Ioan Gruffudd scores large win as decide extends order in opposition to ex-wife Alice Evans amid bitter courtroom battle

Fantastic Four star Ioan Gruffudd won a major victory Wednesday in his ugly court battle with his ex-wife Alice Evans when a Los Angeles judge ruled that a domestic violence restraining order against her will be renewed for five years.

Evans, 57, remained calm and subdued as Judge Michael Convey announced his decision, while Gruffudd – sitting at the opposite end of a long table – also displayed little emotion. Neither wanted to comment to the Daily Mail after the ruling.

On the opening days of their trial that started last week, Gruffudd, 52, recounted a years-long campaign of online harassment and abuse waged by Evans, targeting him and his new wife, Australian actress Bianca Wallace, 33, which led them to seek and win a three-year restraining order against Alice in 2022.

Evans confessed on the witness stand Wednesday to bombarding social media sites with denigrating and false posts about her former spouse and his new wife and offered apologies to both Gruffudd and Wallace.

She told the court how ‘ashamed and regretful’ she was – and assured Judge Convey that her online trash-talking was a thing of the past.

But Judge Convey didn’t buy her attempts at contrition, citing the ‘multiple’ times she violated the original restraining order, which called for her to stay 100 feet away from Gruffudd and Wallace and not to post negative comments about them online.

The judge granted the Welsh actor’s request to renew the restraining order, and in a 75-minute summing up of the evidence presented over seven days of trial he told Evans Wednesday that she had carried out a ‘concerted, focused, intentional and caustic campaign of denigration’ aimed at Gruffudd and Wallace.

Evans’s ‘threats of force and intimidation….caused Ioan to fear for his and Bianca’s physical safety,’ he said. Her ‘pattern of abuse’ isolated him from his children. ‘Her vow to “dedicate her life to fighting him” and ruin his career, threatened his ability to provide for his children.’

Gruffudd and Evans split in early 2021 and went through a messy divorce that was final in 2023. Since then they’ve been in a bitter fight over money and their daughters Ella, 16, and Elsie, 12. In April last year, Gruffudd married Wallace, who gave birth to their daughter, Mila, in November.

Judge Convey said he was particularly disturbed by an incident which happened in front of the children where Evans ‘screamed at Gruffudd at the top of her lungs,’ and told him she was going to ‘Amber Heard’ him, and told the girls, ‘If daddy’s creepy with you let me know.’

‘This is harassment,’ said the judge who cited another occasion, where Evans disclosed online that Wallace suffers from multiple sclerosis, causing distress to Bianca. ‘This is emotional abuse – this is coercive control,’ he continued.

Of Evans’s expressions of regret in the witness box about her harassment of her former spouse and his new wife, Judge Convey asked, ‘Is it true remorse? I am not persuaded. But it is a positive step forward.’

He conceded that Evans’s online trash-talking ‘has abated somewhat – it’s not at the same level of violence or hate. But there has not been sufficient showing of responsibility.’

The judge, who told the court that he had thought about renewing the restraining order permanently rather than just for five years, said it ‘is incumbent on Alice to get therapy. And he warned her that violating the new restraining order ‘could lead to criminal prosecution.’

He also urged both Evans and Gruffudd, who hasn’t seen their daughters for two years, according to Evans, to ‘find a way to co-parent’ to give him the chance to be a part of the girls’ lives again.

Evans – wearing a black jacket over a pink and white patterned long skirt at Wednesday’s court proceeding – didn’t want to talk about the judge’s ruling. Nor did Gruffudd, sporting a dark suit and tie as he has for the length of the trial.

But Gruffudd’s attorney, Joseph Langlois, told the Daily Mail, ‘You have to start somewhere and this is a start for Alice to correct her life.

‘The judge gave her some good advice and I’m hopeful going forward that she’ll fix things, that she’ll change and turn her life around.’

Earlier Langlois and Evans’s attorney, Janina Verano, presented closing statements respectively for and against the renewal of the restraining order.

Langlois told the court that the legal standard for renewing an order is that ‘the protected parties have a reasonable fear of future abuse.’

Evans, he said, had violated the previous restraining order against her ‘almost too many times to count.’

‘Alice’s abuse has endangered the physical safety and well-being of the protected parties (Gruffudd and Wallace) and their infant daughter. She intended to hurt him economically and damage his career.’

Citing Wallace’s testimony last week about her and her three-month old baby receiving death threats as a result of Evans’s derogatory social media posts, Langlois said Bianca could face the danger of physical violence from ‘some unhinged follower of Alice ….who has drunk her poison….who gets riled up by her posts and wants to do her (Bianca) harm.’

Noting that Evans’s ‘relentless campaign of abuse spanned five years from 2021 to 2025,’ Langlois said Evans was ‘driven by an insatiable desire for revenge over her emotions about her divorce.

‘Ioan and Bianca have a reasonable fear that Alice will continue her behavior, based on her many violations of the restraining order.’

He added, ‘Alice cannot remediate the damage she has done. Her derogatory posts on the internet are available forever for all to see.’

Langlois scoffed at Evans’s ‘unconvincing show of remorse’ last week and her claim to being sorry about her online harassment of Gruffudd and Wallace, saying, ‘Her confession was nowhere near good enough to prove that she has moved on.

‘Alice has a lack of true contrition. She is still denying and making excuses for her abusive behavior. She has never taken any steps to reform her abusive character.’

Evans’s attorney, Verano, told the court that when Evans embarked on her online harassment of Gruffudd in 2021, ‘It was the end of covid, she was isolated, she was facing the loss of her marriage.’

Any hope of reconciling with Gruffudd was ‘crushed’ when she learned he was romantically involved with Wallace. ‘She lost her mind, she was devastated,’ said Verano.

But today, her lawyer went on, ‘Alice is in a very different place. She has moved on with her life.’

Verano insisted that Evans’s abusive emails and texts had stopped. ‘There are no threats. Alice has deactivated her Twitter account,’ she told the court.

She added that while some of Evans’s more recent social media posts ‘talk about what she’s been through….they are not meant to disturb Ioan’s peace. Alice’s conduct has changed quite a bit.’

The three-year RO imposed on Evans in August 2022 impacted her ability to work and travel, said Verano, who told the court that she had lost jobs because of the RO. She also said that flying into the USA with her daughters, Evans and the girls are always detained at airports, ‘which frightens the girls because they’re afraid she might end up in jail.’

She said that renewing the RO, which has a ‘stay away’ clause requiring Evans to keep 100 feet away from Gruffudd, would mean that her daughters would have to choose which parent shows up at their school graduations and other family events.

Verano closed asking Judge Convey to deny Gruffudd’s request to renew the RO, telling the court, ‘Alice is learning. She has grown.’

Wednesday’s RO ruling marks the end of the first phase of what’s expected to be a nine-day trial. The second phase this week will deal with the child and spousal support disputes of the former couple who spent more than 20 years together.

Evans claims she’s broke and wants the court to order him to increase the $1,500 a month he pays her in spousal support and the $3,000 a month he pays in child support.

Gruffudd maintains that their girls have been ‘poisoned and alienated’ against him by their mother.

He wants to stop paying spousal support altogether, ‘based upon Alice’s persistent domestic abuse of him and her many violations of the restraining order’ and insists that he has already ‘overpaid’ Evans by almost $400,000.