Catherine and Alan agreed in March to try to save their marriage, three months after he filed for divorce. In September they said it was over.
Catherine Ritchson, a former financial analyst and the mother of Alan Ritchson’s three sons, is still legally married to the Reacher actor. The divorce case Alan filed in December 2025 was open when Headline Magazine checked Williamson County Chancery Court’s online records on 5 October, and no final decree had been entered.
The couple announced on 12 September that they were ending the marriage. Their joint Instagram post, signed “Cat and Alan”, began: “After twenty years together, Cat and I have decided to end our marriage and continue alongside one another in a different way.” They have three boys, Calem, 14, Edan, 12, and Amory, 10.
Alan had filed more than nine months before that post, on 1 December 2025. The Daily Mail reported from the court papers that he cited irreconcilable differences, and People confirmed the case through court records two days after the announcement.
In March the couple filed an agreed order of reconciliation, which suspended the case for six months, Us Weekly reported. That suspension would have ended in September. They appeared together in public while the case was on hold, and in July Catherine and the boys joined Alan on the red carpet at the New York premiere of his film Motor City.
Neither of them has said publicly why the attempt to reconcile ended. As of 5 October, Catherine, 42, had not posted on her own Instagram account since the announcement.
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How Cat Ritchson met Alan in a Florida ballet class
Catherine, who goes by Cat, grew up on a 90-acre farm in a small town in north Florida. In 2000, aged 16, she was still in high school and taking a ballet class at a state college. Alan, then 17, was another high school student taking classes there, and he needed dance credits for musical theatre.
She described the first time she saw him on The Road to Wisdom podcast in September 2023: “I’ll never forget seeing him for the first time in the [dance] studio. I turned to my friend Miriam and I said, ‘Who is that?’ He, at some point, came up to me and we just got chatting.”
Alan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2024 that he had held back at first. “I thought she was a college student, so I was afraid to talk to her.”
They dated that summer until Alan ended it. Catherine said he still blames the break-up on the 30-minute drive between their homes and the cost of petrol. “I’ve made him pay for it ever since.”
They reconnected through a mutual friend during her time at the University of Florida, where she studied finance and Russian from 2002, while Alan was modelling in Miami. They got engaged in 2005 and married on 12 May 2006, a week after she graduated.
Married life before Reacher
Around the time of the engagement, Alan had made an album himself, and Catherine’s plan was to sell it on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. They set up a boom box, realised they had no extension cord, made a run to Home Depot and started selling CDs, until a man dressed “kind of like a clown” asked whether they had a permit. They didn’t. “I believed in him that much,” she said on the podcast.
Two months after the wedding, in July 2006, she joined the talent agency ICM as a financial analyst. She stayed for almost eight years, until March 2014, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She was pregnant with their first son in 2012 when Alan was cast as Gloss in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, a shoot in Atlanta that could have kept him away for the birth. She told him to take the part. “This is too big of an opportunity. You have to go,” she recalled. A two-week break in filming got him home, and Calem was born on 19 September 2012.
Edan was born in 2014 and Amory in December 2015. When Amory arrived, Catherine wrote on Instagram that his name means “brave & powerful” and that they had chosen it “to equip our third born to feel he could be as much of a leader as if he were the first born”.
In a February 2024 Instagram post, she said she had spent “many years” as his “scene partner on the other side of the audition tape”. IMDb lists her as an executive producer of the 2017 short film Tree House Time Machine and as co-writer, with Alan, of Employee 665, a project in development.
Living on the move for Reacher
Alan has played Jack Reacher on Prime Video since 2022. In early 2023, while he filmed the second season, the boys went back to school in Florida. On the podcast, Catherine called it an experiment that failed, mainly because “Alan kind of fell apart with us all not being together”. The family’s conclusion was “we just gotta stay together”, and later that year they sold the Florida house and began living in Airbnbs and hotels near his shoots.
Speaking that September, she said: “If I knew everything I knew now from the beginning, I’d still choose this road.”
“There is an art to loving an artist. And there are no Nielsen ratings for that.”
Catherine Ritchson, The Road to Wisdom podcast, 2023
What Catherine has posted this year
Apart from the joint statement, everything Catherine has posted on Instagram in 2026 went up before the announcement. She marked her 42nd birthday in March with a week-long retreat that included an off-grid digital detox.
A solo trip to Alaska followed in June. Afterwards she wrote that she had “kind of learned to relate to the world through my own existence instead of exclusively through caretaking my kids or family or friends. That part was weird and new but welcome.”
In July she worked on the pastoral crew at Hope Heals Camp, which hosts families affected by disability. A family photo she posted that month, after Alan’s appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, carried the caption “Was so fun to support Dad as a family”.
What happens next in the divorce case
Tennessee law sets out what a divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences needs before a judge can grant it, when the couple have children under 18.
| What the law requires | The Ritchson case on 5 October |
|---|---|
| The case has been on file for at least 90 days before a hearing | Passed on 1 March 2026 |
| A written agreement on custody, child support and property that the judge finds adequate | None made public |
| A permanent parenting plan, included in the final decree | None made public |
If the judge does not find the arrangements adequate, the court adjourns the case so they can be revisited, under section 36-4-103 of the Tennessee Code. The parenting plan rule is in section 36-6-404.
In their September statement, the couple said the best gift they could give each other and their sons “right now is friendship, grace, and a commitment to become the strongest co-parents we can be”. The statement went on: “Change is hard enough without the whole world weighing in. We hope, especially for the sake of our boys, that you will allow our family to move through this chapter with privacy and compassion.”
