Laurence Fox and Billie Piper

[TogetherNormanDouglas]

https://news.sky.com/story/laurence-fox-responds-after-ex-wife-billie-piper-claims-enormous-difficulty-in-co-parenting-with-him-13095462

Laurence revealing more stuff in that statement than perhaps he meant to.

TeamBillie all the way.

Oh come on, she didn’t need to mention them and in the way she did. She’s so transparent.

She was criticising the media for continuing to ask her the questions and make her responsible for his behaviour rather than the other public figures in his life. A perfectly reasonable response.

You’re reaching there, aren’t you?

Extract below:

“I’ve had to make some choices and a divorce speaks for itself,” she says, followed by a very specific brand of grown-up laughter. “Or at least it should!” Her laughing sets me off too, before I immediately apologise. “Don’t worry, you have to laugh because it’s a lot,” she says. “It’s a good way of kind of soothing yourself.” She continues: “Look, if people want to try and understand the workings of the guy, they ought to either ask him or his family. Ask [Fox’s brother-in-law, actor and comedian] Richard Ayoade what he thinks, or his wife [Fox’s actor sister] Lydia. They might have a more interesting take.”

Yes, I read it. She’s saying: I divorced him. That’s my only comment. Ask the public figures who still know him.

What are you not getting?

Exactly

Why are you so desperate to make out that there is anything slagging Fox off in that? She is literally saying 'I divorced him. Go ask his own family what hes like'. If you ihnk that saying something terrible about him, then maybe you recognise that his sister would not be praising him to high heaven either.

crap but sadly typical that a film promotion / fashion interview dug for ‘dirt’

Are people on here seriously suggesting that Billlie maintaining a dignified silence for years, then making the comments stated above is in any way comparable to him being coked up while the kids were young, blacking them up and posting the photos online and refusing to give one child medication while accusing Billie of poisoning the child??

Oh, yes.

I'd like to say I was surprised, but this is increasingly the tone of MN in more recent years.

Apparently so. I’d like to imagine they posted similarly outraged threads every time Laurence came out with some offensive nonsense about her, but I suspect that’s unlikely.

Are women suggesting it? Or a bunch of men? Either way I agree with you. It's misogynistic rubbish where the woman cannot move on from this man and a decade after she divorced him she is still being asked about him as if it's something to do with her. Depressing.

Not quite. He obviously didn't want the divorce and is still cut up about it - especially losing the children. But he's got to stop using Twitter to lash out at people. Perhaps her inability to "settle down" is because of her poor choice of men! I don't really know what the conflict over the medication was about. Another row he shouldn't have posted on Twitter!

He hasn't "lost the children". They do 50/50 care. And children aren't possessions. His best bet for having a relationship with them is to be respectful of them and their mother. Instead he behaves like a tool. I am not surprised his behaviour had damaged their relationship.
Your language is straight out of the MRA playbook.

Lost the children, really. He's probably done far better than many men like him. They will make a decision when they are older and he will be judged by them, and I guess not favourably

Billie Piper has kept quiet for years as her ex spouts racist and misogynistic bullshit, uses their kids as Twitter props (including talking about their medical history/making them do racist stuff), and has insulted her and passed negative comments on her parenting on social media.

Yet the first time she cracks and passes a remarkably restrained comment about how her ex's publicly documented behaviour (and court cases) makes co-parenting difficult, and we have people on her clutching their pearls. How dare she say anything about her racist, misogynistic ex who uses his kids to push his vile agenda! How dare she ask journalists to stop asking her about her exes! Silence, woman!

She won't be the first woman who was charmed by a vile, volatile prick, and she won't be the last.

The fact is, a lot of men are cut up about it. They don't want to divorce and then they have to go to court to see their own children. I don't know if that's what happened here, but it's a pretty inevitable consequence of no-fault divorce. Like I said, perhaps the problem was her poor choice of men! and he brought it on himself.

Rule #1 of Misogyny. 'Women are responsible for what men do'.

Fox is responsible for Fox. Billie Piper is not accountable for what the ex she divorced a decade ago does; nor is she to blame because she 'picked' him.

I'm not sure whether this interesting assumption comes from that men are somehow lacking in individual autonomy, cannot be expected to take responsibility for their own actions, and that women must therefore take the blame not only for their own conduct but men's, too.

Rule #3 of misogyny: womens speaking for themselves are exclusionary and selfish.

Rule #11 of misogyny: whatever women suffer from, it's worse when it happens to men.

She lost her kids for 50% of the time too.

But as a PP mentions, this 'women are to blame for everything' style of rhetoric is straight out of the MRA playbook.

"He didn't want the divorce". Men on the thread, hear me now. If you don't want a divorce, behave like a decent human being and treat your wife like a person. That would do it in about 75% of cases. For Mr Fox's behaviour as husband, see his many, many previous comments.

Gosh, that's rather twisting what I said! He shouldn't have written that jibe on Twitter about her failure to "settle down" without considering how that could reflect badly on him as well - maybe he turned out to be a poor choice to settle down with! but even after 10 years he can't consider that he might have been at least partially to blame. Even if it's true that she's the problem, he's a 40-year-old man lashing out at people on Twitter - it's kind of pathetic.

You said, and I quote:

Like I said, perhaps the problem was her poor choice of men!

When balanced with the fault you convey on his side, this amounts to something along the lines of six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Hint: Billie Piper's choice of men is not the problem here.

@MyNameIsFine the children he "lost" are now 11 and 15.

The 15 year could move in with LF full-time if he wanted and BP wouldn't be able to do anything.

I wrote "Like I said, perhaps the problem was her poor choice of men! - and he brought it on himself"

Rule #1 of mumsnet: always put the worst possible spin on what PP have written so that you can start a row in an empty room. 😂

But has he always been a twat?

A lot of women are cut up about it too. No parents go into a marriage with the intention of getting divorced and not seeing the children every day. It hurts both sides, but is less damaging than staying in an unhealthy marriage.

I don't know Billie Piper or Laurence Fox but based on how they conduct themselves in public, I'm going to say that if he didn't want to divorce, he should have been nicer to his wife.

Oh, and also most parents don't have to go to court for childcare arrangements. In fact our divorce processes are set up to try to avoid that happening as far as possible. Court is for when parents can't agree, or when there are safeguarding concerns. Usually in my experience down to the male parent being a grade 1 arsehole.