The last time Jennifer Lopez saw Ben Affleck was at her rented home last Thursday, to wish him well on his 52nd birthday and spend some time with his children.
She is close to Violet, 18, Fin, 15, and Samuel, 12 – his teenage years with first wife Jennifer Garner.
The day before, JLo took Samuel shopping as he prepared to return to school, and then dropped him off at Affleck’s home in Brentwood, LA.
Affleck’s daughter Violet, who has just started at Yale University, was spotted last week wearing one of her stepmother’s dresses. (I’m told this wasn’t any kind of message, but rather the typical wardrobe search you might expect from a teenager.)
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck attend the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles last year
Thursday’s celebrations were the last combined family gathering of the summer, and admittedly a rather awkward one.
That was the last meeting before JLo finally decided to officially end her marriage and filed for divorce in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday of this week, the second anniversary of their big white wedding at their estate in Georgia.
As to why he dropped a lawsuit filed, unusually, without a lawyer, he is not saying, nor has he asked friends for comment.
However, the sad truth is that Affleck apparently did not want to fix the marriage, even though she had wanted to. Their separation, which had lasted since April, could not last long.
“He was impossible to marry,” I was told. “Friends think he’s selfish, surly, impossible to please most of the time, and negative. She was constantly trying to cheer him up, to cheer him up; it was exhausting. He’s a big mouth, he loves to hear himself talk and brag. She was a great listener, hanging on his every word most of the time, but she’s not as young or impressionable as she once was.
A clip from the event appears to show the pair having a heated exchange.
“In the end the negativity was overwhelming, she couldn’t lift him up anymore.”
People magazine quotes a source as saying: “She’s very disappointed and sad, but Ben hasn’t given her any indication that he wants to continue their marriage. It’s gotten to the point where she just needs to take care of herself.”
After months of speculation and attention, which she found ‘personally humiliating’, JLo felt she had no choice but to acknowledge they were over.
She herself gave the date of separation as April 26. The split came to light in early May, shortly after she walked the red carpet at the Met Gala alone. A source said at the time that Affleck would “get a divorce on grounds of temporary insanity” if he could, because he had finally “come to his senses” after what seemed like a “fever dream” of a relationship with Lopez, to whom he was once engaged before ending it in 2004.
Over the summer, they began to dismantle their married life. Their sprawling Beverly Hills home, bought for $60m (£46m), went on the market on 12 July. Divorce became inevitable after he bought a new Los Angeles home in Pacific Palisades in the last week of July – coincidentally on her 55th birthday. He did not attend her big Bridgerton-themed party, although their children spent time with her in the Hamptons during that period.
Now that classes have resumed and Violet is leaving for college, there’s no reason to delay making it official.
What we can expect now is a quick and bloodless separation. There will be no fights over money, friends say: both have plenty and will emerge from the marriage with what they had at the beginning.
“They’ll both just give up and be glad it’s over,” one of them says. A financial disclosure sheet filed as part of the divorce petition suggests they don’t have a prenuptial agreement in place, meaning they’ll technically have to split any income or community property acquired during the union.
However, in an indication that no fight over money is expected, Lopez opted to waive spousal support and asked the judge to deny spousal support to Affleck as well.
She has a few public engagements in the immediate future. JLo is planning a trip to Canada for the Toronto Film Festival premiere of her new film, Unstoppable, in which she plays the mother of a one-legged wrestler. The film is produced by Affleck’s Artists Equity; he is not expected to attend. The hope is that the two can have a period of relative peace and quiet after that.
The suggestion that they have somehow been “faking” their marriage for the past few weeks for the paparazzi provokes tired laughter among friends.
“They are mature, responsible adults and have been going through the separation in a way that tries to minimize the effect on the children,” says one.
I’m told the children are understanding and accepting of the situation. Although the couple was only together for two years, their respective five children (Lopez has 16-year-old twins with ex-husband Marc Anthony) have developed relationships with their new stepparents and each other, so this will be sad for them.
But above all, it is a desperately painful experience for Lopez. This was her fourth marriage and I am told that it is “absolutely humiliating” that it was so short and so bad.
The Hollywood star couple attend the Golden Globes earlier this year in California.
The end of Bennifer 2.0 is a major setback for the actress and singer, who had staked everything on rekindling their romance. In February, she released an album, a film and a documentary about their love story, which saw them reunite after having separated 20 years ago.
She can’t be entirely blamed for leaning so hard into romance, as the signs were that Affleck was just as interested as she was.
The documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, which accompanied his film This Is Me… Now, was produced and financed by Affleck’s company, and he was involved throughout the process, including editing, selling it for a profit to Amazon.
But there were signs of conflict there. In the documentary, Affleck said: “When we got back together, I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a social media relationship.'”
“Then I realized it wasn’t a fair thing to ask for. It’s like you’re marrying a sea captain and you’re like, ‘Well, I don’t want the water. ‘ We’re just two people with different approaches trying to learn how to come to an agreement.”
Jennifer added: “I don’t think he’d be comfortable with me doing this, but he loves me and knows I’m an artist… and he doesn’t want to stop me from doing it.” Sources deny that his thirst for publicity was to blame for the end of the marriage, pointing to “deeper issues”.
But another friend says: “What happened between her first engagement and this new marriage was all through social media and that has had a huge impact on her. JLo’s social presence has been a constant stream of fans who love her, praise her and she can’t give that up. She loves it, but she also loves this fake world of fame and attention.”
There was drama, to be sure. There were some public fights, like Affleck looking sullen and bored at the 2023 Grammys, and JLo asking him to look more “friendly” and “motivated.”
In January of this year, an apparent fight was caught on camera outside a jewelry store in St. Barts, with Affleck gesturing angrily. A week later, he told reporters at the Golden Globes: “You don’t have to worry about Ben. Let me tell you, he’s fine. He’s happy.” By June of this year, when he cancelled his tour to “spend time with his kids and his family and his close friends,” it was obvious that this was no longer the case.
The couple met when they co-starred in the romantic comedy Gigli in 2001. The following year they were spotted kissing and she filed for divorce from dancer Cris Judd, her second husband, after just ten months of marriage.
Bennifer, as they were known, got engaged in November 2002 and Affleck gave her a huge pink diamond ring worth $1.2m (£920,000). They called it off in 2003, just days before their planned wedding, and split for good the following year. Affleck apparently hated the attention the romance generated.
Affleck’s facial expressions and body language in some photos raised questions among fans of the couple.
There were reports of him partying with female dancers in 2003 and in January 2004, he and Matt Damon were seen with female fans they met at a Berlin nightclub.
Affleck married actress Jennifer Garner in the summer of 2005, with whom he had already acted in several films, after having begun a romance the previous year. JLo also quickly married singer Marc Anthony. Both had children with their new partners: twins Max and Emme for her, and Violet, Fin and Samuel for him.
Affleck, whose father was an alcoholic, said he quit drinking in 1998 but entered rehab for alcohol abuse three years later.
He and Garner divorced in 2015 after she grew tired of his gambling and drinking addiction. In 2018, Garner took him to rehab after he showed up at her home with a Bible and a lawyer.
There are fears that Affleck has struggled to stay sober during his two-year relationship with JLo. At the premiere of the film Shotgun Wedding in December 2022, she was filmed asking him what was in his glass and then taking a sip to check it wasn’t alcohol. Affleck’s representatives do not respond to queries on the matter.
For the record, JLo barely drinks alcohol, although she does have a beverage company, Delola, which she founded before her romance with Affleck.
And while there is no evidence he had relationships with women, he has a reputation for being a flirt. There was an alleged flirtation with his children’s nanny, which he denied, and in 2017 he faced accusations of groping a woman on set in 2003. He later apologised, saying: “I acted inappropriately.”
In 2021, Jennifer split from baseball star Alex Rodriguez after a rocky two-year engagement (he was previously linked to another woman) and Affleck, also single, began the process of courting her again. They tied the knot in Las Vegas and then had a second, spectacular wedding at his estate in Georgia.
Lopez was sure this would be different from his first failed romance.
“We’re older now, we’re smarter, we’re more experienced, we’re at different stages in our lives, we have kids now and we have to be very aware of those things,” she said.
“It’s a beautiful outcome that this has happened in this way at this time in our lives where we can truly appreciate, celebrate and respect each other.”
Sadly, after only two short years of marriage, there wasn’t much left to celebrate.