Just as one Mrs. Affleck is changing her name, another woman named Jennifer Lynn Affleck is making headlines as a cast member on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. This Jennifer Affleck — a 25-year-old Mormon who has 1.4 million followers on TikTok — has called herself “the new Jenny from the block” and claims that she and her husband, Zac, are distantly related to the much more famous Afflecks. But some fans and Reddit sleuths have doubts about her status as “Ben Affleck’s cousin.”
Jennifer Affleck addressed the connection in a 2022 video, joking that J.Lo “stole” her name and writing in the caption, “Can’t forget that Ben Affleck is my husbands second cousin.” When The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives came out earlier this month, she told People that Ben is “my husband’s cousin, but we’ve never met him.” People ran with the claim, referring to her as “Ben Affleck’s cousin” and noting that “Zac is Ben’s first cousin once removed. His dad, Dave Affleck, is Ben and Casey Affleck’s first cousin.”
Some fans are more skeptical. A Reddit thread from the weekend claiming to have examined “multiple genealogy websites” poked some holes in the notion that Ben and Dave Affleck are cousins. For that to be true, the reasoning goes, Timothy (Ben’s dad) and Gordon (Dave’s dad) would need to be brothers, but based on a number of free celebrity family trees available online, that does not appear to be the case. The only publicly listed sibling of Timothy Byers Affleck (Ben’s dad) is a man named Stephen Affleck — which doesn’t match the reported name of Zac’s grandfather, Gordon. Stephen also doesn’t seem to have had any children, let alone one named Dave.
Meanwhile, Adina Newman — a professional genealogist who runs the Instagram account @myfamilygenie — also examined Ben’s and Zac’s family trees, pointing out that Ben’s grandfather was born in Rhode Island, while Zac’s great grandfather was born and raised in Utah. In fact, looking at the family trees, she says, she found “no place where they cross at all.”
So did Jen Affleck make up a celebrity cousin, or is she just misinformed? She seems to have gotten her info from Zac, who she claims told her while they were dating, “If you get married to me, you can say you’re related to Ben Affleck.” As for Ben, it seems fair to assume he has way too much going on right now to be bothered to set the record straight about his distant Mormon reality-TV-star “cousin.”
In any case, the Cut has reached out to reps for all the Afflecks in an attempt to get to the bottom of this, and we will update this post if we hear back.
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