Long before she was happily committed to Alex Rodriguez, Jennifer Lopez was engaged to Ben Affleck. While covering Vanity Fair’s December 2017 issue with the former New York Yankees player, 42, the “Ain’t Your Mama” singer, 48, opened up about her rocky relationship with Affleck, 45.
The “On the Floor” songstress and the Justice League actor met and started dating while filming their 2003 flick Gigli, got engaged and later called things off in 2004. “I was eviscerated,” Lopez said of the press she received while shooting Gigli. “I lost my sense of self, questioned if I belonged in this business, thought maybe I did suck at everything. And my relationship [with Affleck] self-destructed in front of the entire world. It was a two-year thing for me until I picked myself up again.”
The Gone Girl actor has also been vocal about his split from Lopez. In June 2006, Affleck claimed that his career took a turn for the worse directly following the high profile breakup. “If you went by what people said … I wasn’t cool and I wasn’t talented and I was, like, the lowest run of cool and talented that you could possibly be in the public consciousness at that time,” the Argo director told Bill Simmons at the time. “I had broken up with Jennifer Lopez and I had, like, three or four movies in a row that had bombed.”
While Lopez and Rodriguez have been going strong since February, Affleck has since publicly moved on with Saturday Night Live producer Lindsay Shookus, following his divorce filing from Jennifer Garner. Although multiple sources claimed to Us that the two-time Oscar winner and Shookus began hooking up three years ago while he was still married to Garner, a source close to Affleck countered that they began dating this April.
As for Lopez and Rodriguez? In an exclusive interview with Us in September, the athlete revealed that his daughters, Natasha and Ella, look up to Lopez. “Their role model is Jen and how diverse she is in terms of the arts and her career,” he gushed. “For them to be around their role model is so cool.”
