Jennifer Lopez files to drop Ben Affleck’s last name in divorce
J.Lo doesn’t want to be J.Aff anymore.
Jennifer Lopez has asked a California court to change her legal name from Jennifer Lynn Affleck to Jennifer Lynn Lopez.
The “Jenny From the Block” singer, 55, filed for divorce from husband Ben Affleck, 52, on Tuesday, August 20. In her divorce petition, Lopez checked a box requesting to have her maiden name restored after her divorce is granted, according to TMZ.
Lopez filed her divorce papers by herself without a lawyer on the two-year anniversary of her and Affleck’s second wedding ceremony.
The “Atlas” actress announced her marriage to Affleck in her On the JLo newsletter. She signed the missive, “With Love, Jennifer Lynn Affleck.”
Lopez got flak for taking Affleck’s last name when she married him in a simple Las Vegas ceremony back in July 2022. She was assailed by the Styles section of The New York Times for becoming Mrs. Affleck rather than asking the “Argo” director to become “Mr. Lopez” — a possibility J.Lo laughed off.
“No! It’s not traditional,” she said in an interview with Vogue in November 2022, just a few months after she and Affleck held a lavish wedding ceremony at Affleck’s estate in Georgia. “It doesn’t have any romance to it.”
She added, “People are still going to call me Jennifer Lopez. But my legal name will be Mrs. Affleck because we’re joined together. We’re husband and wife. I’m proud of that. I don’t think that’s a problem.”
“I can understand that people have their feelings about it, and that’s okay, too,” J.Lo shared. “But if you want to know how I feel about it, I just feel like it’s romantic. It still carries tradition and romance to me, and maybe I’m just that kind of girl.”
Lopez had always said she wanted to take Ben’s last name. When she and the Oscar winner were engaged for the first time in the early 2000s, she told Access Hollywood that while she would remain Jennifer Lopez professionally, her name would “obviously” be Jennifer Affleck.
Interviewer Pat O’Brien teased her and suggested she could go by “J.Aff” instead of “J.Lo,” to which the actress and singer jokingly responded that it “doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but you’ve gotta make sacrifices.”
In that same 2003 interview, Affleck noted that his fiancee was “much more traditional than I anticipated she would be.”
Lopez made the move to end her union with Affleck after the pair spent the summer apart. In her divorce filing, she marked their date of separation as April 26.
In the months before her marriage to the man she often described as the love of her life, Lopez said she believed the pair were doing things “better the second time.”
But in the end, she reportedly felt the “Air” actor didn’t show “any interest” in making their marriage work, and she was “done waiting.”
The pair now face a potentially messy divorce given that the stars reportedly did have a prenup.
