Jelena Radanovic: Skipping Child Support Takes No Courage

Jelena Radanovic posted a message about unpaid child support on her Instagram account on July 31, 2026, alongside a photograph with her sons. She named no one. The subject was not picked at random: for years she pursued a legal case against her ex-husband over exactly that, maintenance he was not paying.

The line she wrote is short and carries no softening.

“Failing to pay child support is the only criminal offence that requires not a shred of courage - it is an act of pure cowardice”

That was all of it. No explanation underneath, no dates, no reference to any proceeding. The post reads as a general position, which is why part of her audience read it as aimed at someone specific.

Who Jelena Radanovic is

She is the wife of singer Sloba Radanovic. The two married on February 20, 2024, and their son was born after the wedding. Radanovic has two sons from her previous marriage, and the child support dispute concerns those two boys rather than the youngest child.

Her ex-husband is a businessman who lives and works abroad, where he owns a restaurant and deals in real estate. In 2023 she also filed a report against him over violence. Through the years the case dragged on, she spoke about it sparingly, in short remarks and never with figures attached.

Why this is not just moralising online

Because the outcome has a name. The money for her two sons did not, in the end, come from their father. It comes from the state. Radanovic receives it through Serbia’s alimony fund, at 55,000 dinars a month, the maximum the fund pays out for two children.

That changes how the post lands. It comes from someone who already reached the end of the road, and who got there sideways, through a state mechanism that exists precisely because a maintenance ruling on paper does not guarantee money in an account. The case is behind her. The position stayed.

Is failing to pay child support actually a crime?

It is, and the phrasing in her post is not rhetorical. In Serbia, failure to provide court-ordered maintenance is defined as a criminal offence rather than a purely civil matter that ends once the debt is settled. A parent who avoids an obligation set by a court ruling can face criminal liability regardless of whether the arrears are later paid off.

Enforcement is the harder part. Cases run long, debtors living abroad are difficult to reach, and the parent raising the children covers everything in the meantime. The alimony fund was set up to close that gap between a ruling and a payment.

Timeline

• 2023, report filed against her ex-husband over violence
• February 20, 2024, marriage to Sloba Radanovic
• 2026, maintenance for her two sons arrives through the alimony fund, 55,000 dinars a month
• July 31, 2026, Instagram post about unpaid child support

What is new here for the Serbian celebrity scene

Unpaid child support usually surfaces on the domestic scene when someone is the accused party, through a denial or a shouting match on a talk show. Radanovic is the first from that world to open the subject from the other side, as a parent who chased the money for years and finally received it from a fund rather than from the other parent.

The form is unfamiliar too. No names, no screenshots of messages, no appeal for support in the comments. One sentence and a photograph with her children.

Whether a more specific statement follows, with names and amounts, nobody around her is signalling. Sloba Radanovic has not commented on his wife’s post.