Just a few week after news surfaced that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, who were engaged in the early 2000s before splitting up for 17 years, got married in an intimate ceremony in Las Vegas on July 16, 2022, Ojani Noa, Lopez’s first husband, took a dig at the marriage and said, “Jen loves being in love but she’s been engaged six times.”
According to DailyMail, Lopez, while marrying the man she calls her ‘soulmate’, said, Maybe you’ll find the best moment of your life in Las Vegas at twelve thirty in the morning in the tunnel of love drive-through with your kids and the one you’ll spend forever with. However, Lopez's former husband pointed out her three failed marriages and said, I wish her and Ben the best, but I’m not convinced it will last. Jen loves being in love but she’s been engaged six times. Ben is husband number four. I was husband number one and she told me I was the love of her life. When we lay in bed on our wedding night, she said we would be together for ever.
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Who is Ojani Noa?
The Cuban-born waiter turned occasional actor met Lopez in 1996 at Gloria Estefan's restaurant. They married in 1997 and got divorced in 1998.
Since their short-lived marriage, Lopez faced a lot of legal issues due with Noa. According to Hollywood Life, after their divorce, she decided to hire him to manage her restaurant called Madres in 2002. But she fired him only six months after he started working. He has also been prohibited from sharing any details about their marriage as it would violate their confidentiality agreement. However, Noa broke his silence to DailyMail and said, We were together romantically for two years but friends for nearly a decade. There were many times I felt like Mr Cinderella, he said, adding, She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. In the beginning, I had no idea who she was. We fell in love when she was already famous. But during our marriage, she became a megastar. For years it was too painful to talk about. I wanted to lie low and live my life. But when I saw she got married to Ben, who is a good guy, the feelings came flooding back.
Noa, who is now a personal trainer and has appeared on a 2016 episode of 'Million Dollar Matchmaker' added, There has been so much written about Jen and I, especially in the past couple of weeks, most of it wrong. I want people to know the real story.
He narrated that Lopez walked into Gloria Estefan’s Cuban restaurant on Miami’s famous Ocean Drive and he, a 22-year-old at that time, had arrived in the US illegally seven years earlier from Cuba to Florida with six friends on a 6ft long inflatable boat. Before that, he washed cars and later, worked as a dishwasher at Estefan’s restaurant. Gloria treated us like family. I worked my way up to being a waiter. Miami was buzzing. I did some modelling. I hustled. I wanted the American dream – and I found it when Jen walked into Lario’s, he recalled.
I was smitten. She was wearing a white top and trousers, and I remember thinking she had the best body I’d ever seen. She later told me she knew that first night she was going to marry me, he said, adding, I quit my job and moved to LA. We lived in a nice apartment. But soon we moved into our first house and then the houses kept getting bigger. She loved that I was a balseros from Cuba. I never wanted anything from her. I always worked and had my own money. She went from Jen to being JLo, this big business bringing in millions. She had all these new people around her, all wanting to make money off her. I would call and an assistant would say, 'Sorry, she’s not available'.
Noa, who is a fitness freak, has played Dan Valdez in 2002’s 'Rappin-n-Rhyming', an Irish Thug in 'Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy' in 2004, and was the lead trainer in 2019’s 'Telemundo: Un nuevo Dia'.