Jennifer Lopez Files to Divorce Ben Affleck
The rumors are true: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are over … again.
One of Hollywood’s most famous A-list couples have split for a second time as Lopez filed for divorce on Tuesday in L.A. County Superior Court, according to The Associated Press. Per People, Lopez listed the date of separation as April 26, 2024, though she filed today, on Aug. 20, the second anniversary of their ceremony in Georgia, an extravagant wedding that followed a quickie Las Vegas elopement in July 2022. The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to reps for Affleck and Lopez and will update accordingly, though no statements are expected as they both have kept mum in recent months about the status of their relationship. TMZ was the first to report the news.
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The filing comes after a dizzying few months of tabloid headlines and TMZ news blasts covering the sale of their $65 million mansion, separate outings (with and without wedding rings) and speculation about the source of tension in one of the most publicized couplings in modern celebrity history.
In hindsight, the hints were there. The flurry of tabloid coverage included reports of Lopez’s solo summer trip to the Hamptons (and Italy before that) while Affleck remained back in Los Angeles, where he is said to have moved his belongings out of their shared home and into a Brentwood rental. She attended the premiere of her Netflix film Atlas alone, just like that other major outing of hers in May when she stepped out with no plus-one as a co-chair of fashion’s biggest night at the Met Gala, which has long been a high-profile place for Hollywood couples. While in the Hamptons, she also celebrated her 55th birthday with a Bridgerton-themed bash with no Affleck in sight.
Affleck, 51, and Lopez, 54, reunited in April 2021, after she ended an engagement with baseball great Alex Rodriguez and Affleck parted ways with onetime co-star Ana de Armas. A year later, Affleck proposed while Lopez was taking a bubble bath. An intimate Las Vegas ceremony followed in July 2022, while a larger, more traditional ceremony followed a month later at Affleck’s Georgia estate, presided over by life coach and podcaster Jay Shetty and covered by Vogue. The bride wore a custom Ralph Lauren wedding dress, while the seats were filled with family and friends like Matt Damon, filmmaker Kevin Smith and Affleck’s longtime power agent, WME’s Patrick Whitesell.
They blended their families, with Affleck arriving to the marriage with three children from a longtime marriage to actress Jennifer Garner, and Lopez bringing twins from a marriage to music star Marc Anthony. There were many high-profile public appearances over the past two years at their respective film premieres and awards shows like the Grammys. Some of those, like music’s biggest night or her The Mother premiere, inspired headlines about everything from Affleck’s resting grumpy face to an alleged red carpet spat, though they maintained all was well with their rekindled romance.
This year delivered a new round of press when Lopez dropped back-to-back-to-back new projects with an album (This Is Me … Now), a musical film featuring the tracks from the new album (also titled This Is Me … Now) and a documentary about the making of the musical film (The Greatest Love Story Never Told), all of which put their romance front and center as the fairy tale that had finally come true. Lopez repeatedly praised Affleck as the inspiration for the works and spoke about him at length in various interviews.
“Now I feel like because Ben and I have rediscovered each other — and now that we’re married — I have something to offer. This is the defining piece of work that’s going to close that chapter so I can move on to the next part of my life,” she told Variety. In a separate interview, she confessed that Affleck wasn’t “very comfortable” with the swirl of projects. “But he loves me, he knows I’m an artist, and he’s gonna support me in every way he can, because he knows you can’t stop me from making the music I made … he doesn’t want to stop me. But that doesn’t mean he’s comfortable being the muse.”
He confirmed that a public romance wasn’t the easiest place for him to exist. “Getting back together, I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media.’ Then I sort of realized it’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s sort of like, you’re gonna marry a boat captain and you go, ‘Well, I don’t like the water.'”
Still, it seems as though having their relationship serve as the inspiration for an album and for breathless media coverage created some tension. “Things that are private, I’d always felt, are sacred and special, because, in part, they’re private. So this was something of an adjustment for me,” he has said.
The Bennifer origin story dates back to 2001. Affleck and Lopez met while filming the Martin Brest romantic dramedy Gigli, which was released two years later, only to tank at the box office and live on in infamy. Their romance, however, flourished and the couple got engaged in 2002 when the actor proposed with a 6.1-carat Harry Winston rock. Also that same year, Affleck made a cameo in Lopez’s “Jenny From the Block” music video, a track from the entertainer’s This Is Me … Then album.
“I think what happened is, as we worked together [on the movie Gigli], we became such good friends,” Lopez previously told Zane Lowe in an interview. “We realized that we were crazy about each other. I found myself kind of thinking about him after the movie was over. And having to take care of my own business, because I was coming out of a relationship at that time. But it’s like you just knew it. It’s just like, ‘This is the person I want to be with.’ And that happened over a period of months. It wasn’t an instant thing because we weren’t allowed to do that. Yeah, it kind of grew over time.”
But it did not grow all the way to the altar. The couple broke up just days before an extravagant wedding. “Ben and I broke up four days before our wedding and we had a big wedding plan, with like 14 ushers and bridesmaids, and three days before we just crumbled under the pressure,” Lopez once confirmed about the heartbreak that took some time to get over. “For all those years it was really hard cause I didn’t just feel like I lost the love of my life, I felt like I lost the best friend I ever had. I couldn’t talk for so many years, and that was the hardest part.”
Lopez was previously married to Ojani Noa (1997-98), Cris Judd (2001-03) and Marc Anthony (2004-14), and was engaged to Rodriguez during a four-year relationship. Affleck was married to Garner (2005-18).
While it may be the end of the road for Bennifer, it’s never too late to find another Hollywood ending. “Sometimes it doesn’t work — and that’s sad,” Lopez explained in a 2011 interview with Vanity Fair. “But I remain an eternal optimist about love. I believe in love. It’s still my biggest dream.”
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