Actor-director Ben Affleck took a serious and very public shot at his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner, by claiming in a Tuesday, December 14, interview with Howard Stern that, “Part of why I started drinking was because I was trapped,” in his marriage to the Elektra star. A source tells Life & Style that the actress feels his wording was “disrespectful” and a “slap in the face.”
“Jen isn’t particularly happy with Ben’s wording on the subject of why they divorced. He gave an interview saying he felt ‘trapped’ in the marriage, Jen wouldn’t have used that phrase or even opened up publicly like that. It was disrespectful,” the insider reveals.
The Argo star even brought the former couple’s three children, daughters Violet, 16, and Seraphina, 12, and son Samuel, 9, into the situation by saying they were what kept him in an unhappy marriage, causing him to hit the bottle.
“I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I’m not happy, what do I do?’ And what I did was [I] drank a bottle of scotch and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution,” he told Stern. “If you think about it, it’s kind of a slap in the face to Jen and their kids,” the source explains about Ben’s comments.
Ben pinning his drinking problem on his marriage seemed like an odd place to go, as the actor checked into rehab at Promises Malibu in 2001 for alcohol abuse, long before his 2005 wedding to Jennifer. Two years after their 2015 split, he again checked into a facility to address his issues with alcohol and wrote in a Facebook statement, “I’m lucky to have the love of my family and friends, including my co-parent, Jen, who has supported me and cared for our kids as I’ve done the work I set out to do.”
In his most recent experience with alcohol treatment, Jen infamously drove Ben to rehab on August 22, 2018, after he went on a bender that caused her to have an intervention with the father of her children. Their divorce was finalized less than two months later, three years after the pair had separated.
“Ultimately, we tried, we tried, we tried because we had kids, but both of us felt like we didn’t want this to be the model that our kids see of marriage,” Ben revealed in his explosive interview. He also claimed that news reports about his split from the Peppermint star were off base.
“Everything you read [about the divorce] was bullsh–t. The truth was we took our time, we made our decision … We grew apart,” he said. “We had a marriage that didn’t work. This happens. She’s somebody I love and respect, but to whom I shouldn’t be married any longer.”
Ben has been dating his ex-fiancée Jennifer Lopez since April, calling their reunion “beautiful.” Jen has been seeing businessman John Miller on and off since 2018.
A rep for Jennifer did not immediately respond to In Touch‘s request for comment.