Ben Affleck and Lindsay Shookus never ended up having a baby, despite the predictions of one tabloid last year. Gossip Cop debunked that story one year ago today. 365 days later, it’s quite obvious how silly the claim was.
In an article published last spring, NW falsely claimed that Affleck and his then-girlfriend, Shookus, had a baby on the way. The outlet’s evidence? The couple was seen at a Bed Bath & Beyond in Santa Monica with bags that had the logo of the store’s baby supply subsidiary, Buy Buy Baby. This alone led the tabloid to engage in a bit of wild speculation that the couple, who had initially broken up in 2018 and recently reunited, were planning on “starting a family together.”
This story was just flat-out ridiculous. The actor and SNL producer were buying pillows and sheets, your basic everyday errand, and the bags that Bed Bath & Beyond gave them had its logo on one side and Buy Buy Baby’s logo on the other because that’s just the bag that that store gives out to everyone. It doesn’t mean that everyone who shops at the Santa Monica Bed Bath & Beyond is pregnant. And if the story weren’t flimsy enough, Gossip Cop got in touch with Affleck’s spokesperson, who confirmed for us that the two weren’t expecting a child.
As with many phony pregnancy claims by the tabloids, time has proven this one to be a complete work of fiction. In the year that has passed since NW wrote this story, Shookus has at no point announced a pregnancy. But perhaps even more amusingly, Affleck and Shookus broke up again just ten days after Gossip Cop debunked the article. A source speaking to People, a much more reputable outlet for celebrity news, said that the situation just didn’t work out.
Affleck lives in Los Angeles and Shookus lives in New York, and both have kids from their previous marriages. “While they love and respect each other they just realized it wasn’t going to work,” the insider reported. Given that they live across the country from each other, it doesn’t sound like they were planning on starting a family together, even before they split.
Bogus tabloid stories have continued to plague the now-exes for months after their split. One popular rumor was that Shookus had started dating actor Jon Hamm, a story initially pushed by RadarOnline in September but which Gossip Cop confirmed through Hamm’s spokesperson was not true: Hamm and Shookus are just friends and have been so for years.
Soon after, we busted Life & Style for writing that Shookus was dating Hamm to make Affleck jealous. In October, the gossip site Naughty Gossip wrongly claimed that Affleck had given Hamm his “blessing” to date Shookus. Each of these stories, in their own special way, is patently absurd. Hamm has never dated Shookus, despite the tabloids’ insistence that they have. Affleck is currently dating Ana de Armas.