The photographs are still on Instagram: Keith Urban, guitar in hand, grinning beside Nicole Kidman and their two daughters, Sunday Rose and Faith. Sun‑drenched snaps from tour buses, backstage hugs, the carefully curated image of a family that somehow managed to straddle Nashville andHollywoodwithout falling apart.
Off social media, the picture being painted is much harsher. In the wake ofKidman's shock decision to file for divorceafter 19 years of marriage, US gossip magazines now insist the couple's teenage daughters have quietly chosen a side — and it is not their father's.
Whether that is entirely fair is another matter. But it does say something about how brutally a celebrity split can redraw family loyalties.
According to US tabloidGlobe, 58‑year‑old Urban is facing not just a public divorce but a private estrangement. The magazine cites unnamed sources who claim Sunday, 17, and Faith, 15, have 'cut off' contact with their father and are 'firmly supporting their mum instead'.
'The word is that they consider him an insensitive dog and they're giving him a wide berth,' one insider is quoted as saying, in the kind of language that tells you as much about tabloid appetites as it does about teenage daughters.
The reported rift comes after Kidman, also 58, filed for divorce in September, ending nearly two decades of one of the more carefully packaged showbusiness marriages. Since then, Nashville has been thick with rumours that Urban has already moved on romantically — allegations that, if true, would go down badly in any family, let alone one digesting the collapse of a long marriage under a global spotlight.
TheGlobepiece suggests Sunday and Faith had initially 'given Keith the benefit of the doubt,' hoping that talk of new flings was exaggerated. But as whispers of a new relationship have persisted, the girls have allegedly "more or less turned their back" on theSomebody Like Yousinger.
From a distance, there is a grim familiarity to the script: famous man, messy mid‑life, furious teenagers closing ranks around a mother they see as wronged. Up close, of course, it is more complicated. We are relying on unnamed sources, suppositions and the notoriously elastic ethics of supermarket tabloids. Urban himself has not publicly addressed any rift with his daughters, and the girls, sensibly, are not speaking at all.
Where the story slides from sad to slightly salacious is in the detail. TheGlobereport leans heavily on Nashville gossip that, long before the divorce papers were filed, Urban was 'hot and heavy' with 25‑year‑old fiddle player Maggie Baugh — a member of his touring band. He has also been publicly linked to country star Kelsea Ballerini, 32, and singer‑songwriter Karley Scott Collins, 26.
There is, it has to be said, a world of difference between professional collaboration, harmless flirtation and a full‑blown affair. Urban has performed with Ballerini and Collins; that much is on YouTube. He has not confirmed any romantic relationship with any of the three women mentioned. In the vacuum, rumour does what rumour always does.
Source: International Business Times UK
