Showing her support. Jennifer Lopez is there for her man amid backlash surrounding Ben Affleck‘s quotes about his past marriage to Jennifer Garner.
Lopez, 52, and Affleck, 49, were in happy spirits as they headed to a taping of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday, December 15. The public outing came after the Argo director made headlines for discussing how his marriage with Garner, 49, ended.
“We had a marriage that did not work. This happens. It is somebody I love and respect, but to whom I should not be married any longer,” he said during an episode of The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday, December 14.
The Oscar winner noted that he felt “trapped” in his relationship with the 13 Going on 30 star, which is why he “started drinking alcohol.”
“I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I am not happy. What do I do?’ he recalled. “What I did was drink a bottle of scotch on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution.”
Affleck, who married Garner in 2005, admitted that he “would probably still be drinking” if he hadn’t gotten a divorce, adding, “And then we said, ‘You know what? We tried. We tried because we had kids.'”
Although the twosome parted ways, Affleck credited Garner for the coparenting approach that they established at the time, saying, “Did we have moments of tension? Did we have disagreements over the custody? Was stuff difficult for us? Did we get angry? Yes. But fundamentally it was always underpinned with respect. I knew she was a good mom. I hope that she knew that I was a good dad. I was. I had to get sober — I knew that too — and I acknowledged that. I said, ‘You’re right. I’ve got to quit drinking.'”
The exes, who share daughters Violet, 16, and Seraphina, 12, and son Samuel, 9, called it quits in 2015. Since then, Affleck has rekindled his romance with his ex-fiancée, Lopez. After his recent comments about his relationship with Garner went viral, the Gone Girl star explained that he was initially “really happy” with how he described his current situation with his ex.
“Because the movie [The Tender Bar] is about family and all this stuff that is meaningful to me, [Howard and I] talked a lot about my family and divorce and alcoholism and struggling with real things and how you have to be accountable and loving and how I work with my ex-wife and how I’m so proud of the way that we work together for our kids,” he shared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday. “I had gone on and said how much we respect each other and cared about each other and cared about our kids and put them first and went through our stuff.”
The director noted that social media reactions to the interview made him look like “the worst, most insensitive, stupid awful guy.”
”That’s not true. I don’t believe that. It’s the exact opposite of who I am, what I believe and I would never want my kids to think I would ever say a bad word about their mom,” he said. “It hurts my feelings.”
The Love, Simon star, who has yet to publicly comment on her ex-husband’s interview, after their divorce was finalized in 2018, has started dating now-longtime boyfriend John Miller.