Ben Affleck knows what it's like to be hated more than a would-be convicted killer -- or that's how he feels.
The "Argo" star is GQ's Filmmaker of the Year, and he told the magazine that when he was seeing Jennifer Lopez the attention he received somehow was worse than anything the media was saying at the time about Scott Peterson, who was convicted of killing his wife Laci and their unborn child in 2002.
"At the time, I knew on some level, 'This is insane,' " he said of the "Bennifer" years, telling the magazine that he was the media's punching bag. "What was that guy's name who killed his wife and dumped her off the side of a boat? ... Peterson. I remember thinking he actually gets slightly better treatment than I do in the press."
Wait, excuse us: Ben Affleck, say what?
"At least they had to say 'alleged killer,'" he continued. "Unfortunately there's an aspect of that that's like one of those fights you see on YouTube where one of them falls down and then a bunch of people who were standing around come over and kick the person. They don't know them, they have no involvement in the fight, but they recognize a moment that they can get a free shot in, and for some people it's just too much to resist. And that was definitely me at that point. I was the guy. I was the designated person to loathe."
Affleck began dating Lopez in 2002, after starring in critically eviscerated "Gigli" together, and the couple later became engaged before breaking things off shortly before their scheduled wedding in 2004.
It was a relationship the media didn't take kindly to -- according to GQ the "Bennifer romance was regarded as though both parties were "making some kind of laughably terrible mistake" that was a "shameful betrayal of who they really were."
Affleck appears to be traumatized by the attention he received and admits it was really bad for him in all kinds of different ways, "particularly in terms of my emotional life, my sense of self," he said.
"The amount of venom—I must have touched some specific little place in the consciousness. I don't believe I didn't deserve any negative judgment for anything, but it was just way out of whack," he told GQ. "People decided that I was the frat guy, even though I've never been inside a fraternity, or the guy who beat them up at school, even though that wasn't me at all."
It's not the first time Affleck has spoken about the his hellish "Bennifer" years. In September he told Details magazine:
"In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives."
For more with Ben Affleck, click over to GQ.
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