Inside the WORST year of Jennifer Lopez’s life: As her ‘love story’ with Ben Affleck ends in divorce, TOM LEONARD exposes the commercial flops, the public humiliations… and even the friends who are now abandoning her

Jennifer Lopez looked the picture of happiness last month as she celebrated her 55th birthday in a flowing Regency ball gown with a Bridgerton-themed extravaganza in the Hamptons.

The many photos and images she later posted online were peppered with JLo’s usual look-at-me exuberance.

But beneath all the glitz and glamour was an unmistakable air of desperation.

Bridgerton certainly has a strong Jane Austen romance to it. But the theme might have been more fitting if JLo had taken her cue from Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham, who spends the rest of her life in a faded wedding dress after being dumped at the altar.

There was one notable absentee from the extravagant birthday party: JLo’s husband, Ben Affleck.

Jennifer Lopez looked the picture of happiness last month as she celebrated her 55th birthday in a flowing Regency ball gown with a Bridgerton-themed extravaganza in the Hamptons.

There was one notable absentee from the extravagant birthday party: JLo’s husband, Ben Affleck.

He was spotted on the other side of America that same day, not caring at all about wearing his wedding ring.

We now know from their divorce papers — which were finally filed by Lopez in Los Angeles on Tuesday — that the couple once cozily nicknamed “Bennifer” had been living apart since April.

In January, Lopez posted a short video for her nearly 17 million YouTube subscribers titled “JLOVERS… 2024 is our year.”

Seven months later, the hoped-for year of triumph has all but fallen to pieces.

By the time the separation was announced on Tuesday, it would have been hard to find a tribesman in the most remote part of the Amazon who would have been surprised by the news. Or genuinely sympathetic, given the abundance of evidence that both sides should have seen it coming.

Far from a miracle year for JLo, 2024 has surely gone down as her worst year yet – a year dominated by a drip-drip-drip of demeaning claims from the Affleck camp that Lopez was driving him crazy with her endless craving for attention.

But the formal failure of the marriage is just the icing on the cake of her 55th birthday, given all the recent setbacks.

For JLo, 2024 was far from a miracle year, but it certainly ranks as one of her worst years yet. It was a year dominated by the endless stream of demeaning claims from Affleck’s camp that Lopez was driving him crazy with her endless craving for attention.

Driven by a burning ambition that has propelled her to stardom that some say far exceeds her true talents, Lopez has never neglected her work.

After her romance with Bennifer rekindled in 2022 and they married in Las Vegas that summer, her professional projects have remained inextricably linked to her private life.

Thus, in February, the first part of an exhaustively narcissistic $20 million quadripartite public tribute to their enduring “love story” (album, film, documentary and tour) was released.

‘This Is Me… Now’ was her first studio album in a decade, but it received a lukewarm response from fans and critics alike, not least because of Lopez’s endless, self-centered nagging about Affleck.

New songs included ‘Dear Ben Pt II’, ‘Rebound’, ‘Greatest Love Story Never Told’ and ‘Mad In Love’, undoubtedly the most honestly titled.

The album debuted at number 38 on the Billboard 200 (the first of her studio albums not to enter the Top 20), but quickly lost relevance, selling only 14,000 copies in its debut week.

‘This Is Me… Now’ was accompanied by a musical film.

The bizarre yet visually dazzling film was a highly stylized, fictionalized retelling of her various failed romances, which JLo — now reportedly worth $400 million — self-financed.

In the film, Lopez’s character says that when people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always replied, “I want to be in love.”

When she is told she is “addicted to relationships,” she goes to rehab.

The film, which features a cameo from Affleck, was heralded as an “unrelenting,” 20-year “journey of self-discovery” and a “vulnerable portrait of an icon who risked everything and discovered a new resolve in self-acceptance and love.”

Reports that the unassuming Affleck couldn’t cope with Lopez’s relentless urge to share everything were confirmed by the film’s director, Dave Meyers, during a press conference.

He confided that Affleck had reservations about “all their personal stuff” [being] outside’.

As if the film wasn’t publicity enough, there was also an accompanying documentary for Amazon Prime, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” in which Affleck admits onscreen that he confronted Lopez and bluntly told her that “one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media.”

Rightly so, although some were quick to point out that Artists Equity, a production company co-owned by Affleck, paid for and produced the documentary.

Once again, critics judged the film to be – at best – not all that interesting to anyone but hardcore JLo fans.

‘This Is Me… Now’ was her first studio album in a decade, but it received a lukewarm response from fans and critics alike, not least because of Lopez’s endless, self-centered nagging about Affleck.

And then there was the overly ambitious arena tour planned after the new album, with 30 shows in the US and Canada.

Soon, reports emerged that JLo was struggling to fill stadiums, with industry insiders accusing her of grossly overestimating her current commercial appeal.

Lopez initially responded to the disappointing sales by canceling some dates.

At the end of May, she cancelled the tour altogether, as her ‘friends’ insisted that she had only done so because she had to spend time trying to save her marriage, which was by now in the spotlight of the press.

“Jennifer is taking some time off to be with her children, family and close friends,” the statement said.

2024 was also a bad year for her non-Affleck-related businesses.

Atlas, a $100 million science fiction action film about the threat of artificial intelligence that starred Lopez, was panned by critics.

The film, which she co-produced for Netflix and was released in May, has a meager 19 percent approval rating on review website Rotten Tomatoes.

The film’s reputation took a further hit when Ukraine’s Kiev Post reported that Netflix had – disturbingly – used real footage of fighting in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol (where hundreds were killed in the Russian invasion) in a scene where robots attacked people.

Meanwhile, Lopez’s cosmetics line, “JLo Beauty,” isn’t so fragrant anymore.

Reports that the unassuming Affleck couldn’t cope with Lopez’s relentless urge to share everything about their private life with fans were confirmed by the film’s director, Dave Meyers.

At the end of last year, she was told that the major beauty chain Sephora wanted to have her products removed from stores by the end of 2024 due to disappointing sales figures.

For example, Selina Gomez’s “Rare Beauty” line generates sales more than five times hers.

Pop music expert Louis Mandelbaum put it bluntly: “Jennifer Lopez remains a superstar, but she hasn’t been a relevant hitmaker for a long time. There’s a dissonance between her fame and how much value she has as a pop star in 2024.”

There was also a fatal “dissonance” between what Lopez claimed about her unconquerable love for Affleck when they married in 2022 and the things her soon-to-be ex is reportedly saying now.

By spring, the language from Affleck’s camp had become no less romantic. One friendly insider even claimed that Ben had been “temporarily insane” when he married JLo, and that their brief marriage had been a “fever dream.”

Affleck, it was said, had grown tired of his wife’s glamorous extravagance and publicity-seeking and had moved out of their $60 million marital home in May into a $100,000 rental house in Brentwood.

Stung by the one-sidedness of the wedding rumors, and while JLo was vacationing alone in Italy – caught by paparazzi taking selfies on a yacht off the coast of Positano – her camp hit back.

Friends of Lopez said Affleck, a recovering alcoholic, was “very difficult to live with.”

He’s “not easy… he’s got a lot of demons,” one insider claimed, with some even suggesting he might be drinking again.

Stung by the one-sidedness of the wedding rumors, and while JLo was vacationing alone in Italy (pictured), her camp hit back.

A friend of JLo confided to the Mail that “she has taken the blame for the end of the tour, the marriage and the world’s ridicule – it’s all the opposite of the truth.”

Whatever the truth, it’s hard not to feel like she’s partly responsible for the failure of a marriage that everyone knew would never work.

On Wednesday, it was reported that even some of her friends have had “had enough” of the four-times-married star and her endlessly chaotic love life.

In a sense, 2024 has really been JLo’s year, but not in the way she wants to remember it.