HOLLYWOOD STAR SUED BY HER OWN EMBRYOS
The legal battle between Modern Family actress Sofia Vergara and her ex-fiancé over the custody of two fertilised eggs took a bizarre turn this week
IT IS always sad when a woman and her offspring find themselves in fundamental disagreement; sadder still when the matter ends up in court. But in a new twist to one of the most bizarre cases ever involving a family row, it has just been reported that America’s highestpaid TV actress Sofia Vergara is being sued by her two daughters who have not yet been born.
Emma and Isabella, a pair of female fertilised eggs, have been named as plaintiffs in a case in which they are demanding the right to live – namely, to be placed in the body of a woman who is not their biological mother, to be born and to inherit a trust fund that has been set up for them.
When Aldous Huxley wrote his groundbreaking novel Brave New World in 1931 predicting a future in which embryos would be conceived in test tubes, even he did not imagine the contents of those test tubes talking to their lawyers and threatening to take their mother to court. And were this the plot of a sci-fi movie it would be pronounced just too far-fetched.
This strange tale dates back to 2013 when Sofia and her then fiancé Nick Loeb (the man behind a food topping called Onion Crunch) created the embryos together to use for future parenthood.
At the time her career was going stratospheric. Since 2009 Sofia has been starring in sitcom Modern Family as Gloria DelgadoPritchett and in doing so has become the highest-paid woman in television, earning an estimated £34million last year. They signed an agreement with a Beverly Hills fertility clinic where the embryos are in cold storage, saying they would be brought to term only if both parents agreed.
HOWEVER, and crucially, they did not specify what would happen if they split up, which is what happened in 2014 after four years together. At the time Sofia blamed her work for the split, saying “it’s not fun any more” but reports surfaced that she was feeling “used” by her ex and that he was trying to take advantage of her celebrity. Whatever the truth, Sofia moved on pretty quickly.
In July 2014 Sofia began dating Joe Manganiello – an actor in TV show True Blood – six months later they got engaged and in November 2015 they were married. It is a fair bet that if Sofia, now 44, wanted to have more children with anyone – she has a 24-yearold son Manolo from an earlier marriage – it would be with Joe.
But Nick had other ideas. As far back as May 2015 he started a legal battle with his ex, saying that he wanted the two embryos to be implanted in a surrogate and that he would bring them up.
“A woman is entitled to bring a pregnancy to term even if the man objects,” he wrote. “Should not a man who is willing to take on all parental responsibilities be similarly entitled to bring his embryos to term objects?
“I do not want the two lives I have created to be destroyed or sit in a freezer until the end of time.”
His argument was that the agreement was void as it did not specify what would happen in the case of a break-up. As for the names – “I was so excited once the lives were created that I began to suggest names we could call the girls.”
Sofia took a dim view of this. She declined to comment at the time but then went on to say that it would be selfish to have children outside a loving relationship. “I wouldn’t want to bring kids even if the woman into the world where it’s already set against them,” she said.
After that the fighting on both sides became really dirty: Nick filed a suit against Sofia saying that keeping the embryos frozen was tantamount to murder. This was dropped after Sofia’s lawyers demanded he reveal the identities of two women who’d had abortions after conceiving his child.
But this latest suit is coming not from him but the embryos themselves and their trustee James Charbonnet, saying that because they have not been born they have been deprived of an inheritance from a trust that is waiting for them.
The case is being brought in Louisiana, a pro-life state which protects frozen embryos. All in all it is a mess, with no obvious solution in a litigation-obsessed America attempting to come to terms with new developments in fertility treatments. It is also the latest colourful episode in a very colourful life.
Sofia Margarita Vergara Vergara was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, to a cattle rancher and was studying to be a dentist when she was spotted by a model scout and embarked on a new career. Her first appearance, at the age of 17, was in a Pepsi commercial after which she attended the Creative Workshops School of Acting.
Marriage to her childhood sweetheart Joe Gonzalez lasted only two years, although it did produce Manolo. She then moved to Miami in 1998 and four years later her older brother Rafael was murdered in a botched kidnap attempt in Bogotá. In the US, Sofia was living the American dream. In the early, poorly paid days of her career, she and her manager Luis Balaguer produced a calendar that made both of them a fortune.
SINCE then her career has spanned the worlds of product endorsement, film and television. People magazine called her one of the “50 most beautiful people” and she has also been called one of the most influential Latin women in Hollywood. Her films include The Three Stooges and Hot Pursuit while Modern Family has made her a household name.
She has been linked to a string of men including Tom Cruise, Craig David and Enrique Iglesias and there have been other challenges. In 2000 she was treated for thyroid cancer and in 2011 it was reported that her younger brother Julio had been deported to Colombia from the US after 30 drugsrelated arrests.
Now Sofia finds herself at the centre of another drama, in this case a bitter and highly public wrangle with her ex. The case has sparked a huge amount of publicity in the US where it has fuelled the debate about whether men and women have equal rights over frozen embryos.
Sofia clearly wishes the matter would go away while Nick clearly has no intention of dropping it. It is a very modern dilemma for the star of Modern Family and at this point there is no indication where this increasingly strange tale will end. CELEBRITIES: Sofia with her husband Joe Manganiello