Ben Affleck’s cruelty knows no limits after cruel Jennifer Garner insult

Jennifer Garner helped clean up Ben Affleck’s image from a drunk womaniser to a repeat Oscar winner, and this is the thanks she gets?

OPINION

This is the thanks Jennifer Garner gets?

After saving ex-husband Ben Affleck — who can ever forget that furious Jack-in-the-Box-en-route-to-rehab paparazzi shot? — Affleck says that he “probably still would’ve been drinking” had he stayed married to her.

The mother of his three children. Wow.

Nope, not enough that Affleck’s conducting a very smug, public romance with ex-fiancee Jennifer Lopez, making Garner look like the runner-up and Lopez the One Who Got Away.

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Nor was it enough that Affleck humiliated then-wife Garner when he finally won his Oscar for Argo — an Oscar he won largely because she cleaned up his image from dissolute gambler, drunk, and womaniser into wholesome family man — by telling the world, in his acceptance speech, that marriage to Garner was “work.”

This is the cruellest post-divorce interview since Brad Pitt blamed ex-wife Jennifer Aniston, in Parade magazine, for his deep unhappiness and subsequent affair with Angelina Jolie.

“It became very clear to me that … I wasn’t living an interesting life myself,” Pitt said in 2011.

“I think that my marriage had something to do with it. Trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn’t.”

As Nora Ephron once said: Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.

Here’s Affleck on Tuesday’s Howard Stern show: “Part of why I started drinking was that I was trapped,” he said.

“I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I’m not happy, what do I do?’ ”

Yes, Affleck couldn’t leave because of his children, whose mother — and, yes, by extension, his children — he continues to humiliate.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner in happier times. Picture: Christopher Polk/Getty Images for VH1

Affleck and Garner’s kids are 16, 12 and 9 years old. They have already suffered through their father’s gambling and drinking, the nanny, Shookus, the back tattoo.

But these heartless comments might be the worst yet.

Just when you think celebrities can’t get more out of touch, they do. Ben Affleck, out promoting his awards-bait movie The Tender Bar, clearly thinks he’s running a great Oscar campaign. One of his talking points is how great a dad he is!

“The most important thing is being a good father,” he recently told the Wall Street Journal.

“I think the most important literal or metaphorical autobiography anybody could ever write is written on the hearts of their children.”

Here’s Affleck, days later, to Stern, on his marriage driving him to drink: “[I] drank a bottle of scotch and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution … We had a marriage that didn’t work. This happens. She’s somebody I love and respect, but to whom I shouldn’t be married any longer.”

Ben Affleck has been spruiking himself as a good father on the publicity trail. Picture: Sussman/GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP

This is all so mean, cold and unnecessary — especially since Garner has been so open about how desperately she wanted their marriage to work and how heartbroken she was by its demise.

“He’s the love of my life,” she told Vanity Fair in 2015, one year after their split.

“What am I going to do about that? He’s the most brilliant person in any room, the most charismatic … 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.”

That’s one way of putting it.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post and has been reproduced with permission

Originally published as Ben Affleck’s cruelty knows no limits after cruel Jennifer Garner insult