The last time Jennifer Lopez saw Ben Affleck was at his rented house on Thursday last week, 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 teens with first wife Jennifer Garner.
The day before, JLo took Samuel out shopping as he prepared to return to school, and dropped him off at Affleck’s home in Brentwood, LA, afterwards.
Affleck’s daughter Violet, who just started at Yale University, was spotted the previous week in one of her stepmother’s dresses. (I’m told that wasn’t a message of any sort – just the normal wardrobe raiding which you might expect from a teenager.)
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck attend the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles last year
The celebrations on Thursday were a final blended family get together of the summer – and no doubt a rather awkward one.
For that was the last gathering before JLo finally chose to officially pull the plug on their marriage, filing for divorce at the Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday this week — the second anniversary of their big white wedding at his estate in Georgia.
As to why she pulled the plug in a filing made, quite unusually, without a lawyer, she’s not saying — and she’s asked friends to not comment either.
However, the heartbreaking truth is that it seems Affleck did not want to fix the marriage, although she had hoped to. Their separation – which had lasted since April – could only go on for so long.
‘He was impossible to be married to,’ I am told. ‘Friends think he is selfish, sullen, impossible to please most of the time and negative. She was constantly trying to lift his spirits, boost him up – it was exhausting. He is a loudmouth, loves to hear himself talk and blusters on. She was a great audience, mostly she hung onto his every word, but she is not as young and impressionable as she used to be.
A clip from the event appears to show the pair having a heated exchange
‘The negativity was overwhelming in the end, she could not lift him any more.’
People magazine quotes a source as saying: ‘She’s very disappointed and sad, but Ben hasn’t given her any signs that he wants to continue their marriage. It’s gotten to the point that she just needs to look out for herself.’
After months of speculation and attention, which she found ‘personally humiliating’, JLo felt she had no choice but to acknowledge that they were through.
The date of separation was given by her as April 26. The split emerged in early May, soon after she walked the red carpet of the Met Gala alone. A source said at the time that Affleck would ‘divorce on grounds of temporary insanity’ if he could, because he finally came ‘to his senses’ following what felt like a ‘fever dream’ of a relationship with Lopez, to whom he was engaged once before ending it in 2004.
Over the summer, they began to dismantle their married life. Their huge home in Beverly Hills, bought for $60 million (£46 million), went on the market on July 12. Divorce became inevitable after he bought a new LA home in Pacific Palisades in the final week of July – coincidentally on her 55th birthday. He did not attend her massive Bridgerton-themed party, although his children spent time with her in the Hamptons over that period.
Now that school has resumed, and with Violet off to university, there are no reasons to delay making it official.
What we can expect now is a bloodless and rapid split. There won’t be any fights over money, say friends — both of them have plenty and they will each come out of the marriage with what they had going into it.
‘The two of them will just call it quits and be glad it’s over,’ one says. A financial information sheet submitted as part of the divorce petition suggests they have no prenuptial agreement in place, which means technically they will have to split any income or community property acquired during the union.
However, in an indication that no fight over money is expected, Lopez has opted to waive spousal support and asked the judge to deny Affleck such support as well.
In the immediate future she has some public commitments. JLo is planning a trip to Canada for the Toronto Film Festival premiere of her new movie, Unstoppable, in which she plays the mother of a one-legged wrestler. The movie is produced by Affleck’s Artists Equity; he’s not expected to attend. The hope is that they can both have a period of relative peace and quiet thereafter.
The suggestion that they have been in some way ‘faking’ their marriage over the past weeks for the paparazzi provokes weary laughter from friends.
‘They are mature responsible adults and have been going through the separation in a way to try and minimise the effect on the children,’ one says.
I’m told the children understand and accept the situation. Although the couple were only together for two years, their respective five children (Lopez has 16-year-old twins with ex-husband Marc Anthony) developed relationships with their new step-parents, and with each other, so this will be sad for them.
But above all it’s desperately wounding for Lopez. This was her fourth marriage, and it is ‘absolutely humiliating’ that it has been so brief, and so bad, I am told.
The Hollywood star couple attends the Golden Globes earlier this year in California
Indeed, the end of Bennifer 2.0 represents a shocking reverse for the actress and singer, who had ‘bet the farm’ on the rekindling of their romance. Only in February she released an album, a film and a documentary all about their love story, which saw them rediscover each other after breaking up 20 years ago.
You can’t entirely blame her for leaning so heavily into the romance, as the signs were that Affleck was as into it as she was.
The documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, which accompanied her film This Is Me… Now, was produced and financed by Affleck’s company, and he was involved all the way through, including in edits, selling it for a profit to Amazon.
But there were signs of conflict there. In the documenrtary, Affleck said: ‘Getting back together, I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media.’
‘Then I sort of realised it’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s sort of like you’re going to marry a boat captain and you go, ‘Well, I don’t want the water.’ We’re just two people with kind of different approaches, trying to learn to compromise.’
Jennifer added: ‘I don’t think he is comfortable with me doing this, but he loves me and he knows I’m an artist… and he doesn’t want to stop me.’ Sources deny that her thirst for publicity was to blame for the end of the marriage, pointing to ‘deeper issues’.
But another pal says: ‘What happened between their first engagement and this new marriage was social media and it has had a huge impact on her. JLo’s social presence has been a steady stream of fans loving her, praising her and she cannot give it up. She loves him, but she also loves this fake world of fame and attention.’
Beyond a doubt there were dramas. There were some fights in public – notably Affleck looking morose and bored at the Grammys in 2023 and JLo urging him to look more ‘friendly’ and ‘motivated’.
There was an apparent row caught on camera outside a jewellery shop in St Barts in January this year with Affleck gesticulating angrily. A week later she told reporters at the Golden Globes: ‘You don’t need to worry about Ben. Let me just tell you, he is good. He is happy.’ By June this year, when she cancelled her tour to ‘spend time with her children, family and close friends’, it was obvious that this was no longer true.
The couple met when they co-starred in the romantic comedy Gigli in 2001. The next year they were seen kissing and she filed for a divorce from dancer Cris Judd, her second husband, after just ten months of marriage.
Bennifer, as they were known, got engaged in November 2002, with Affleck giving her a huge pink diamond ring that cost a reported $1.2 million (£920,000). They called it off in 2003 a few days before they were due to wed, and split for good the following year. Affleck apparently hated the attention which came with the romance.
Affleck’s facial expressions and body language in some photographs raised questions among fans of the couple
There were reports of him partying with dancers in 2003 and in January 2004, he and Matt Damon were seen with female fans they met in a Berlin nightclub.
Affleck went on to marry actress Jennifer Garner, with whom he’d already starred in several movies, in the summer of 2005, having started a romance the year before. JLo quickly married as well – to singer Marc Anthony. Both had children with their new partners — twins Max and Emme for her; Violet, Fin and Samuel for him.
Affleck, whose father was an alcoholic, claimed to have given up drinking in 1998, but three years later he checked himself into rehab for alcohol abuse.
He and Garner were divorced in 2015 after she tired of his gambling and drinking. In 2018 Garner carted him off to rehab after showing up at his home with a Bible and a lawyer.
There are fears that he could have been struggling with his sobriety during his two-year union 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 sipping from it to check it wasn’t booze. Representatives for Affleck don’t respond to enquiries on the topic.
For the record, JLo barely drinks alcohol, although she does have a drinks company, Delola, which she founded prior to her romance with Affleck.
And although there is no suggestion of any current womanising, he has had a reputation as a lothario. There was an alleged dalliance with his children’s nanny, which he denied, and in 2017, he faced accusations of groping a woman on set back in 2003. He later apologised, saying: ‘I acted inappropriately.’
In 2021, Jennifer broke up with baseball star Alex Rodriquez after a tricky two-year engagement — he was linked to another woman — and Affleck, also single, began the process of wooing her all over again. They married in Las Vegas then had a second spectacular wedding at his estate in Georgia.
Lopez was sure that this would be different from their first failed affair.
‘We’re older now, we’re smarter, we have more experience, we’re at different places in our lives, we have kids now and we have to be very conscious 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 really appreciate and celebrate each other and respect each other.’
Sadly, after only two short years of marriage, there was not much left to celebrate.