She built a career in corporate law while sharing a face with one of the most photographed women of the Tiger Woods era. The two worlds met only once.
Josefin Nordegren is a Swedish corporate lawyer and the identical twin sister of Elin Nordegren, the former wife of golfer Tiger Woods. While her sister’s marriage and its collapse in 2010 played out across the world’s front pages, she built a legal career in London and Stockholm that drew almost no attention.
During the months when the scandal was at its loudest, that resemblance had a use. Johnny Axelsson, a reporter at the Swedish magazine Se & Hรถr who covered the story, said Josefin stood in for her sister more than once, leading photographers away while Elin slipped past them.
She is usually cast as the supportive twin in the background. The part that gets left out is that she was, by then, a qualified corporate lawyer, and one of the people who represented Elin when the marriage ended.
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Who is Josefin Nordegren?
She was born in Stockholm on 1 January 1980, around ten minutes after Elin, according to Hello! Magazine, which makes her 46. Her married name is Lรถnnborg, and Swedish public records list her in full as Anna Josefin Sigrid Lรถnnborg. Her field is commercial law, and she has practised in both Stockholm and London.
The family behind the Nordegren twins
The twins came from a family already well known in Sweden. Their parents handled publicity carefully, and that caution seems to have stayed with both daughters.
Their father, Thomas Nordegren, spent decades in Swedish journalism. He reported from Helsinki, Brussels and Berlin, ran Swedish radio’s Washington bureau, and for years presented a daily current affairs programme on Sveriges Radio P1 before he retired in 2023. When the Woods story broke, producers from the Today show and Larry King Live both approached him. He turned them down and told the newspaper Aftonbladet that he would never take advantage of his daughter in that way.
Their mother, Barbro Holmberg, was Sweden’s Minister for Migration and Asylum Policy from 2003 to 2006, and later served as Governor of Gรคvleborg County from 2008 to 2015. Her official residence as governor was a castle dating from the 16th century.
The twins also have an older brother, Axel, born about thirteen months before them, who has lived in Shanghai and worked as a marketing consultant for the Swedish Trade Council. Elin later named her son Charlie Axel after him.
Two identical girls, raised to be told apart
The sisters grew up in Vaxholm, in the islands east of Stockholm. Their parents divorced in 1987, when the girls were seven, and the children split their time between the two households after that.
Elin described their upbringing in a 2010 interview with People, and it explains why the two ended up so different in public:
- Their parents rarely dressed them alike.
- When they did, Elin wore red and Josefin wore blue, so no one used the wrong name.
- They were given different haircuts and put in separate classes at school.
“Everybody knew that red equals Elin and blue equals Josefin,” Elin told the magazine. “My sister has been my best friend since the day we were born, and she is more than a best friend today.”
With a journalist father and a politician mother, the family understood how easily two identical girls could blur into one public identity, and they worked against it. The sisters earned their own money early, taking summer jobs as supermarket cashiers to pay for their studies, and in 1997 they spent a year in Berlin with their father, studying at the John F. Kennedy School.
Where the twins’ paths divided
The choice that sent the sisters in different directions had nothing to do with golf.
Around 2000 and 2001, both worked in the United States for the family of Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik. NBC’s Today reported in December 2009 that Elin was an au pair for Parnevik “along with her twin sister, Josefin” when she began seeing Woods.
Then they chose differently. Elin stayed. She was introduced to Woods at the 2001 Open Championship, married him in 2004, and within a few years was one of the most recognised faces in the celebrity press. Josefin went back to Sweden and enrolled at Lund University to read law.
The corporate lawyer behind the headlines
Almost none of her working life reached the public before 2010. After Lund, she took a master’s degree in law at the London School of Economics. The Martindale-Hubbell legal directory records her first admission to practise in 2005, and she is qualified in both England and Sweden. She worked at firms in Stockholm and London before joining the American firm McGuireWoods, which had entered the British market only in May 2009, through a merger with the City practice Grundberg Mocatta Rakison.
Her work was in corporate law, covering mergers and acquisitions, international transactions, securities and finance. This was technical work, far from the tabloids that followed her sister. The Swedish Bar Association first listed her in 2011, under its overseas section, at McGuireWoods’ London office. A 2013 announcement from the firm named her on the team advising the telecoms company TEOCO on its purchase of AIRCOM, and McGuireWoods later recorded her as a partner.
Her role in the Tiger Woods divorce
That separation between her work and her sister’s fame held until late 2009. After Woods crashed his car outside his Florida home and admitted to affairs, Josefin flew out to be with Elin. Their mother went too, and at one point collapsed from low blood pressure and spent a short time in hospital after flu went through the house.
On 20 January 2010, while Woods was reported to be in treatment, Josefin and her husband took Elin’s two young children, Sam and Charlie, to Sea World in Orlando. Hollywood Life ran photographs the next day.
The legal part came that August. When the divorce was finalised on 23 August 2010 in a Bay County courtroom in Florida, Josefin was among the McGuireWoods lawyers named for Elin, alongside colleagues from the firm’s American offices and its London base. Reporters covering the case noted how unusual it was for a corporate firm, with a London office barely a year old and no real divorce practice, to be handling one of the most closely watched celebrity splits of the year. The reason was that the client’s twin sister worked there. The settlement was widely reported at around $100 million. Her name appeared in the legal press that month and then went quiet again.
Marriage, family and a return to Sweden
She is married to Daniel Lรถnnborg, a finance professional who has worked in London, including at Barclays Capital. The couple were photographed with a child in 2013 and have kept their family life private. Swedish records now place them in Djursholm, an affluent area north of Stockholm.
In August 2024 the Swedish Bar Association moved her from its overseas section to the domestic roll of registered advocates. No firm was listed beside her name, and there was no announcement.
That listing was in keeping with the rest. Two decades after she moved to London to practise law, the most public thing about Josefin Lรถnnborg is still her sister’s marriage, and the divorce she helped bring to an end.
