Jennifer Lopez Revelation: How Tears 'Gushing' Over Ben Affleck Divorce Led To Healing Dad Moment

Jennifer Lopez has revealed how an evening watching a film with her father in New York in late 2024 left her in tears 'gushing' over her divorce from Ben Affleck, but also triggered what she describes as a quietly life‑changing, healing moment.

Speaking on Brett Goldstein's Films to Be Buried With podcast, the 56‑year‑old singer and actor said the exchange with her dad, David Lopez, helped her let go of a painful chapter in her life and rethink her own relationships.

For context, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, who first dated in the early 2000s, rekindled their relationship in 2021 and married in 2022, only for their second attempt at romance to unravel within two years. The couple separated in January 2024 and finalised their divorce in 2025 after months of tense settlement talks.

Reports at the time spoke of clashing expectations around fame, Affleck's discomfort with aspects of Lopez's creative life, and what one source described as his 'erratic mood swings,' though friends of Affleck suggested Lopez also needed to 'take a look inside.'

Jennifer Lopez On Being 'Sick, Isolated And Thinking About My Kids'

The news came after Lopez sat down with her Office Romance co‑star Goldstein for a long, often raw conversation about work, family and what happens when your love life becomes global entertainment. She recalled falling ill around Christmas while her family were visiting, which forced her to cancel a party she had planned to host.

Instead of mingling, Lopez shut herself in her room.

'At that time of my life, I was going through a divorce and thinking a lot about my kids,' she said on the podcast. 'As you do when something like that happens in your life.'

It was during that quiet, slightly miserable evening that she agreed to watch the Oscar‑winning 2024 film I'm Still Here with her father. The choice was notable in itself. As she put it, David Lopez is not the type to sit through movies, which made his presence beside her on the sofa feel surprisingly intimate.

The film, starring Fernanda Torres, follows a woman who spends years trying to prove her husband did not simply vanish, while she raises their children alone. Lopez summarised the plot with the air of someone who had clearly gone over it again in her mind. 'This woman spends her whole life trying to prove that her husband was really — that he didn't just disappear,' she told Goldstein, describing how the character keeps going, 'raising all these kids on her own.'

Tears 'Like Water Gushing' And A Line Jennifer Lopez Needed To Hear

Part way through the film, the emotional weight of the story collided with Lopez's private life. On the podcast, she broke down again as she described what happened next, her voice cracking as she recounted the moment.

Sitting next to her dad, she said, a switch flipped. 'Something happened in my head, and I just started crying, where I started calculating all of the things with my kids, my experience with my dad, like everything happened just all at once,' she remembered. 'My whole family knew I was going through a hard time.'

She tried to do that discreet crying people attempt when others are in the room. It did not work. 'He gets up like nothing, you know, he's like "Oh, that was a nice movie." He turns around, and he sees my face,' she said. 'I was trying to cry quietly, so when you try to cry quietly, then it's like all the tears, it's like water gushing down my face.'

Her father asked what was wrong. Lopez's answer was simple and oddly childlike: 'Dads are so important.'

What followed is the line she now credits with shifting something fundamental inside her. 'He just kind of came over to me and grabbed my face, and he said, "I love you. I always loved you,"' she told listeners. 'That kind of changed my life in that moment because I think sometimes as kids, we don't know if our parents love us enough, though we know they love us.'

Lopez, who shares 18‑year‑old twins Max and Emme with ex‑husband Marc Anthony, said that hearing those words, unprompted, landed differently from the public support or private reassurances she is used to. 'He knew that that's what I needed to hear, and it healed a part of me that needed to be healed, to kind of move on from that part of my life and from those types of relationships in my life,' she said.

The film, she added, 'changed me and helped me grow and healed me in a way'. On the face of it, it is just a daughter crying at a movie with her dad. Yet there is something quietly wild about the idea that, after months of speculation, lawyers and tabloid nonsense, what helped Jennifer Lopez start to move on from the end of Bennifer 2.0 was not a retreat or a big spiritual reset, but a single sentence from her father in a darkened room.