LOS ANGELES – After a relationship spanning two decades, two engagements, two weddings and countless headlines, Jennifer Lopez has filed for divorce from Ben Affleck.
The divorce, filed in Los Angeles on Tuesday, appears to have ended a celebrity pairing – or at least a second continuation of one – that rose from the highest heights of pop culture and graced countless tabloid covers. The couple were known as “Bennifer” before such power couple knockoffs were ubiquitous.
According to court documents, Lopez filed the petition in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday. The news was first reported on the website TMZ. TMZ further reported that Lopez had given a separation date of April 26, 2024. She added that she did not mention a prenuptial agreement.
After they met in the early 2000s, fell in love and got engaged – and in 2003 they were together in the infamous Gigli and 2004 Jersey Girls– the couple separated, partly blaming public pressure.
But to the delight of many and perhaps the skepticism of others, they reunited two decades later and married in 2022 – twice.
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“Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And as it turns out, love is patient. Twenty years of patience,” Lopez wrote when she announced her first flash wedding in Las Vegas in July, registering as Jennifer Lynn Affleck.
“Stay here long enough and you might have the most beautiful moment of your life driving through Las Vegas at 12:30 a.m. in the Tunnel of Love with your children, who you will be with forever,” she wrote in her newsletter.
The couple flew to Las Vegas, waited in line with four other couples to get their marriage license, and married just after midnight at A Little White Wedding Chapel, where Lopez said a Bluetooth speaker played their brief walk down the aisle. She called it the most beautiful night of the couple’s lives.
A month later, they celebrated a much more lavish wedding at Affleck’s home in Georgia, attended by friends and family.
Both were previously married. Affleck, 52, married Jennifer Garner in 2005, with whom he has three children. They divorced in 2018.
Lopez, 55, has been married three times before. She was briefly married to Ojani Noa from 1997 to 1998 and to Cris Judd from 2001 to 2003. She and singer Marc Anthony were married for a decade, marrying in 2004, and have 14-year-old twins. She has been dating former baseball player Alex Rodriguez since 2017, but the couple called off their engagement in 2021.
Throughout it all, it was Lopez who described her and Affleck’s journey most clearly. When asked earlier this year if she was harder on herself because their relationships attracted so much attention, Lopez agreed.
“Oh yeah. 100%. It made me doubt myself and feel really bad at times. At times I wanted to give up. But at the end of the day, I feel like you kind of have to go through this thing to learn to deal with it,” she told the Associated Press. “You take the things that could be constructive and use them, and the rest you just throw away as some kind of hate or, you know, other things of that nature and just say, ‘Whatever. I know who I am, I know what I want to do.'”
Affleck himself expressed admiration for her confidence, telling AP last year that he agreed that Hollywood was unsure how to capitalize on her versatile talent.
“I think she’s at her best,” Affleck said at the time. “She’s doing an extraordinary job, especially because she’s taking the step of taking responsibility for what she’s doing rather than saying, ‘This is what’s being offered to me.'”
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Lopez plays the lead role in the upcoming Unstoppableunder the banner Artists Equity by Affleck and Matt Damon.
In May, she played the lead role in the Netflix film Atlas. At the end of the month, she suddenly canceled her 2024 North American tour, saying she was “heartbroken and devastated” to disappoint her fans, but the move was necessary. “Jennifer is taking time off to be with her children, family and close friends,” organizers said in a statement.
The tour was supposed to be her first in five years, in support of her first solo album in a decade. This is me… now and the accompanying film. A fictional look at their long love life and a documentary.
“When I was a girl, they asked me what I wanted to be. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a woman in love,” Lopez sang in the title song.
The album, she said, was inspired by her rekindled relationship with Affleck. But the film is more about “your journey as a human being, the journey of a human being and what it takes to go from heartbreak back to love. Or the journey of a hopeless romantic looking for love.” In the film, she played a character called The Artist, who also decided as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up: “in love.”
But the road was rocky. In an early scene, the artist sits on the back of a motorcycle, riding along a beach with a well-built man wearing a face mask. Then the motorcycle crashes.
“Not all love stories have a happy ending,” she says.
—Noveck reported from New York.
