Jennifer Garner Opens Up About Ben Affleck Divorce: ‘No One Needs to Hate Him for Me’
Jennifer Garner (Photo: Patrick Demarchelier/Vanity Fair)
In a bombshell new profile for Vanity Fair, Jennifer Garner opens up about the divorce that shook Hollywood to its core last year: her split, after 10 years, from Ben Affleck, and all the ugly, subsequent nannygate fallout.
“It was a real marriage,” Garner says. “It wasn’t for the cameras. And it was a huge priority for me to stay in it. And that did not work.”
The world has watched every new development since Garner and Affleck announced their split on the day after their 10th wedding anniversary with breath that is bated: the alleged affair with the nanny, their living situation (he’s still living in the family’s guesthouse with Garner and the kids), that midlife crisis tattoo. Garner talks about all of it.
“Let me just tell you something,” Garner says of the couple’s former nanny, Christine Ouzounian, who attempted to become a celebrity herself in the wake of the split. “We had been separated for months before I ever heard about the nanny. She had nothing to do with our decision to divorce. She was not a part of the equation. Bad judgment? Yes. It’s not great for your kids for [a nanny] to disappear from their lives.”
“I have had to have conversations about the meaning of ‘scandal,’” she adds.
Related: How the Tabloids Are Covering Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s Split
Garner says she goes to great pains to avoid reading anything written about her or her family these days, and instead is focusing on work. While she’s kept a pretty low profile following the divorce, you’re probably about to start seeing a whole lot more of her. “I definitely put a lot of time towards my marriage that I will now have for myself. I don’t know how I will use that.”
For now, she says, she’s not dating.
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner on vacation together last July, after they split. (Photo: Fame Flynet)
“It’s not Ben’s job to make me happy,” she says. “The main thing is these kids — and we’re completely in line with what we hope for them. Sure, I lost the dream of dancing with my husband at my daughter’s wedding. But you should see their faces when he walks through the door. And if you see your kids love someone so purely and wholly, then you’re going to be friends with that person.”
While she avoids what’s been said about the divorce, she did catch Ricky Gervais’s joke that Matt Damon is “the only person who Ben Affleck hasn’t been unfaithful to” at the Golden Globes. “I laughed,” she admits. “People have pain — they do regrettable things, they feel shame, and shame equals pain. No one needs to hate him for me. I don’t hate him. Certainly we don’t have to beat the guy up. Don’t worry — my eyes were wide open during the marriage. I’m taking good care of myself.”
Throughout, Garner has nothing but praise for her ex-husband and co-parent, but she’s not on board with everything.
“You know what we would say in my hometown about [Affleck’s new back tattoo]? ‘Bless his heart.’ A phoenix rising from the ashes. Am I the ashes in this scenario?” Garner says. “I take umbrage. I refuse to be the ashes.”
Still, if she had it to do all over again, she would. “I didn’t marry the big fat movie star; I married him,” she says. “And I would go back and remake that decision. … He’s the love of my life. What am I going to do about that? He’s the most brilliant person in any room, the most charismatic, the most generous. He’s just a complicated guy. I always say, ‘When his sun shines on you, you feel it.’ But when the sun is shining elsewhere, it’s cold. He can cast quite a shadow.”
