. Pictured with Bianca Wallace, now 32, he wrote: ‘Thank you for making me smile again.’
Evans, now 56, has always maintained this was the first she and her daughters, then aged 11 and seven, knew of the romance.
In February 2022, Gruffudd was granted a restraining order after Evans posted a number of messages about him and his new girlfriend on social media and allegedly sent him more than 100 texts, some appearing to threaten him.
Evans denied abusing or harassing him – but the order was extended for three years, so she remains forbidden from posting about either of them until August 2025.
Now comes this new court battle. Claiming that Evans has breached her restraining order ‘5,000 times’ in the past three years, Gruffudd is seeking to have her permanently banned from talking about him and from ever contacting him or his new wife.
A hearing is set for August 2, and the claims from Gruffudd’s side are damning if true.
He claims Evans has sent him an average of four harassing communications a day since the restraining order was granted. Evans denies this, but has spoken of her regret at reacting to the split so publicly.
In a legal filing last year she wrote: ‘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.
‘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.’
In June 2023, Gruffudd detailed a shocking fight with Ella after she came to his apartment and met Wallace for the first time. Left with minor injuries, Ella subsequently sought a restraining order against her father and his girlfriend.
In her submission Ella, then 13, said she was so upset to meet Wallace that she threw milk on her father’s bed, poured mustard on the floor and threw porridge oats at him. Gruffudd told the court that the acting out ‘made it clear Ella is in urgent need of mental health care’.
Ella meanwhile, claimed Gruffudd and Wallace ‘called her ‘manipulative’, ‘abusive’ and ‘narcissistic’. When she tried to leave, her father chased after her, she said, and she was hit by the door, injuring her arm. However, a judge dismissed the application.
Last year, an agreement was made over the custody of the girls, following a Child Custody Evaluation in 2023 in which a highly qualified expert, nominated by Gruffudd, interviewed all concerned and made recommendations. These were filed into court under seal to protect the children’s privacy.
The legal battles showed no sign of ending, however, and in July 2024, Evans filed a request for money, saying that she hadn’t received a penny since April. She said that she was broke and could not pay her bills. When she faced being homeless she set up a GoFundMe page to appeal to the public for help.
Gruffudd had been paying her $3,000 (£2,200) per month in child support and $1,500 (£1,100) a month in spousal support, but that wasn’t enough for her to make ends meet, she claimed.
Gruffudd claims that bank statements show Evans is far from hard up. He states that she earned $130,141 (£97,000) in 2024 and is on track to get the same amount in 2025.
According to bank statements filed with the court, in December 2024 she spent $9,288 (£6,900) including a holiday which cost $2,990 (£2,200).
Gruffudd claims that after paying Evans $70,000 (£52,000) a year in support, he is left with just $121,752 (£90,000) – a smaller income overall than hers. He rejects her claim he is ‘intentionally’ turning down work to keep his income low so he won’t have to pay her as much.
‘This new tactic is simply Alice attempting to avoid accountability for her very public denigration of me that continues to this day,’ he writes.
He has turned down jobs for ‘several reasons’, he continues, including being the wrong fit for the character. One job was a ‘small rural theatre production’, which would have cost him money to perform in and clashed with previously booked projects, he claims.
Sources close to Evans claim the picture painted by Gruffudd’s lawyers is misleading and that the figures cited by the Welsh actor include the support he was ordered by the court to give, accounting for around $80,000 of the $130,000.
Evans is prevented from addressing any of his claims on social media, but in a post on Instagram a week ago she wrote about her trip to a fan convention in Paris, saying: ‘Me and my two girls came so close to being homeless a month ago. I’m their only parent and only relative within 6,000 miles so it’s hard to go away for 5 days knowing they’re alone.
‘But I did it. And I earned the money for next month’s rent.
‘Life crises make you fight. And I’m fighting. Against the people I think are treating me badly but also against the urge to give in.
‘I will never give in. I will be there for my kids and true friends until the day I die.’
