Throughout their relationship, former Hollywood power couple Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner dominated media headlines and weathered over a decade of non-stop paparazzi attention. They spent a little over a decade together wherein they welcomed three kids, Violet, Seraphina, and Samuel. Sadly, they ultimately filed for divorce in 2015. Per Variety, the couple released a shared statement about the decision, which read, “We go forward with love and friendship for one another and a commitment to co-parenting our children.” Notably, they also requested privacy for themselves and their children.
The two Hollywood stars rose together, attaining fame and fortune. Their meteoric rise made the fall back down to earth much more dramatic, with the tabloids capturing every moment. The famous Hollywood duo has been open about the effect the spotlight had on their family and marriage — something which only became heightened when Affleck’s often public experiences with alcohol addiction became a focal point for the paparazzi. Like many fractured relationships, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s divorce can’t quite be pinpointed to one event, but we finally understand why this pair simply wasn’t meant to be.
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
A match made in Hollywood heaven
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Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner first met in 2001 while filming “Pearl Harbor.” But it wasn’t until the 2003 Marvel flop, “Daredevil” that they fell in love. In 2017, Affleck admitted to Playboy that the romance helped him to appreciate that there may be bright sides to failure. “We fell in love on ‘Daredevil,'” he said. “… The Rotten Tomatoes rating is not in direct proportion to how important a life experience a movie was.” And honestly who wouldn’t fall in love with Garner portraying a sword-yielding superhero assassin? Have you seen her in those leather pants? While both films hardly set Hollywood alight, sparks flew for the two actors off-screen. The pair went public with their romance in 2004, looking adorable while snuggling up together at the World Series (per Insider).
While they kept their relationship mostly under wraps for months amidst the prying paparazzi, the pair eloped the following year in a low-key four-person ceremony according to Entertainment Weekly. Affleck credits his then-wife for getting him through a dark period in his career after he felt he wasn’t being taken seriously as an artist. “Getting to know her, falling in love with her, and being connected with her gave me a foundation to reach out and say, Okay, I’m going to do ‘Hollywoodland,’ I’m going to direct ‘Gone Baby Gone,'” Affleck told Playboy about Garner’s support. “She is by leaps and bounds the most important person to me in that respect.”
They were already in relationships when they fell in love
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It’s no secret that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner were romantically involved with other people when they first fell in love. Affleck was famously engaged to Jennifer Lopez in one of the most highly-profiled relationships in Hollywood history (‘Bennifer’ anyone?). The two first met while filming the romantic comedy “Gigli” in 2001, and dated amidst such a rabid tabloid frenzy that they subsequently called off their wedding. “Due to the excessive media attention surrounding our wedding, we have decided to postpone the date,” Lopez and Affleck said in a joint statement at the time (via ABC News). Shortly after, in January 2004, Bennifer called it quits. Six months later, the “Let’s Get Loud Singer” moved on and married her longtime friend, Mark Anthony, welcoming a set of twins together in 2008, per People.
As for Garner, she was married to actor Scott Foley when she and Affleck starred opposite each other in “Daredevil.” According to Us Weekly, the couple met in 1998 while filming “Felicity,” and they were married just two years later. After four years of marriage, the two parted ways. However, Foley insisted there was no foul play. “There was no other relationship, there was no infidelity, nothing. People get divorced, you know?” he told TV Guide at the time (via Entertainment Weekly).
What happened between Affleck and the nanny?
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In 2015, Ben Affleck was accused of striking up an affair with his children’s nanny. Per People, Christine Ouzounian was 27 when she started working for the family with sources claiming to Us Weekly, “Christine is in love with him.” She allegedly caught Affleck’s wandering eye and even joined him and his kids in the Bahamas on vacation. Plot twist: Jennifer Garner — who was said to be estranged from her husband at the time — showed up at the Bahamas whereupon Affleck reportedly went to Vegas with Ouzounian for a charity poker event. The couple announced their divorce shortly afterward — a day after their tenth wedding anniversary.
Via his spokesperson, the “Armageddon” star denied the accusations with a source close to the actor claiming that he and his staff member had a professional and platonic relationship only. “There has never been a romantic or sexual relationship,” they added, per People. Weeks after the divorce announcement, Page Six published photos that appeared to show the pair exchanging a bottle of Champagne outside his home. Bubbly anyone?
Garner took the less-than-ideal situation in stride, telling Vanity Fair, “[Christine] had nothing to do with our decision to divorce. She was not a part of the equation. Bad judgment? Yes. It’s not great for your kids for [a nanny] to disappear from their lives.” Keeping her priority on her children, she vowed to keep herself offline in light of media negativity, insisting, “I cannot let anger or hurt be my engine.”
Garner and Affleck’s growing pains
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During an appearance on “The Howard Stern Show” in 2021, Ben Affleck suggested the tabloid media had spread lies regarding the reasons behind his divorce from Jennifer Garner. “The truth was, we took our time, we made the decision … We grew apart,” he explained. “We had a marriage that didn’t work … with somebody that I love and respect, but to whom I shouldn’t be married any longer.”
Despite the pair no longer being a fit for each other, they have consistently made co-parenting their kids a priority. Garner told Vanity Fair that her friendship with Affleck acts as the foundation for raising their three children. “Sure, I lost the dream of dancing with my husband at my daughter’s wedding. But you should see their faces when he walks through the door. And if you see your kids love someone so purely and wholly, then you’re going to be friends with that person.”
Perhaps the pressure of constant media attention overshadowed this Hollywood duo. If anything, it uncovered the cracks in the relationship. Even after they announced their split, Garner gushed to Vanity Fair about her ex-husband, admitting his likable personality can be quite infectious. However, on the contrary, she admitted, “He’s just a complicated guy. I always say, ‘When his sun shines on you, you feel it.’ But when the sun is shining elsewhere, it’s cold. He can cast quite a shadow.”
Ben found his way back to Jennifer Lopez
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Few romances have ever taken Hollywood by storm quite like that of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. The pair made things official in 2002 after co-starring in the box office flop “Gigli.” While their scripted story was a box office flop, their off-screen love was the real thing, dominating every media headline from the moment they got together to their parting of ways in 2004.
History repeated itself in 2021 when Bennifer reunited, going Instagram official on Lopez’s 52nd birthday with a steamy snap of them kissing on a yacht. Exactly 20 years after the pair first stepped out as a couple, they wed in a surprise Vegas wedding. The singer-slash-actor shared details of the day on her blog OnTheJLo (via TMZ), “We did it. Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient.”
When Lopez and Affleck split in 2004, the “Love Don’t Cost a Thing” singer detailed her heartbreak in her memoir, “True Love” (via UPI) writing, “Ben and I split up at the moment when I thought we were committing to each other forever, it was my first real heartbreak, it felt like my heart had been torn out of my chest.” “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin clearly believed Affleck was always the one. After the couple’s surprise nuptials in 2022, she shared, “I’ve spoken to her mother, Lupe, about it … Lupe has always said that Ben is her true love.”
The pressure of the spotlight
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Throughout their marriage, Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck were vocal about the tremendous toll the paparazzi had on their family. On an episode of “Tell Me More With Kelly Corrigan,” Garner was candid about the intense scrutiny placed upon them. “For 10 years, there were at the very least six cars and often 20 outside of our house, and outside of school, and at the pediatrician’s. And you’re begging them, ‘Please step aside from the pediatrician’s door. I have a sick kid. Please,'” she confessed.
It was these kinds of interactions that led the actor to testify before the California State Assembly Committee on Public Safety alongside Halle Berry for Senate Bill 606, which ultimately passed in 2013. The law protects the safety of celebrities’ children by increasing penalties for harassment from a maximum of six months in jail to one year. Affleck has also been vocal about the paparazzi. “It’s a safety thing, and there’s also a sanity thing,” he told Playboy. “My kids aren’t celebrities. They never made that bargain.”
Under the anonymity of masks, Garner could finally take her children to the beach during the COVID-19 pandemic. As she told The Hollywood Reporter, her kids wondered why it was never possible before. “I told them, ‘We’d try to go and we’d just get chased away,'” she explained. The star added that she and Affleck’s children are now so opposed to cameras they can’t get family pictures taken.
Ben’s troubled family history
Tinseltown/ShutterstockGrowing up, Ben Affleck didn’t have the ideal family upbringing, and to his disappointment, history tends to repeat itself. From a grandmother and uncle who died by suicide, to an aunt addicted to heroin, and a father who experienced alcoholism and addiction, he opened up about his roots in an interview for The New York Times. Reckoning with his family history led him to question his own split from Garner. “I never thought I was going to get divorced,” he confessed in an ABC News interview. “I didn’t want to be a split family with my children, and it upset me because it meant I wasn’t who I thought I was.”
Ultimately, Affleck’s troubled childhood gave him inspiration for his own career. His father worked in theatre, and while he was ambitious and creative, his issues with addiction overshadowed his talent. “It caused me to obsess about success and money because my dad ran out of money and got kicked out of his house. I obsessed about how important money was,” he told Playboy. While the actor admitted his father’s failures led him to take on some movie roles out of desperation, it also inspired the framework for his Oscar-winning screenplay “Good Will Hunting,” which he co-wrote with bestie, Matt Damon. The Actor told Playboy that he modeled the under-achieving janitor, Will Hunting, after his own dad — a great talent who was often in between jobs and unable to fulfill his full potential.
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
Affleck’s experiences with alcohol addiction
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Ben Affleck has had his fair share of problems with alcohol misuse, with specific episodes covered salaciously by the media. He told The New York Times in 2020, “It took me a long time to fundamentally, deeply, without a hint of doubt, admit to myself that I am an alcoholic.” According to People, the Oscar winner first checked himself into rehab at 29 years old, in 2001.
Things seemed to settle down when he found love with Garner three years later, becoming a dad shortly after. But as he previously admitted on Instagram (via People), “Battling any addiction is a lifelong and difficult struggle.” In 2017, the actor experienced a relapse and secretly entered rehab. Radar reported that he was given a one-night pass from the facility to attend that year’s Oscar ceremony.
A year later, he re-entered rehab after he started dating Playboy model, Shauna Sexton, forcing the star to publicly state that she had no influence over his drinking (via Daily Mail). Garner reportedly staged an intervention for her ex-husband, with the paparazzi taking snaps of her driving Affleck to a facility for treatment. While he seemed to be doing well after his third stint, he appeared to relapse a year later during a drunken Halloween night when he was seen stumbling backward into a car. Per TMZ, when asked about the incident the next morning, Affleck took it in his stride saying, “It happens, it’s a slip, but I’m not going to let it derail me.”
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
Ben Affleck’s #MeToo movement scandals
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Ben Affleck weathered controversy in 2017, after the firestorm “Me Too” movement came crashing down on powerful Hollywood elite Harvey Weinstein. The actor got his start with Weinstein backing his Oscar-winning film “Good Will Hunting.” Affleck addressed the allegations against the disgraced producer on Twitter, writing, “I am saddened and angry that a man who I worked with used his position of power to intimidate, sexually harass, and manipulate many women over decades.”
His former “Phantoms” co-star Rose McGowan didn’t take too kindly to his statement. The actor had her fair share of struggles with Weinstein — abuses that awarded her a $100,000 settlement in 2017 as revealed by The New York Times. She fired back at Affleck on Twitter and suggested that not only was he aware of Weinstein’s behavior but that following her alleged assault, the actor had said to her, “Goddamnit! I told him to stop doing that.”
The “Daredevil” actor put out yet another fire when a “Total Request Live” video from 2003 resurfaced in which he appeared to grab host Hilarie Burton’s breast. The video showed Affleck leaning into hug Burton and asking, “How old are you, 19?” before discreetly groping her. When the incident was brought back to light in 2017, Burton revealed that she hadn’t forgotten the incident, tweeting, “I had to laugh back then so I wouldn’t cry.” The actor acknowledged his behavior on Twitter, writing, “I acted inappropriately toward Ms. Burton and I sincerely apologize.”
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN’s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
They may be better as friendsJason Merritt/term/Getty Images
Though their marriage wasn’t meant to be, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner have always emphasized their mutual love and respect for each other. Post split, Garner opened up to Vanity Fair about her ex-husband and explained that they were committed to working together through the divorce and through their shared parenting duties. “He’s still the only person who really knows the truth about things,” she said, “And I’m still the only person that knows some of his truths.”
Though their marriage weathered its fair share of tabloid scandals, the former couple’s focus has always been on co-parenting their three children. “If you recognize that you both have the best interest of the kids at heart, it’s quite a special connection. We’re the only two people in the world who care this much about these three kids,” Affleck told Today in 2017.
Still, Garner doesn’t appear to miss a chance to poke fun at her ex-husband. The mom of three was quick to quip back when asked about Affleck’s infamous phoenix tattoo that covers his entire back. “You know what we would say in my hometown about that? ‘Bless his heart.’ A phoenix rising from the ashes. Am I the ashes in this scenario?” Garner told Vanity Fair. “I take umbrage. I refuse to be the ashes.”
