Who is Nick Loeb? Sofia Vergara's ex loses battle to use her frozen embryos without consent, judge denies appeal
On Tuesday, March 2, a Los Angeles court ruled in favor of Sofia Vergara in her ongoing court battle with ex Nick Loeb over custody rights to frozen pre-embryos they created while together. The ‘Modern Family’ actor and Loeb ended their engagement in May 2014. She married Joe Manganiello the following year.
In 2017, Vergara filed legal documents in California in order to block Loeb from being able to use, without her written consent, the frozen pre-embryos they created via IVF at the ART Reproductive Center in Beverly Hills, California, while still together in 2013. Initially, Loeb tried to gain full custody of the viable pre-embryos. In January, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal in Louisiana dismissed this.
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On Tuesday, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge sided with Vergara, granting her request for a Permanent Injunction and preventing Loeb from using the frozen embryos "to create a child without the explicit written permission of the other person".
According to the court records, Loeb and Vergara previously signed a document, "the Form Directive," at the fertility clinic agreeing that both parties had to agree in order to do anything with the embryos. As per reports, Loeb had previously argued that he signed this form under "duress". However, the court found that "the Form Directive is not void or voidable based on Defendant Loeb's duress defense as to its execution."
Who is Nick Loeb?
The son of American businessman John Langeloth Loeb Jr. and Meta Martindell Harrsen, he is a businessman and a filmmaker. As per a 1999 profile of Loeb, his parents divorced when he was a year old. His father, in light of his mother’s mental illness, retained custody of his son, raising him in his sprawling Upper East Side townhouse.
“Growing up in today’s world everyone is married a million times,” he said in the profile. “I don’t think the divorce affected me too much,” though his mother’s absence did. “From age two to nine I never saw her, I don’t know why. She’d call once a year, and I’d see her every couple of years. She was always very loving and warm.”
In 2008, Loeb served as finance co-chairman for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential run. The following year, running as a Republican with the support of Giuliani, he abandoned a state Senate campaign because he was going through a divorce from his first wife Anna Pettersson.
Loeb met Vergara in 2010. As per reports, he started to push for children after they got engaged, and Vergara agreed on the condition that they use a surrogate. The surrogate later miscarried, so the couple created the two embryos that were at the center of the legal battle.
In a letter published in the New York Times in 2015, Loeb said he wanted a surrogate to carry and give birth to the two female embryos that were created through in vitro fertilization with Vergara. “Many have asked me: Why not just move on and have a family of your own? I have every intention of doing so. But that doesn’t mean I should let the two lives I have already created be destroyed or sit in a freezer until the end of time,” he wrote.
