It’s over for Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.
The A-list couple are divorcing roughly two years after their July 2022 Las Vegas elopement, TMZ reported Tuesday, which they followed up with a larger celebration and ceremony with friends and family in Savannah in August. Representatives for Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck did not immediately return Vanity Fair‘s requests for comment.
According to TMZ, divorce documents list the date of separation as April 26, 2024.
The two do not have any children together but share a blended family from their past relationships.
The split comes after a highly scrutinized second-chance romance for Affleck, 51, and Lopez, 54, who dated in the early 2000s and were engaged before splitting up in January 2004.
In the years before their 2021 reunion, both had major public relationships: Lopez was married to singer Marc Anthony from 2004 to 2011 and shares twins with him, and was also engaged to former Yankees player Alex Rodriguez along the way. Affleck was married to Jennifer Garner from 2005 to 2018; the two have three children.
Both occurrences of Bennifer, as the relationship between Affleck and Lopez was dubbed in magazine pages and the hearts of celebrity gossip enthusiasts, came with a seemingly bottomless well of public curiosity. In 2002, Lopez included the song “Dear Ben” on her album This Is Me…Then, singing of her then fiancé, “I love you, you’re perfect / A manifestation of my dreams” and “I write this song to let you know / That you will always be to me / My lust, my love, my man, my child, my friend, and my king.” On 2024’s This Is Me…Now, she released “Dear Ben, Pt. II.” The sequel song acknowledges that the two have been here before, with Lopez singing, “I was missing a part / You was the missing piece” and “Even miles apart / We’re never out of reach / Seasons change but love remains, I’ll show you / Wrap my arms around you, I want to console you / Look into your eyes, I can see it’s the old you.”
In a November 2022 interview on Apple Music, Lopez opened up about the first song and her relationship with Affleck, versions one and two. “Once we called off that wedding 20 years ago, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life, and I honestly felt like I was going to die,” she said. “And it sent me on a spiral for the next 18 years where I just couldn’t get it right. But now, 20 years later, it does have a happy ending. It has the most would-never-happen-in-Hollywood ending.”
Along with This Is Me…Now and its accompanying film, Lopez self-financed and released a 2024 documentary largely about her and Affleck’s relationship, The Greatest Love Story Never Told. Appearing in the documentary, Affleck acknowledges his reluctance to participate before capitulating, calling it “a bit of an adjustment for me.” He acknowledged that the attention and pressure from the media that first time around was what drove them to break up and that he’s done a lot of thinking in the intervening years.
“Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media,” he said in the doc of their do-over. Then, he continues, “I sort of realized it’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s sort of like, you’re going to marry a boat captain, and [you’re like], ‘Well, I don’t like the water.’”
Lopez, too, got vulnerable in the film. When Affleck asks her whether she’ll ever forgive him for their first breakup, she says, “I think I was angry at you for a long time. But that heartbreak set both of us on a course to figuring ourselves out to being better people. I think I’ve forgiven you all the way. I think I need to forgive myself [for] some things.”
The media scrutiny was higher, if anything, the second time around for Affleck and Lopez. Facial expressions at awards shows were analyzed, leading Lopez to insist of Affleck on a red carpet, “he is happy.” This spring, the two went 47 days without being photographed together, a period including major events like Lopez co-chairing the Met Gala 2024. They reunited in May for one of Affleck’s children’s school plays, blind items about the state of their marriage whooshing around the internet. At a May press conference for her movie Atlas, a reporter asked if “your divorce with Ben Affleck [is] real” before being reprimanded by both Lopez and her costar Simu Liu.
“You know better than that,” Lopez told the reporter.
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