Jennifer Lopez Says She's 'Forgiven' Ben Affleck 'All the Way' After Being 'Angry' for a 'Long Time'

Jennifer Lopez opens up about her healing process in her new documentary 'The Greatest Love Story Never Told'

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in December 2023. Photo:

Kevin Winter/Getty

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s past relationship strife is water under the bridge.

In her new Amazon Prime documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, the "Waiting for Tonight" singer, 54, opens up about the ways in which she and the Air star, 51, have found harmony together after pressing pause on their relationship for nearly 20 years.

At one point, Affleck asks Lopez if she’s forgiven him, or is angry at him.

“I think I was angry at you for a long time,” she tells him in the doc. “But that heartbreak set both of us on a course to figuring ourselves out to being better people. I think I’ve forgiven you all the way. I think I need to forgive myself [for] some things.”

After meeting on the set of their movie Gigli in 2002, the pair were engaged later that year, and were set to be married in September 2003. But days before, they postponed the wedding, citing “excessive media attention.” After briefly splitting in the wake of the canceled nuptials, they officially called it quits in January 2004.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez at the Los Angeles Special Screening Of "Marry Me" on February 08, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez at the Los Angeles Special Screening of "Marry Me" on Feb. 8, 2022 in Los Angeles.

Frazer Harrison/Getty

After their split, Lopez married singer Marc Anthony, with whom she shares 15-year-old twins Max and Emme. The couple divorced in 2012. Affleck, meanwhile, shares kids Violet, 18, Seraphina, 15, and Samuel, 12, with ex-wife Jennifer Garner, from whom he separated in 2015 after 10 years of marriage.

The Selena actor and The Town star rekindled their romance in the spring of 2021, and were engaged in April 2022. They married in Las Vegas that July.

The Greatest Love Story Never Told, which begins streaming on Tuesday, offers fans a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Lopez’s ambitious new film, This Is Me…Now: A Love Story. The doc, directed by Jason Bergh, includes interviews with the star’s inner circle, as well as her producing partners and longtime collaborators.

In the documentary, director Dave Meyers — who helmed This Is Me…Now: A Love Story — says that when Lopez and Affleck broke up, it was “catastrophic” — and the "On the Floor" artist explains that losing him was hard because he wasn’t just the love of her life, but her best friend.

In an interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, Lopez opened up more about the couple’s split in the early 2000s, saying that the two had doubts over where their relationship was headed.

“I knew in my heart that I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life, I knew that,” she said. “But it didn’t feel like we were going to make it. And so it scared me.”

Lopez added to Lowe that she and the two-time Oscar winner weren’t “mature enough” to navigate things the first time around.

“Even though he was in his late 20s, I was in my early 30s, it still, it wasn’t… we weren’t ready to deal with, and look at each other and go, what we have is real, we need to buckle down, we need to do some work,” she explained. “We just weren’t there yet.”

The Greatest Love Story Never Told is streaming on Prime Video on Tuesday.

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