Has Jennifer Lopez split with Ben Affleck? Inside her troubled comeback (2024)

It’s been a tough couple of months for team JLo. Reports of a divorce from Ben Affleck are building, with Us Weekly claiming this week that Affleck moved out of the pair’s house “weeks ago”. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail is confidently calling the actor an “ex-husband” of Lopez in its headlines, and also reports that the pair have been living separately for some time.

Perhaps this would also explain Lopez’s reticence on the Met Gala red carpet earlier this month, where she was hit with criticism after barely acknowledging the reporters who lined the steps. When one Us Today reporter asked her who she was wearing, JLo responded with a clipped “Schiaparelli” and no more.

But even before the potential Bennifer break up speculation, Team Lopez had already been in a tailspin for months.

After releasing her first album in 10 years, This Is Me… Now, this February, JLo was all set for a big comeback. The public interest in her reunion with Affleck provided a healthy cushion of good press, and the prospect of an album themed around the pair’s second chance at love was intriguing for fans and casual onlookers alike.

But JLo did not just release an album. She released an extended 16-track album, with two accompanying films, This is Me… Now: A Love Story, and a documentary on the making of the film. Not only were the album and films panned by critics, but it also became the lowest charting of her career, according to Forbes.

What’s more, the film, a high-octane fever dream made up of bizarre music videos which romanticized JLo’s love life and romance with Affleck, was revealed to have cost $20 million of Lopez’s own money to make. It featured high-profile cameos by friends of Lopez, from Post Malone to Keke Palmer and Jane Fonda, JLo’s Monster-in-Law co-star.

When Fonda expressed doubt to JLo’s manager, Benny Medina, her thoughts were relayed to Lopez. “I believe that everyone in the entire world is pulling for this relationship and this love,” Fonda is believed to have said, as per Variety. “And the idea of how you present that is so sacrosanct, so important. It should be handled in a way that you aren’t overly flaunting it, so much so that it creates any form of criticism or resentment.”

JLo did not stick the landing. The cost and content of the film are what partially fuelled the ensuing media storm of TikTokkers accusing JLo of having never truly been “Jenny from the Block”. One TikTokker named Angela, who claims to have attended the same Bronx school as JLo, went viral after telling her followers that the star was “lying to look more human.” “We both attended an all-girls high school in an Irish and Italian neighbourhood, so you weren't ‘running up and down the block,’” she said.

Then Lopez announced her This Is Me… Now tour, marking her first North American tour in five years. What should have been a huge comeback victory lap became immediately apparent to be a flop, with Team JLo cancelling seven tour dates due to lack of demand. The organisers eventually decided to re-brand the tour as a greatest hits career retrospective, a choice which Variety described as “a move that may entice listeners who didn’t connect with her latest material.”

But this should have been Lopez’s year. She was back with Ben Affleck, returning to touring, co-hosting the Met Gala. Everything was lined up for Lopez to come and collect her coins and reclaim her pop queen crown.

Not long ago, JLo’s public reputation was top notch. As journalist and pop culture critic Amy Odell wrote in her hit newsletter Back Row, “In 2019, Lopez was at a career peak. She was credited with generating $9.4 million in media impressions after appearing in the spring 2020 Versace runway show wearing the same “jungle” dress she famously wore to the Grammys in 2000... Lopez walked in the show because she was Versaceʼs face that season.

“She had also been fronting Coach and would soon be announced as the face of Guess. At this time, many agreed that she should have been nominated for an Oscar for her appearance in the 2019 movie Hustlers, which cast a halo effect on everything she did.” So where did it all go so wrong?

“The pandemic seemed to be a real turning point for her,” Odell tells the Standard. “People were looking at wealthy people who could spend that time isolated in vacation homes they accessed by private plane in an entirely new way, and if she understood that, she didn't telegraph that she did to her followers.”

She continues: “The media environment changed during the pandemic. That marked the shift from the era of pretty pictures on Instagram to talking head analysis videos being the ultimate form of online clout. So while you have Lopez struggling, you have a social media environment primed to surface content that analyzed those struggles more so than flaunt what she was selling.”

Odell also notes that Lopez struggled with the launch of her beauty brand, J-Lo Beauty, and line of co*cktail spritzers around this time period. “Consumers are incredibly savvy, and they didn't react well to a wealthy celebrity trying to sell them things that, they presumed, she wouldn't even use.” In one Reddit post from September, a user shared a picture to the Sephora subreddit showing JLo beauty literally gathering dust on its shelves. By March of this year, the beauty retailer had pulled JLo beauty products from its stores.

But Lopez has faced backlash for years. In 2003, The Guardian referred to her as "the most vilified woman in modern popular culture". She has long battled accusations of being a “diva”, something she denies, and infamously once retorted with: “I've always been fascinated by how much more well-behaved we have to be than men.” In Odell’s newsletter, she compares the recent tide of bad will towards JLo to the viral “Hathahate”-train that plagued Anne Hathaway for most of 2012.

Now, Lopez is laying low as reports continue to point to the end of her and Affleck’s marriage for a second time. Ironically, it used to be Affleck who would defend her in periods like this. In 2021, he referenced her bad press in the 2000’s, telling The Hollywood Reporter: “People were so f*cking mean about her; sexist, racist, ugly vicious sh*t was written about her in ways that if you wrote it now, you would literally be fired for saying some of the things you said.”

But with a question mark above Lopez and Affleck’s heads, and an impending stadium tour set to begin next month, what will become of brand JLo by the end of 2024 is yet to be seen. As she sings in This Is Me... Now’s Hearts and Flowers, diamonds can be made from pressure, but time is precious.