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 and Hollywood without falling apart.
Off social media, the picture being painted is much harsher. In the wake of Kidman's shock decision to file for divorce after 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.
Keith Urban Cut Off By Daughters, Tabloids Claim
According to US tabloid Globe, 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.
The Globe piece 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 the Somebody Like You singer.
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.
Alleged New Romance Leaves Keith Urban 'Persona Non Grata'
Where the story slides from sad to slightly salacious is in the detail. The Globe report 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.
'If he's gotten serious with someone else, then it's perfectly understandable why he's quickly turned into persona non grata with the kids,' the magazine's source insists. It is a blunt assessment, but not an implausible teenage reaction. Even adult children flinch at the speed with which a newly single parent sometimes parades a new partner; teenagers, still half‑children themselves, are rarely more forgiving.
To make matters more fraught, Globe reports that Kidman is weighing a move back to Australia with Sunday and Faith, taking them closer to her extended family in Sydney and further away from their father's Nashville base. For a pair of already angry girls, an intercontinental shift could harden into long‑term distance.
The same source, in a softer turn, suggests the estrangement may not be permanent. 'The girls still love Keith very much and it's likely in time, they'll soften and want to spend time with him,' they say, adding that Urban 'has a lot of explaining to do if he wants to re‑establish his relationship with them, and the secretive way he's gone about things has done him no favours.'
That, buried under the tabloid venom, is the one note that rings undeniably true: if Urban has moved on quickly — whether emotionally or physically — he will almost certainly have to do the hard, unglamorous work of earning his daughters' trust back.
Between Gossip And Reality, A Family Bruises In Public
It is easy to roll your eyes at all of this. Another celebrity divorce, another round of anonymous 'friends' tattling to the Globe about who feels betrayed and who is 'desperate.' But behind the gaudy fonts and breathless headlines is a fairly ordinary human drama, made crueller by its visibility.
Teenagers taking their mother's side in a marital break‑up is not new. Nor is a middle‑aged man being painted as a 'skirt‑chaser' while insisting, perhaps accurately, that his private life is his own business. What makes the Keith Urban version more unsettling is the extent to which strangers are being invited — encouraged, even — to adjudicate which parent deserves loyalty.
There is also the question of how much truth sits beneath the gossip. Urban has a well‑documented history of addiction and recovery; Kidman has spoken in the past about the effort it took to hold their marriage together through rehab and relapse. Against that backdrop, the idea of him 'moving on' at pace is bound to sting more sharply than it might in a less complicated relationship.
Yet for all the noise, what we do not have are direct quotes from the only people who actually matter here: Sunday and Faith. We have someone else's version of their anger, packaged for maximum outrage. Their actual feelings, their texts, their silences — those remain, as they should, theirs.
If the gossip is even half right, Keith Urban is a father on the outside of his own family, watching his daughters close ranks with their mother and possibly preparing to watch them board a plane to the other side of the world. No amount of chart success or industry respect insulates you from that kind of loss.
The tabloid line is that he is a 'desperate dad' who has brought this on himself. The more honest one is that he is a man who, like many before him, may discover too late that whatever thrill there is in starting again can come at the cost of the relationships he once sang about as though they were unshakeable.
The guitars will still be there. The arena lights will still go up. But if the two teenagers who used to dance in the wings are now watching from a deliberate distance, that will be a harsher verdict than anything printed in the Globe.
Originally published on IBTimes UK
© 2026 MusicTimes.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
