Jose Stemkens: What Happened to Titus Welliver’s Ex-Wife?

Jose Stemkens built a real career in international fashion long before most people heard her name. She is a Dutch fashion consultant who worked in Holland, Germany, Hong Kong, and the United States, founded her own consulting business in Los Angeles, and helped foreign brands find their place in the American market. For many readers, though, she is first known as the former wife of actor Titus Welliver, the star of Bosch.

Her story has two clear halves. One half is a working life in fashion that started in a shop in Holland and grew, step by step, into senior roles on three continents. The other half is a marriage that placed her, for a few years, next to a well known television actor, and a divorce that was handled in court papers rather than in public arguments. This article follows both halves, using what is documented and marking what is not.

Quick Facts

Early Life in South Africa and Holland

Most biographies of jose stemkens agree on the broad shape of her early life, even when they disagree on dates. She was born in Tembisa, South Africa, and she grew up in the Netherlands, which is why she is described as Dutch. Her full name is given in reporting as Josepha Theodora Stemkens. Family from Holland remained close enough that, years later, her mother, brother, and sister travelled from Holland for her wedding in California.

Her birth date needs honest handling. Many sites list December 29 as her birthday, but they do not agree on the year, and at least one careful profile notes openly that reports about her year of birth contradict each other. One widely repeated year would make her far too young for senior jobs she is documented as holding in the 1990s. For that reason, this article does not present a birth year as fact. What can be said safely is that her career timeline shows she was already working in fashion as a young woman in Holland and was holding international roles by the mid 1990s.

From a Shop Floor in Holland to the World

Stemkens began her working life in Dutch retail, at the Mata Hari multi chain store in Holland. Biographies describe her starting as a sales clerk and rising to assistant manager, and in some accounts to managing the store. Retail work of that kind teaches the basics that the rest of fashion depends on. What customers actually buy, how stock moves, and how a shop floor feels on a busy day are lessons that stay useful at every higher level.

At the age of 21, by the commonly told account, she moved into a very different kind of fashion job. She took a role in Dusseldorf, Germany, with a fashion wholesaler that held licensing rights for Disney apparel. She worked there for about five years, and the job took her to Hong Kong, where the company had production, to help set up an office. Few people in their twenties get that mix of European retail, licensing, and Asian production experience, and it shaped the rest of her path.

Building Her Own Name in Los Angeles

After Esprit, Stemkens kept moving through senior fashion roles. She worked as an international account manager for The Great China Wall, a high end clothing label, for close to three years. In mid 2009, she became president of a Dutch clothing company with the labels JC Rags and Dept, with a clear task. She was to establish those Dutch labels in the American market. She later spent a period as a vice president helping to set up a Los Angeles base for the House of Quirky, a role described as lasting about eight months.

Then, in 2014, she started her own ventures. The best known is Sunrise Fashion Consulting, her own firm. Its work, as described across profiles, is practical. It helps international fashion brands enter or grow in the United States market, advising on how a brand should be presented, placed, and sold in a country whose retail habits differ from Europe and Asia. That is exactly the kind of work her career had been training her for, since she had lived the problem from both sides, as a European professional learning America and as an America based professional guiding Europeans.

She is also reported as a co founder of Eywasouls Malibu, a fashion brand known for luxury maxi dresses. That venture showed the creative side of her work, moving from advising other people’s brands to shaping a product of her own. Details of her day to day role in these businesses in recent years are limited, because she does not promote herself heavily in public, but the businesses are a consistent part of her biography across many profiles.

Marriage to Titus Welliver

Stemkens married Titus Welliver on April 12, 2014, at Saddle Peak Lodge in Calabasas, California. Reports of the wedding describe a bride in a Herve Leger gown, flowers and planning by a named local planner, and music by a band for the evening guests. Welliver’s three children attended, and Stemkens’s family came from Holland, which gives the day a clear picture. It joined a Dutch fashion family and an American acting family in one California ceremony.

Welliver was already a familiar actor by then. He had built a long career in film and television, with roles in shows such as Deadwood and Lost and films including The Town and Argo, and 2014 was also the year Bosch began, the series that made him a leading man as detective Harry Bosch. He had been married before. His earlier marriages included Heather Wielandt, Joanna Heimbold, and Elizabeth W. Alexander. Alexander, a film producer, died of breast cancer in 2012. Sources differ in how they number Stemkens among his wives, which is why readers may see her called his fourth wife in one place and his fifth marriage counted in another. The safe facts are the date, the place, and the marriage itself.

Family Life and Her Bond With Cora

Stemkens did not have biological children with Welliver, and profiles agree that she has no biological children of her own. Her family role in the marriage was still a real and serious one. She became stepmother to Welliver’s three children, his sons Eamonn and Quinn, from his marriage to Joanna Heimbold, and his daughter Cora, from his marriage to Elizabeth W. Alexander.

With Cora, the bond went further than the word stepmother suggests. Cora was eight years old when Stemkens and Welliver married, and Stemkens legally adopted her during the marriage. That single fact explains a lot about how the later divorce was handled. When a marriage includes an adopted child, the end of the marriage does not end the legal and emotional questions, and court arrangements for Cora formed part of the couple’s settlement process.

The Divorce and What Happened Next

Welliver filed for legal separation from Stemkens on May 14, 2019, in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The filing listed April 3, 2019, as the date of separation. He sought joint custody arrangements connected to Cora and offered to pay spousal support, according to court reporting at the time. The marriage had lasted five years by the separation date, although the legal process took much longer to finish.

The divorce was finalized in January 2021. Reporting on the settlement says Stemkens kept a 2017 Range Rover, the couple’s six horses, and her personal and business accounts, and that she received monthly spousal support through the end of 2021. One widely repeated report puts that support at 27,000 dollars a month, but readers should treat exact settlement figures as reported rather than independently confirmed, since full court documents are not published for public reading. Welliver, in the same reporting, kept his bank accounts, his acting residuals, and other property including a Mini Cooper and a motorcycle.

So, what happened to Jose Stemkens after that? The honest answer is that she returned to the life she had before the marriage became news. Reports indicate that she continued to run her fashion consulting business from the Los Angeles area. She has kept her post divorce life away from public view. There is no confirmed report of a remarriage, no public feud with her former husband, and no new public profile built on the divorce. For a woman whose career existed before the marriage and continued after it, that is a consistent ending to the public part of the story. Her work stayed hers, her privacy came back, and the headlines moved on to her former husband’s next roles.

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FAQs

What does Jose Stemkens do for a living?

She is a fashion consultant. After early retail work in Holland, a licensing role in Germany and Hong Kong, and about a decade with Esprit across four cities, she held senior roles with other labels and then founded Sunrise Fashion Consulting in Los Angeles. She is also reported as a co founder of Eywasouls Malibu.

When were Jose Stemkens and Titus Welliver married and divorced?

They married on April 12, 2014, in Calabasas, California. Welliver filed for legal separation in May 2019, listing a separation date of April 3, 2019, and the divorce was finalized in January 2021.

Did Jose Stemkens have children with Titus Welliver?

No. They had no biological children together. During the marriage she was stepmother to his three children, and she legally adopted his youngest child, his daughter Cora, who was eight years old at the time of the wedding.

Where is Jose Stemkens today?

Reports indicate that she continues her fashion consulting work from the Los Angeles area and keeps a private personal life. Her exact current activities are not documented in detail in reliable public sources, and any net worth figure printed for her online is an unverified estimate.

Final Thoughts

Jose Stemkens is sometimes reduced, in headlines, to a single line about a famous former husband. Her actual biography is longer and more interesting than that line. She started on a shop floor in Holland, worked in Germany and Hong Kong while still young, spent a decade with a global brand across four cities, led Dutch labels into the American market, and then founded her own consulting firm in Los Angeles.

Her marriage to Titus Welliver, from 2014 to a separation in 2019 and a finalized divorce in 2021, is part of her story, and her adoption of his daughter Cora shows it was a real family life, not a brief celebrity pairing. What happened to her afterwards is, fittingly, the least dramatic part. She went back to her work and her privacy. In a media world that rewards noise, Jose Stemkens chose the same quiet professionalism that built her career in the first place.

Featured photo: Titus Welliver – photo by Kevin Paul, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons