As noted yesterday in my post about the changing Bennifer narrative, Page Six first broke the story on the weekend that Ben Affleck has been spending time with Kick Kennedy and they may have been hanging out since June. Which would suggest that he had no interest in making it work with Jennifer Lopez. 

 

Over the last few days, Kick has become a main character in the gossip ecosystem. Everyone’s rushing to post articles about her background, her family, who she’s dated, and what might actually be going on between her and Ben. Does that remind you of someone, kinda sorta? For me, it’s … Chrissy O! 

Nine years ago this week, Christine Ouzounian was a major heatscore, just like Kick Kennedy right now, when a photo of her on a private jet wearing Tom Brady’s Super Bowl rings on her fingers went viral. 

She was Ben and Jennifer Garner’s nanny, and had been spending time with the family in the Bahamas when for whatever reason Ben left to go to Vegas and took her with him, picking up Tom on the way. This was June 2015, the same month Ben and Jen announced their separation. That photo came out two months later, in August, and everyone was talking about the timeline. 

 

It’s 2024 and timelines associated with Ben’s divorce are once again under scrutiny, only Chrissy O is long gone and Ben’s kicking it with Kick (sorry, I had to), who is the opposite of a nanny, but the age difference is similar and the circumstances are just as sus. 

But the reporting on this situation is all over the place. We aren’t talking about the Daily Mail’s story because it’s the Daily Mail, please let’s not go there. Instead, let’s focus on TMZ and they’re going with the shut down approach. TMZ is saying that Ben and Kick are NOT dating, that “they’re just buddies, and Kick thinks highly of Ben -- and that’s literally it”. 

 

TMZ default is to protect men, so it would seem that their tips are coming in from Team Affleck. PEOPLE, meanwhile, is playing the middle. According to one of their sources: 

“Kick and Ben have been spending time together, but I'm not sure what's happening,” one source says.

The source notes they do not know when or how the pair first crossed paths, but, “Kick’s celeb crush has always been Ben.” The source describes Kick, an actress and activist, as a a "partier," adding that she “likes to have a good time.”

Another source tells PEOPLE that Ben and Kick have been “spending time together since late spring”. 

 

But there’s another insider who claims in the PEOPLE story that "I don't think they even know each other. There's definitely nothing going on."

This would be wild if there was alllllll this rumouring and they don’t even know each other. And it would be a quick debunk if that really were the case. Publicists love to wave away absurdities and I feel like we would have heard by now that “Ben has never met Kick Kennedy” if they hadn’t been somewhere together recently. Maybe his position is that he doesn’t want to address anything at all, but that doesn’t explain TMZ’s report that Ben and Kick aren’t dealing with each other romantically. 

They keep telling us that he prefers to dial down his fame, that JLo’s celebrity was too loud for him. Jennifer Garner’s celebrity was much quieter when they were married and somehow he brought the noise. JLo has exited the scene and it’s actually gotten noisier. More mess from a complicated man who isn’t a stranger to mess. “I swear I don’t love the drama, it loves me” – did Taylor Swift write this line for Ben Affleck?