Has Ben Affleck already gone, baby, gone after a new romance? After multiple outlets reported the Air director had been spending time with Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy-the eldest daughter of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s six children-amid his divorce from Jennifer Lopez, a source with knowledge told E! News Aug. 26 that the pair are “not romantically involved.”
The source added, “They only know each other in passing.”
E! News reached out to reps for Kick, 36, and Ben, 52, for comment but has not heard back.
Rumours of a romance between Ben and Kick-who’s acted on shows like Gossip Girl and The Newsroom-arrived less than a week after J Lo filed for divorce from the Oscar winner after two years of marriage. In her filing, obtained by E! News at the time, the Hustlers star cited “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for the breakup and marked their date of separation as April 26, 2024.
And Jennifer made a few requests in the documents as well. For one, the 55-year-old, who is currently legally known as Jennifer Lynn Affleck, asked that her name be restored to Jennifer Lynn Lopez. But Jennifer and Ben’s breakup didn’t come totally out of nowhere. Speculation that the couple were headed for a split loomed heavy for months before the “On the Floor” singer filed the paperwork.
In fact, Ben even hinted that he and Jennifer have had incompatible lifestyle preferences since the early aughts in her The Greatest Love Story Never Told documentary, which was released six months before they called it quits.
“I had a very firm sense of boundaries initially around the press while Jen I don’t think objected to it in the way I did,” Ben explained in the documentary of their 2004 breakup. “I very much did object to it.”
As a result, when they rekindled their romance in 2021, the Good Will Hunting actor made some stipulations.
“I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media,'” Ben remembered. “And then I sort of realised it’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s sort of like you’re gonna marry a boat captain and you go, ‘Well, I don’t like the water.'”
He added, “We’re just two people with kind of different approaches trying to learn to compromise.” As for Kick, the actress previously shared she’s also not a fan of public attention. As she put it to the New York Post in 2014, “When I see my face or name in the tabloids, I get a knot in my stomach. It’s just not me-it’s reading something that’s not real.”