He did attempt shared custody. Initially straightforward but quickly the eldest kid started bucking the schedule and frequently the younger one was the only one making the visits. The visits got more and more unhinged behaviorally (and access to the kids more sporadic), culminating in an overnight visit suggested by their mother after months of stonewalling. The account of that visit itself is nuts, but we know what happened because Ioan was so disturbed by a combination of the kids’ evolving behavior and their mother’s insinuations that he had a child psychologist there as a chaperone.
So that doc saw the girls arrive, start livestreaming the inside of the house, pour milk on the bed and other food on their father and the counters (scrawling swears in the mess), and then ran away and called a friend of their mother’s to pick them up as Ioan, his girlfriend, and various others tried to find them. The eldest then filed a restraining order against her father and his girlfriend, which is why the doctor’s impartial account of the visit is available. (The attempt to get a restraining order failed, which you can also read in transcripts, as a very patient judge walks the kid through her claims.) Honestly the whole sequence reads like a setup.
So… yeah. Ioan then tried to get them into regular reunification therapy, but their mother kept skipping sessions and firing therapists. There was also a review of some sort by a professional regarding custody and the professional seems to have sided with the mother - no one’s seen that report (and it’s sealed so no one will), but the judge in the recent case expressed confusion as to how someone with an active domestic violence restraining order has ended up with essentially total custody.
This is why people are talking about parental alienation so much regarding this case. He seems to have been willing and eager to share custody, but wasn’t willing to go scorched-earth about it in the beginning, and by the time it became clear that nothing short of a custody case sorted by a judge would be effective - the girls were not only turned against him, but willing to falsely accuse him to lodge a restraining order. And the only reason that didn’t work is because he literally paid a professional observer to attend the visit. And I’m not even getting into what Alice has said/written/posted about how the girls must be loyal to her, about what she’s willing to accuse Ioan of if he doesn’t play ball, etc.
I’m sure Ioan also wishes he’d approached all of this differently, now that this is the outcome, but considering the man fled his martial home with only the clothes on his back and has secured four years’ worth of domestic violence restraining orders… He had a lot of stuff going on.