Highlights
- Joe Jonas fell between a yacht and a tender boat in Portofino, Italy, after a wave pushed the smaller vessel away.
- A crew member who tried to grab him also fell in, and Jonas hit his shin before rolling onto the tender boat.
- Hours later, the shaken singer said he only wanted to call his daughters, Willa and Delphine, and see their faces.
Joe Jonas knows how it sounds. “It sounds like the bougiest problem,” Jonas acknowledged. “But it was terrifying.”
The Jonas Brothers singer, 37, recounted what happened while appearing on SiriusXM’s The Morgan Stewart Show with Morgan Stewart, who was there when the accident occurred. The episode dropped Wednesday, Sept. 23.
Jonas was vacationing with his girlfriend Tatiana Gabriela, as well as host Morgan Stewart and her husband, Jordan McGraw. The two couples had spent time on a yacht with its own crew and chef in Portofino.
Then came lunch. The restaurant required guests to use its own tender boat to get from the yacht to shore.
The water was rough. The transfer went wrong in seconds.
“The boat is getting pretty close to the yacht, but as I take a step, I think a wave came in and it pushed the boat far out from the yacht,” Jonas recalled.
“It was terrifying because I slipped and fell between these two boats,” he recalled, adding that the first mate who tried to grab him also fell into the water.
He notes that at the time he was fully dressed and still had his phone in his pocket. The two vessels were only feet apart.
“So I’m just between these two boats, and I come back up, and I’m just like…what just happened?”
His mind went straight to getting clear. “My first instinct was, ‘I need to get away from these two boats,'” he said.
The people around him suggested swimming toward the yacht’s ladder, but Jonas worried about the engines at the back of the vessel. He went for the tender instead.
It took two tries. “I must have hit my shin or something… and then I fell back in,” he said. Jonas tried again, eventually managing to roll himself onto the smaller boat while soaking wet.
Stewart watched it all from the yacht. “I was like, ‘Vacation’s over. Vacation’s over,'” she explained. “It’s going to hit him in the head, and we’re going to lose a Jonas Brother.”
“It was so terrifying,” she added.
In the moment, Jonas played it cool. “In those moments,” Jonas shared, “your adrenaline’s going so fast.” After the incident, everyone kept asking him if he was alright, to which he assured he was “fine.”
The fear arrived later. About a couple hours later at the restaurant, the emotional impact hit him at once.
“I finally came down from that anxiousness and I looked at [Tatiana Gabriela],” Jonas recalled. “I was like, ‘That s–t was really scary. That really spooked me for a while.'”
His thoughts turned to his girls. Jonas shares Willa, 6, and Delphine, 4, with ex-wife Sophie Turner.
“I just need to call them. I need to see them. I need to see their faces,” he recalled thinking.
He did not downplay how close it came. “You realise it could have been any of us. It could have been really bad.”
Still, everyone walked away. As Jonas put it, “It was the best outcome of a bad situation.”
