Rocco’s choice: Madonna’s place or Guy’s?

Madonna and Guy Ritchie, the British director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Sherlock Holmes, were married for eight years before it ended in divorce. Rocco was born in 2000 and christened the day before their wedding at Skibo Castle in Scotland. During their marriage, they adopted a Malawian boy, David Banda, who is now 10. Madonna has a daughter Lourdes, 19, by the actor Carlos Leon. In 2009 she adopted Mercy, a Malawian girl, who is also 10.

After Madonna and Ritchie’s split it was agreed that they would share custody of the children but that they would be based with Madonna in New York. In December Madonna’s Rebel Heart tour came to Britain but when the circus moved on Rocco stayed in London with his father and declined to return to America.

At a court hearing in Manhattan just before Christmas, a lawyer for Ritchie said that Rocco “has expressed very clearly that he does not want to return to New York”. The judge, Deborah Kaplan, ordered that Rocco had to be back in the city for the start of this school term and said that if he wanted to return to his father, he had to come back to his mother first to resolve it through the court.

Rocco did not return and a fresh court hearing is expected today. Madonna has a few days off before her tour to promote her 13th album, Rebel Heart, continues in New Zealand this weekend.

Reports of the court proceedings in New York did not specify why Rocco prefers to stay in London and, despite speculation, those details remain private. Asked if she could provide some clarity on the legal situation and what the next move would be in the case, one of Madonna’s representatives says simply: “Sadly not.”

Madonna gives every impression of being bursting to talk. In one Instagram post she quoted her song Live To Tell: “I have a tale to tell . . . sometimes it gets so hard to hide it well . #tearsofaclown.” This was alongside a disturbing image of her wearing a scold’s bridle and corsetry with her hands placed provocatively in her crotch. This was posted shortly after she ranted on stage about her ex-husband in Nashville: “I’m looking for a husband, not a c***. I already married a c***.”

On stage in Mexico City she told the crowd: “I too go through challenging times in my life. Right now is one of them. Sometimes I think I can’t do a show. I don’t have the energy. I don’t have the strength.” She paused and wiped tears from her eyes. “I come out here and see your faces and see so much love and you give me strength.”

Cynical manipulation of her audience? Possibly. However, whatever the rights and wrongs of referring to a child custody battle live on stage, no one could doubt that one of the toughest women in showbusiness is in a miserable place.

“This is the sort of case that should never see the inside of a courtroom.” That is the view of Ayesha Vardag, one of London’s leading divorce lawyers. “Once children get to a certain level of maturity they start voting with their feet. You can’t just push them around with court orders. It’s their lives, their fragile, sensitive, emotional lives, which they’re trying to find a way of living,” she says. “What most families need on children matters is mutual disarmament: fire all the lawyers, spend less money and more time and listen to each other until you work it out.”

Unfortunately, that stage seems to have passed. Claire Blakemore, a partner in the family law group of Withers LLP, says that courts can direct parties back to dispute resolution processes such as mediation, but this can be very hard in cases like this because of the geographical constraints and conflicting laws in different countries.

“International children disputes can be the most difficult to deal with,” she says. “If there is a dispute between parents about in which country a child is to live, the implications and impact on the family is often greater because of the geographical considerations. Because of that emotions are often very high. When advising clients we need a healthy mix of appreciation of the sensitivity of the situation, a tight focus on working through complex legal and factual issues, being able to prepare and support clients for some tough and potentially long litigation, that could last months, while also trying to keep their eyes open to the possibility of a resolution being reached by agreement. It is a tough process for parents and children.”

Madonna has always posted pictures of her children on social media. When times were good it probably felt harmless uploading, say, a picture of her son with his hair in bunches. In retrospect, some postings look odd, such as the video of Rocco performing a backflip wearing only a pair of pants. The film was shot from the side, which Madonna said was “Rocco’s preferred profile #nosausage.” Under another picture of a 14-year-old Rocco she wrote: “Hide your wives!”

Rocco closed down his Instagram account shortly after posting a message to a friend saying he was staying in London. Ritchie has put up a couple of pictures of himself fishing with his younger children in Dorset but not a glimpse of Rocco.

At Christmas Madonna posted a picture of herself with Rocco and the comment: “Merry X-mas to the Sun-shine of my Life.” Either she genuinely had no way of contacting her boy other than through a public social media message or she wanted the world to know that she was trying to contact him. It felt like she had been taking tips from Fathers4Justice.

A few weeks later she addressed critics who suggested that long tours were incompatible with raising her family. She featured a picture in which she was relaxing on a sofa with her four children and the message: “It’s possible to be an entertainer and a good mother!!! Too bad we don’t live in a society where many encourage strong independent single working moms! The next great Frontier!”

Meanwhile, in London, where Ritchie has a family house, Rocco has been seen out on a jolly cycle ride with his dad and his stepmother, Jacqui Ainsley, a model who married Ritchie last summer. Less helpful in a court hearing may be photographs published by The Sun showing Rocco hanging out at a skateboarding park on the south bank of the Thames. According to the paper, he was sharing a “suspicious-looking” roll-up cigarette with other youths.

Ritchie and Ainsley married at Ashcombe House, the 1,100-acre Wiltshire estate that Ritchie bought with Madonna. Guests included David Beckham, Brad Pitt and Jason Statham and his girlfriend Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Rocco gave a speech at the wedding, though Ritchie said in an interview that he was too drunk to recall what his son said.

In New York, Madonna, a famous workaholic and follower of Kabbalah who sticks to a strict macrobiotic diet, runs a tight ship.

Lourdes is away at the University of Michigan, which her mother attended for a short period before seeking stardom in New York. The younger children attend the Lycée Français in Manhattan and their mother takes a tough line on homework and screen time.

However, when your mother is one of the most famous entertainers in the world, a stable domestic life is always going to be hard to maintain. When Madonna tours she generally does so with the children in tow, supported by assistants and tutors. The children “travel everywhere with me”, she has said. “I don’t like to be away from my children.”

However carefully you plan, months on the road, crisscrossing the globe to stadium concerts, would be challenging even if your parent were a low-key concert pianist. As it is, she is one of the biggest stars in the world who has built a career on the back of carefully calculated outrageousness and being never knowingly underexposed. She posed nude for a magazine two years ago, aged 56.

In an interview last year Madonna was asked about her raunchy lyrics and said that sometimes she had to tell her children to wait outside when they came to meet her at the recording studio. “At this point Rocco doesn’t care,” she said. “It just goes over his head. He is like, uhh, Mom — Mom is being Mom.” Lourdes, whom she calls Lola, was “horrified by all of it. She just wants me to be her mom.”

Last year she told Entertainment Weekly: “My 14-year-old son is absolutely not satisfied with all my accomplishments. He just wants me to cook for him. I’m like ‘OK, I’ll get to that. I promise you, when this tour is over with, I’m gonna cook for you.’ ”

She added that although he had appeared on stage with her on previous tours, “he’s not interested in performing on stage with me right now. There’s way cooler things. Your mom is not that cool when you’re 14.”

She has admitted that sometimes she thinks her head “is going to explode” from the stress of combining a career with looking after four children. “I’m the husband and the wife,” she said, “but we do have lots of father figures.” Her two serious partners since her marriage ended were both dancers in their twenties: Brahim Zaibat and Timor Steffens.

Ritchie once said of his marriage that he “stepped into a soap opera and I lived in it for quite a long period of my life”. His ex-wife, in an interview last year with The Sun, reflected that “I wanted to express myself as an artist in ways that I don’t think my ex-husband felt comfortable with. There were times when I felt incarcerated. I wasn’t really allowed to be myself.”

After the divorce Madonna recorded the song I Don’t Give A, about her life. “I tried to be a good girl/ I tried to be your wife/ Diminished myself/ And I swallowed my light . . .” she sang.

That was in 2011, when she probably didn’t suspect that five years on her lyrics would still be so apposite: “You were so mad at me/ Who’s got custody/ Lawyers suck it up.”