It’s an age-old tale—boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets court order to force girl to bring the embryo they created to term. These crazy kids!
At any rate, crazy is the right word for the ongoing legal saga between Modern Family actress Sofia Vergara, and her frankly insufferable ex-boyfriend, Nick Loeb, a man who is unembarrassed to be known as the Onion Crunch King.
In 2013, Vergara and Loeb, who were then dating, used in vitro fertilization to create two embryos, which he would now like to bring to term via a surrogate. Just one problem—the pair signed an agreement that required both parties to consent first, which Vergara is decidedly not giving.
“A child needs a mother and a loving relationship with parents who don’t hate each other,” Vergara told Howard Stern last year. “I wouldn’t want to bring kids to the world where it’s already set against them. It would be so selfish.”
That Vergara—who is now married to Joe Manganiello, and can you blame her?—hates Loeb and doesn’t want to have anything to do with him, much less a child is clear. Still, Loeb made the baffling case in a New York Times op-ed last spring that he’s been unable to have kids because two of his ex-girlfriends had abortions. (Some caselaw allows one party to force the birth of the fertilized embryo if he or she is unable to procreate.)
Vergara, in response, demanded to know the names of the women—and both the court and the court of appeals agreed it’s relevant to the case. Now Loeb is in the strange position of defending a woman’s right to privacy while simultaneously demanding another woman become the mother of a child she doesn’t want.
“I would rather go to jail than reveal the names,” Loeb told Page Six this week. “I believe we have to protect a woman’s right to privacy.”
Finally something Nick Loeb and I can agree on—he belongs in jail for this shit.