Inside the WORST 12 months of Jennifer Lopez’s life

Singing and dancing in a billowing Regency ballgown, Jennifer Lopez seemed a picture of delight last month as she celebrated her 55th birthday with a Bridgerton-themed extravaganza in the Hamptons.

The abundant photos and footage she later posted online were full of JLo’s customary look-at-me exuberance in full flush.

Yet, hidden beneath the glitz and glamour, lay a strange air of desperation.

Bridgerton has a strong flavour of Jane Austen romance about it, of course.

But the theme might have been more fitting had JLo taken her cue from Charles Dickens’s Miss Haversham, who spends the rest of her life in a decaying wedding dress after being jilted at the altar.

For there was one glaring absence at the lavish birthday bash – namely JLo’s husband, Ben Affleck. 

He’d been spotted the very same day on the other side of America, no longer even bothering with the charade of wearing his wedding ring.

We now know from their divorce papers – finally filed on Tuesday by Lopez – that the couple once known so cosily as ‘Bennifer’ had been living separately since April but continued wearing their ostentatious rings for the benefit of the cameras – and perhaps their children, too.

In January, Lopez shared a brief video with her nearly 17 million YouTube subscribers titled ‘JLOVERS…2024 is our year.’

In it, she lip-synched to another woman’s voice (actually that of social media star Kym Jenkins) delightedly whooping: ‘Prepare right now to be sick of me.’

The singer and actress didn’t mean it of course – in JLo Land you can neverITAL tire of its egotistical star – but, sadly, her warning has proved all too true.

By the time of Tuesday’s announcement that she’d filed divorce papers in Los Angeles Superior Court, it was difficult to suppose that a tribesman in the remotest part of the Amazon jungle would have been surprised by the news.

Or particularly upset by it, for that matter, given the wealth of evidence that both parties should have seen this coming.

Far from being an annus mirabilis for JLo and her doggedly loyal fans, 2024 must surely rank as among the worst so far – a year dominated by the drip-drip-drip of humiliating claims from the Affleck camp that Lopez was driving him to distraction with her endless craving for publicity and attention.

Even the formal collapse of the marriage was just the icing on the 55th birthday cake when it came to setbacks, not least where Lopez’s career is concerned.

Driven by a burning ambition that has propelled her to a stardom that nowadays greatly exceeds her actual achievements in either film or music, Lopez has never been one to neglect her work.

And, as Affleck had apparently forgotten but was rapidly reminded, she has ensured that her professional life has become inextricably entangled with her private life.

The fact that so much of her creative output was devoted to extolling her undying love for Affleck hardly helped its commercial chances, particularly when it emerged that their relationship wasn’t nearly so rosy as she made out.

The first act in her four-pronged $20 million public tribute to their enduring love (album, film, documentary and tour) was released in February.

This Is Me…Now was her first studio album in a decade but received a lackluster response from both fans and critics, not least because of Lopez’s endless self-absorbed harping-on about Affleck.

Her new songs included the likes of Dear Ben Pt II, Rebound, This Time Around, Greatest Love Story Never Told and Mad In Love, surely most honestly titled of them all.

Entering at number 38 on the US Billboard 200 (the first of her studio albums not to break into the Top 20) the long-awaited This Is Me…Now hardly set the music world alight.

In fact, it sold a mere 14,000 copies in its debut week.

The album was accompanied by a musical film and a documentary on Amazon Prime Video, reportedly another source of marital tension.

The bizarre if visually-dazzling film was a heavily-stylized fictional retelling of Lopez’s various failed romances which JLo – now said to be worth $400 million – financed herself.

In the film, Lopez’s character says that when people would ask what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would answer: ‘I want to be in love’.

Told she’s a ‘relationship addict’, she goes into rehab at Love Addicts Anonymous.

The film featured cameo performances by both Lopez and Affleck and was billed gushingly as her ‘unflinching’ 20-year ‘journey to self-discovery love’ and a ‘vulnerable portrait of an icon who put it all on the line and discovered a newfound determination in self-acceptance and love’.

Reports that the buttoned-up Affleck couldn’t cope with Lopez’s relentless desire to share everything about their private lives with fans were confirmed by the film’s director, Dave Meyers.

He confided that the actor and film-maker had initially felt reservations about having ‘all their personal stuff out there’ for the film.

But, added Meyers optimistically: ‘It’s her way to love. I think he saw that and supported it.’

If that wasn’t enough sharing, there was also a documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, in which Affleck actually admitted confronting Lopez over her addiction to the limelight, telling her after they got back together that ‘one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media’.

Artists Equity, a production company whose co-founders include Affleck and Matt Damon, paid for the documentary and produced it.

Again, some critics said the film was of limited interest to anyone but hardcore Bennifer fans.

Lopez had planned an ambitious arena tour on the back of the new album with 30 dates in the US and Canada.

Industry insiders accused her of woefully over-estimating her current commercial appeal, noting that Olivia Rodrigo had planned a similar-sized promotional tour – but that her album had sold 302,000 copies in its first week, more than 20 times the number sold by Lopez.

In May, the average resale price for tickets to Lopez’s tour dropped 46 percent with $338 tickets now selling for $183.

‘I think JLo misunderstood supply and demand,’ pop music podcaster Nora Princiotti told the Wall Street Journal.

Lopez responded to slow sales by cancelling a few dates and distancing the tour from her Ben-focused album by re-casting it as a greatest hits extravaganza.

At the end of May, she cancelled the tour completely. Her PRs later insisted that she’d only done so because she needed to devote her time to saving her marriage.

‘I am completely heartsick and devastated about letting you down,’ she reassured her disappointed fans.

2024 has been a bad year for Lopez’s non-Affleck-connected ventures, too.

Atlas, a $100 million sci-fi action movie about the threat from artificial intelligence, in which Lopez starred as counter-terrorism expert Atlas Shepherd, was panned by the critics.

The film, which she co-produced and which came out in May, has a pitiful 19 percent approval rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes although it was successful on streaming site Netflix (where, admittedly, subscribers could watch it for free).

The movie’s reputation took a further battering when Ukraine’s Kiev Post reported that it had – disturbingly – used real-life footage in a scene of robots attacking people from the fighting in the Ukraine city of Mariupol, where hundreds have died in the Russian invasion.

The challenge for pop stars of maintaining a strong ‘brand’ when they get into their 50s has also been illustrated in the plight of Lopez’s cosmetics range, JLo Beauty.

She was informed late last year that beauty retailer Sephora wants her products out of its stores by the end of 2024 due to weak sales.

Selina Gomez’s Rare Beauty range, for instance, notches up more than five times bigger sales than JLo Beauty.

Pop music expert Louis Mandelbaum put it bluntly: ‘Jennifer Lopez remains a super celebrity, but she has not been a relevant hit maker in a long time.

‘There’s a dissonance between her fame and how much currency she has as a pop star in 2024.’

There was also a fatal ‘dissonance’ between what Lopez had claimed about their unconquerable love when they married in 2022 and the sort of thing that Affleck was reportedly now saying.

‘Love is beautiful. Love is kind,’ she had told her fans. ‘And it turns out love is patient.’

By May this year, the language coming from the Affleck camp couldn’t have been less romantic as sources close to him cruelly claimed he’d been ‘temporarily insane’ when he married her.

And that their short marriage had been a ‘fever dream’ from which he’d now awoken. Affleck, it was said, a man who shunned the limelight, had grown tired of her starry extravagance, hunger for self-publicity and demanding personality.

It turned out that Affleck really was as miserable as he appeared to be in her company when, for example, they toured a staggering 80 houses in Los Angeles together before settling on the vast mansion they eventually bought for $60 million.

(Affleck himself is no stranger to vulgar extravagance or cringe-making public displays of love. He gave Lopez a $5 million green diamond engagement ring and, in 2002, took out full-page adverts in the film industry press to gush about her wonderfulness).

Stung by the one-sidedness of the rumors coming out about the marriage, and as JLo holidayed alone in Italy – caught by paparazzi taking selfies on a yacht off Positano – her team hit back. 

Friends of Lopez suggested that Affleck, a recovering alcoholic, was ‘very difficult to live with’. He is ‘not easy…he has a lot of demons’, they claimed.

A pal of JLo complained to the Mail that ‘she has been taking the blame for the end of the tour and the marriage, and the mockery of the world – it is all the opposite of the truth’.

Whatever that truth might be, it’s hard not to feel she bears at least some share of responsibility for the breakdown of a marriage that everyone else appeared to know was never going to work.

Today it was reported that even her friends are ‘fed up’ with the four-times married star and her endlessly chaotic love life.

2024 really has been JLo’s year but hardly in the way she’ll want to remember.