Stars Who Can't Stop Talking About Their Exes
Breakups are hard enough for normal people, but add the spotlight into the mix, and, well, it gets tough, because the entire world knows your business and you're being asked about the split almost all the time. These stars can't stop rehashing their old relationships on social media and in the press.
Jennifer Lopez
In Jennifer Lopez's 2014 memoir True Love (via Entertainment Tonight), she confessed that her split from Ben Affleck was her "first true heartbreak," and based on several interviews over the years, J.Lo seems like she's still hung up on Bennifer 1.0.
In April 2017, she told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live that she gave Affleck, whom she dated from 2002 to 2004, a makeover during their romance, noting, "I did say, 'You're a movie star, you should wear a suit, you should do this with your hair.' He was into it. He didn't do anything he didn't want to do. He had some good fashion moments when he was with me."
In March 2016, she told People, "I think different time different thing, who knows what could've happened, but there was a genuine love there ... We didn't try to have a public relationship. We just happened to be together at the birth of the tabloids, and it was like, 'Oh my God.' It was just a lot of pressure."
A year earlier, Lopez told HuffPost Live of her Gigli (2002) era, "I would do it all over again, I think. I really would. Even the relationship part."
Justin Timberlake
Justin Timberlake has milked his split from Britney Spears for years. In his 2002 video for "Cry Me A River," Timberlake plans revenge on a Spears doppelganger who cheated on him.
The same year, he told The Telegraph that their breakup left him "heartbroken ... Of course, I've met some women whom I've felt more mature than, but I'm not naming names." He also dished on his sex life with the starlet to Barbara Walters and spent almost his entire Justified press tour rehashing their breakup.
By 2006, he was still talking about Spears and their intimate life, even though he was dating Cameron Diaz at the time. In 2008, he implied she was a "Madonna wannabe." In 2011, he told Vanity Fair that he and Spears "were two birds of the same feather — small-town kids, doing the same thing. But then you become adults, and the way you were as kids doesn't make any sense. I won't speak on her, but at least for me, I was a totally different person." (Isn't it cute how he said he "won't speak on her" right after he does exactly that?)
He wasn't done. In 2016, he dredged Spears up again, telling Vanity Fair, "In the past, suffering has helped me compose songs. 'Cry Me a River' was written in a time of pain, like everyone knows." Yes. Everyone knows. So you can stop now.
Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Paltrow is really proud to have dated Brad Pitt. During a June 2017 fan Q&A, Paltrow said, "Someone wants Brad Pitt and I to get back together. I think that ship has sailed."
Has it for her, though? Two years earlier, Paltrow told Howard Stern of Pitt via (Us Weekly), "I was such a kid, I was 22 when we met. It's taken me until 40 to get my head out of my a**. You can't make that decision [to get married] when you're 22 years old ... I wasn't ready, and he was too good for me. I didn't know what I was doing."
Of course, in light of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, we would have been proud to have dated Brad Pitt, too. But that's another story.
In any case, Paltrow also chats often about her ex-husband Chris Martin, from whom she infamously "consciously uncoupled" in 2014 — though she's a fan of using those particular chestnuts to glorify her Goopy self. In June 2017, she told The Edit (via Entertainment Tonight), "I wanted to turn my divorce into a positive," she says. "What if I didn't blame the other person for anything, and held myself 100 percent accountable? What if I checked my own s**t at the door and put my children first? And reminded myself about the things about my ex-husband that I love, and fostered the friendship? What I put myself through to get there was the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life."
In December 2016, she told In Style, "To this day, Chris would take a bullet for me, even though I'm not his wife. I honestly think Chris and I have contributed something positive to the culture of divorce." Whatever you say, Goop.
Russell Brand
With the amount Russell Brand talks about Katy Perry, you'd think they were married a lot longer than 14 months. In his 2015 documentary, he declared his marriage to the pop star as "vapid, vacuous celebrity." In March 2017, he said in a television interview, "I still feel very warm towards her. I feel like, when I hear about her or see her, 'Aw, there's that person. There's that person in the world.' I sort of recognize it as a part of my life that was for a clearly delineated piece of time."
He was just as affectionate towards Perry in a Sept. 2017 interview, conducted after he married and welcomed a daughter with Laura Gallacher, telling Grazia magazine (via The Sun), "I'm willing and open for reconciliation, any kind ... It was a very important and lovely time in my life. I don't regret being married to Katy at all. I have very positive feelings about that whole experience and Katy is an extraordinary woman."
Katy Perry
Katy Perry doesn't speak much or often about Russell Brand, though she has addressed their split occasionally (and vaguely) in interviews. She told Vogue (via Page Six) in 2013, "He's a very smart man, and I was in love with him when I married him. Let's just say I haven't heard from him since he texted me saying he was divorcing me December 31, 2011."
She's more loquacious about her recent exes, especially John Mayer. While promoting Witness, Perry told The Therapist that one of her exes "has been a really amazing example of a man, a gentleman, and I had to push pause on that 'cause I had to grow. I couldn't grow together because I still had to make [myself] whole ... I'm really grateful for someone like him who mended my wings and holds a space for me so that I can grow and doesn't judge me." Considering Perry previously told Marie Claire that she and Mayer had to take a break so she could process her divorce from Brand and work on herself, it's safe to assume she was possibly talking about Mayer there.
She also claimed in a segment with James Corden that Mayer was her best lover out of her last three beaus (followed by Orlando Bloom and Diplo, respectively).
John Mayer
John Mayer is no stranger to TMI, and it cost him his reputation for a while.
In Feb. 2010, he told Playboy of ex Jessica Simpson (via E! Online), "Yeah, that girl is like crack cocaine to me. Sexually it was crazy. That's all I'll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm." That's not all he said, though—even though it was bad enough. He added, "There are people in the world who have the power to change our values. Have you ever been with a girl who made you want to quit the rest of your life? Did you ever say, 'I want to quit my life and just f**kin' snort you? If you charged me $10,000 to f**k you, I would start selling all my s**t just to keep f**king you.'" Ugh.
In the same interview, he dissed ex Jennifer Aniston, blabbing, "That woman was the most communicative, sweetest, kindest person. I'll always be sorry that it didn't last. In some ways I wish I could be with her. But I can't change the fact that I need to be 32...I don't want to pet dogs in the kitchen."
Mayer also admitted to The New York Times that much of his most recent album, The Search For Everything, most notably his single "Still Feel Like Your Man," was inspired by KatyPerry. "Who else would I be thinking about? And by the way, it's a testament to the fact that I have not dated a lot of people in the last five, six years," he said. "That was my only relationship. So it's like, give me this, people."
Jennifer Aniston
When a celebrity couple first splits, it's natural for them to talk about it in the press, because they're asked. So, even though they divorced all the way back in 2005, Jennifer Aniston gets a pass for her early chitchat about ex-husband Brad Pitt.
However, when she still spoke about him in 2015, it got a bit ridiculous. "I mean, I don't like it when people bring it up. But people still do, right?" she said on CBS News (via The New York Daily News). "I don't find it painful, though. I think it's a narrative that follows you because it's an interesting headline. It's more of a media-driven topic ... We've exchanged good wishes and all that sort of stuff to each other, but not a constant thing."
In the Dec. 2016 issue of Marie Claire, she brought it up again. "My marital status has been shamed; my divorce status was shamed; my lack of a mate had been shamed; my nipples have been shamed," she lamented. "It's like, 'Why are we only looking at women through this particular lens of picking us apart? Why are we listening to it?' I just thought: I have worked too hard in this life and this career to be whittled down to a sad, childless human."
Gavin Rossdale
While ex-wife Gwen Stefani can't stop gushing about boyfriend Blake Shelton, Gavin Rossdale won't shut up about their split, which was rumored to have been caused by his cheating with their nanny.
"[Divorce] was completely opposite to what I wanted. Really not...but here we are," Rossdale told Fabulous magazine in Jan. 2017. "Apart from death, I think divorce is one of the hardest, most painful things to go through ... We had 20 years together and that in itself is pretty incredible. It's a lifetime," he continued. "I still think she's incredible. It was a lovely 20 years and we have three amazing children. There were a lot of positives, and with time they'll become more and more obvious."
He also told The Guardian a month later that the split was "the worst" time in his life, noting, "Well, if you divorce America's sweetheart, you're in trouble. Or rather, if she divorces me ... She's the mother of my children and one of the most incredible girls in the world."
Kim Kardashian
Kim Kardashian was only married to Kris Humphries for an infamously short 72 days, but with the amount she smack-talks him, it feels like a lot longer.
She told The Hollywood Reporter in Aug. 2017 of the highly publicized, brief marriage, "There was all this attention on the wedding, and I thought maybe it was just the pressure of the show giving me this anxiety. My friends told me I just had cold feet, but even the producers said, 'You don't seem happy. You don't have to go through with this.'"
She added, "The night before, my mom pulled me aside, off camera, and was like, 'This isn't it for you. Why don't you go away and I'll handle it?' I felt like, if I pulled out now, everyone's going to think I just did it for the show. Then afterwards, people were saying, "You have to stay married for a year," but I physically couldn't do it. When I made the decision [to divorce], everyone said it was made up for the show. Everyone really wanted to take me down."
Months earlier, she confessed on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, "At the time I just thought, 'Holy sh-t, I'm 30-years-old, I better get this together. I better get married. I think a lot of girls do go through that, where they freak out thinking they're getting old and all their friends are having kids," she continued. "So, it was more of that situation. But I knew on the honeymoon it wasn't going to work out."
Kanye West and Amber Rose
For the first few years after their 2011 breakup, Amber Rose and Kanye West were amicable, and he even referenced her — not unpleasantly, but slightly profanely — in his April 2012 track "Cold." But in Feb. 2015, West dissed Rose in a radio interview while she was feuding with the Kardashians, saying, "If Kim had dated me when I first wanted to be with her, there wouldn't be an Amber Rose. It's very hard for a woman to wanna be with someone that's with Amber Rose. I had to take 30 showers before I got with Kim."
Rose responded in a series of tweets, writing, "@kanyewest This is my moment to let the world know who u really are and the things you've done to me ... after all these years I never snitched on u and I don't plan on starting now. We once loved each other so I won't do u like that."
West went on a since-deleted Twitter rant in Jan. 2016 telling Rose's then-husband Wiz Khalifa that he "let a stripper trap [him]." Rose replied with a tweet we can't repeat here, but that sent a strong enough message to make West delete his own insults.
In July 2017, Rose told the Everyday Struggle show, "I still have never said anything mean about Kanye. This is after six, seven years of constant bullying from him ... I could have got a reality show just off the fact that I was his girlfriend ... I said, 'You know what? I'm a real a** b***h. I'mma take the high road and work my a** off, and I'm going to get everything I get on my own, so nobody can be like, 'Yo I gave her that.'"
Jenny Slate
Chris Evans has mostly remained mum about his romance with Jenny Slate, but she went on and on and on about it in an interview with New York magazine in March 2017.
"To be quite honest, I didn't think I was his type. Eventually, when it was like, 'Oh, you have these feelings for me?', I was looking around like, 'Is this a prank?'" she recalled. "I mean, I understand why I think I'm beautiful, but if you've had a certain lifestyle and I'm a very, very different type of person—I don't want to be an experiment."
Slate also explained how having strangers approach her about how hot her boyfriend was proved to be difficult, but worth it.
"I first really liked Chris as a person because he is so unpretentious," she said. "Chris is truly one of the kindest people I've ever met, to the point where sometimes I would look at him and it would kind of break my heart. He's really vulnerable, and he's really straightforward. He's like primary colors. He has beautiful, big, strong emotions, and he's really sure of them. It's just wonderful to be around. His heart is probably golden-colored, if you could paint it."
Chris Brown
Rihanna hasn't spoken about Chris Brown in years, but he can't stop bringing her up. Brown touched on his 2009 assault of the singer in his 2017 documentary, Chris Brown: Welcome To My Life.
Brown revealed that he'd been intimate with someone else prior to his relationship with Rihanna, which angered her. "My trust totally was lost with her,"Brown said (via People). "From there, it just went downhill because there were too many verbal fights, physical fights as well. Mutual sides ...We would fight each other," he said. "She would hit me, I would hit her and it never was OK. There was always a point where we'd talk about it like, 'What the f**k are we doing?' ... I'm not ever trying to put my hands on any female."
He also gave some harrowing details on the night of the assault, during which he said Rihanna had been drinking and found a text from another woman on his phone. "She starts going off, she throws the phone. 'I hate you.' Starts hitting me ... She hits me a couple of more times ... I remember she tried to kick me, but then I really hit her, with a closed fist, I punched her," he said. "I busted her lip. When I saw it, I was in shock. ... From there she just spit in my face, spit blood in my face and it enraged me even more."
Ever the victim, Brown concluded, "I look back at that picture and I'm like, 'That's not me, bro, that's not me.' I hate it to this day. That's going to haunt me forever."
Taylor Swift
Joe Jonas was the first of a long line of famous men to reportedly break Taylor Swift's heart, and he did it by phone. She told Ellen DeGeneres (via MTV News), "I'm not even going to remember the boy who broke up with me over the phone in 25 seconds when I was 18...I looked at the call log—it was like 27 seconds. That's got to be a record."
Nowadays, Swift sticks to dissing her exes in her lyrics, with songs reportedly about Jake Gyllenhaal ("We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"), John Mayer ("Dear John"), Harry Styles ("Style," "Out Of The Woods"), and Jonas ("Forever And Always").
On the bright side: her most recent single, "Gorgeous," is rumored to be about her current boyfriend, Joe Alwyn. So, there's that?