It’s been a long time (or maybe it just feels that way) since Ben Affleck‘s affair with the family nanny and his split from wife Jennifer Garner went public — in actuality, it was only last summer that it all went down. Still, she’s kept quiet about the whole thing ever since, likely in an effort to protect her kids and not draw unnecessary drama (a rare quality for a celebrity, but certainly a welcome one). Now Garner is speaking out in the most vanilla star profile ever published on the pages of Vanity Fair.
Here are some of her choice quotes (and H/T to Jezebel for pulling them out for me):
On her marriage:
“It was a real marriage,” Garner tells me. “It wasn’t for the cameras. And it was a huge priority for me to stay in it. And that did not work.”
On Nannygate:
“We had been separated for months before I ever heard about the nanny. She had nothing to do with our decision to divorce. She was not a part of the equation. Bad judgment? Yes. It’s not great for your kids for [a nanny] to disappear from their lives.” Months later, she’s still assessing the damage. “I have had to have conversations about the meaning of ‘scandal,’” she says, with her children.
On Ben as the love of her life:
“He’s the love of my life. What am I going to do about that? He’s the most brilliant person in any room, the most charismatic, the most generous. He’s just a complicated guy. 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.”
On Ben as the knower of truths:
“He’s still the only person who really knows the truth about things. And I’m still the only person that knows some of his truths.”
Well, I suppose that’s pretty special. Jennifer Garner is pretty inoffensive because she’s so bland, but no one deserves to be fucked over the way she was. It’s great of her to take the high road, but I do wonder why she’s trying to paint Ben as some mythological god with depths that none of us can ever understand. He’s an idiot, and his pseudo-whatever it is he’s pandering isn’t fooling most of the world.