You might’ve had friends talk about your relationship behind your back — but what if it was millions of people criticizing you everywhere you turned?
Here are 11 celeb couples whose relationships allegedly fell apart because of fans and the media:
1. Gifted costars and onscreen love interests Chris Evans and Jenny Slate dated from mid-2016 to February 2017. Then, they reconciled in November, but four months later, it was over for good. Jenny told Vulture, “Chris is a very, very famous person. For him to go to a restaurant is totally different than for me to go. I sit in my window, and I say, ‘Hi’ to people on the street. I have more freedom because I’m not Captain America. I’m mostly a cartoon. This is what I needed to do to feel normal. To be alone.”
Most of their time was spent at home, but she was stressed over the internet “psychos” who constantly compared her new relationship to her marriage with Dean Fleischer Camp, whom she was separated from at the time. She said, “The stress that I saw [Chris] be put under, I’ve never seen that before, and he handled that really gracefully. He’s not stressed. I was the person that was stressed.”
There was also the fact that she was still processing the end of her marriage.
She said, “When Chris and I started dating, my husband and I had only been separated for a couple of months. Even though we had an amicable divorce, I think that’s still something that you need to mourn. When you get separated from somebody that you actually care about, it is the destruction of a belief system. That is really, really sad. I just didn’t have the tools. And I didn’t think very hard about that, to be honest. I wanted to step into the light. Chris is a sunny, loving, really fun person, and I didn’t really understand why I should be prudent.
… We’re not on bad terms, but we haven’t really seen each other, spoken a lot. I think it’s probably best. I’d love to be his friend one day, but we threw down pretty hard. No regrets, though. Ever.”
Chris later told USA Today, “You know, relationships are tricky, there are [a] lot of moving pieces. But I am endlessly grateful for having met her. She will be in my life always. … We were both rooting for this. She’s an incredible human being, a very, very special person. We’re all lucky she’s so driven; she’s going to make some amazing art in her life.”
2. In 2024, Karina — a K-pop star who’s the leader of the girl group Aespa — confirmed her relationship with actor/model Lee Jae-wook. Some fans were reportedly so outraged that Karina was in a relationship that they had a truck with an electronic billboard bearing the message, “Do you not get enough love from your fans? Why did you choose to betray your fans? Please apologize directly. Otherwise, you’ll see declining album sales and empty concert seats” drive by her agency’s HQ. On Instagram, she posted a handwritten apology, writing, “I know very well how disappointed [my fans] who have supported me are and how upset you’re thinking about the memories we shared together. I want to make up for my hurt fans from now on. I have always been sincere to you, and still each and every one of you are truly precious to me.”
Karina offered fans her “sincerest apologies” and promised to “show more maturity and work harder going forward to all [her fans] without disappointment.”
A mere five weeks later, they publicly announced their breakup. In a statement, Jae-wook’s agency said that the couple broke up to focus on their careers, “leaving them as colleagues who support each other.”
Many fans came out in his and Karina’s defense, speaking out against rules and expectations that prevent many K-pop idols from publicly dating.
3. Olympic gold medalist figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu married a private citizen in 2023, but they divorced only three months later. In a statement via Twitter (translated by Olympics.com), he said that he and his spouse had “overcome many obstacles together.” However, for a long time, she couldn’t even step out of the house because she’d be hounded by the media. He said, “Currently, various media outlets are slandering, stalking, and conducting unauthorized interviews and reports against my partner, who is a civilian, their relatives, and associates, as well as against my relatives and associates. Even in our living space, we are sometimes prowled by suspicious vehicles or persons, or suddenly accosted.”
Many fans came out in his and Karina’s defense, speaking out against rules and expectations that prevent many K-pop idols from publicly dating.
3. Olympic gold medalist figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu married a private citizen in 2023, but they divorced only three months later. In a statement via Twitter (translated by Olympics.com), he said that he and his spouse had “overcome many obstacles together.” However, for a long time, she couldn’t even step out of the house because she’d be hounded by the media. He said, “Currently, various media outlets are slandering, stalking, and conducting unauthorized interviews and reports against my partner, who is a civilian, their relatives, and associates, as well as against my relatives and associates. Even in our living space, we are sometimes prowled by suspicious vehicles or persons, or suddenly accosted.”
“From now on, please refrain from slander, unauthorized interviewing, reporting, or any other disturbing behavior toward my partner, who is a civilian, their relatives, and associates, as well as my relatives and associates,” he said.
4. Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston dated for a highly-publicized three months in the summer of 2016. Several months later, he told GQ, “If you’re under attack, if your values are under attack, if you’re being shamed, if you’re being humiliated, the animal response is to hide in the bush. It’s to be less, to make yourself smaller, to diminish in size and volume. And the lesson of 2016 is we have to love more, we have to risk more, we have to be braver, we have to be more outspoken. … Taylor is an amazing woman. She’s generous and kind and lovely, and we had the best time. Of course it was real.”
Discussing the infamous “I Heart T.S.” tank top he was papped wearing while celebrating the Fourth of July with Taylor and her friends, Tom said, “The truth is, it was the Fourth of July and a public holiday, and we were playing a game, and I slipped and hurt my back. And I wanted to protect the graze from the sun and said, ‘Does anyone have a T-shirt?’ And one of her friends said, ‘I’ve got this.’ And we all laughed about it. It was a joke. It was a joke. Among friends. I have to be so psychologically strong about not letting other people’s interpretations about my life affect my life. A relationship exists between two people. We will always know what it was.”
“The narratives that are out there altogether have been extrapolated from pictures that were taken without consent or permission, with no context. Nobody had the context for that story. And I’m still trying to work out a way of having a personal life and protecting it, but also without hiding. So the hardest thing is that that was a joke among friends on the Fourth of July. … I just, I was surprised. I was just surprised that it got so much attention. The tank top became an emblem of this thing,” he said.
He added, “I only know the woman I met. She’s incredible. A relationship in the limelight… A relationship always takes work. A relationship in the limelight takes work. And it’s not just the limelight. It’s everything else.”
5. Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn’s six-year relationship — which was notoriously private — ended in 2023. A source told People, “They had plenty in common and fell in love in a safe bubble while she was retreating from the world during Reputation. Then the pandemic hit, and they were locked down together and able to continue growing their relationship in this insulated way. But he didn’t really ‘know’ her yet outside of that bubble. … Joe has struggled with Taylor’s level of fame and the attention from the public. The differences in their personalities have also become harder to ignore after years together. They’ve grown apart.”
Joe later told the Sunday Times, “I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathize and understand the difficulties that come with the end of a long, loving, fully committed relationship of over six and a half years. That is a hard thing to navigate. What is unusual and abnormal in this situation is that, one week later, it’s suddenly in the public domain, and the outside world is able to weigh in. So you have something very real suddenly thrown into a very unreal space: tabloids, social media, press, where it is then dissected, speculated on, pulled out of shape beyond recognition. And the truth is, to that last point, there is always going to be a gap between what is known and what is said. I have made my peace with that.”
“As everyone knows, we together — both of us, mutually — decided to keep the more private details of our relationship private. It was never something to commodify, and I see no reason to change that now,” he said.
6. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck started dating and got engaged for the first time in 2002, but they postponed the wedding a year later because of the intense media attention. In a joint statement in 2003, they told People, “Due to the excessive media attention surrounding our wedding, we have decided to postpone the date. When we found ourselves seriously contemplating hiring three separate ‘decoy brides’ at three different locations, we realized that something was awry. We began to feel that the spirit of what should have been the happiest day of our lives could be compromised. We felt what should have been a joyful and sacred day could be spoiled for us, our families, and our friends.”
A few months later, in early 2004, they broke up. Ben told The Howard Stern Show, “I would say [media attention] was about 50 percent [of what destroyed our relationship]. The idea that people hate you and they hate you together and that being together is poison and ugly and toxic and the thing none of us want to be part of. And, ‘Who the fuck would want to have them to dinner?’ And, ‘What the fuck are they doing together?'”
Nearly 20 years later, they gave their relationship another shot, getting married in 2022. In the documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, Ben said, “When Jen and I broke up before, the catalyst for that was this massive amount of scrutiny around our private life. Getting back together, I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media.’ And then I sort of realized it’s not a fair thing to ask — it’s sort of, like, you know, you’re gonna marry a boat captain, and you go, ‘Well, I don’t like the water,’ you know. We’re just two people with kind of different approaches trying to learn to compromise.”
However, they ultimately weren’t meant to be. Jennifer filed for divorce in 2024, and it was finalized a year later. She told CBS Sunday Mornings, “Honestly, I have to say it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it changed me. It helped me grow in a way that I needed to grow [and] become more self-aware. I’m a different person now than I was last year.”
Discussing his participation in The Greatest Love Story Never Told, Ben told GQ, “Part of it was, ‘OK, if I’m going to participate in this, I want to try to do it in an honest way and in a way that’s interesting.’ Because I thought it was an interesting examination. Like I mentioned to you before, there are a lot of people who I think have handled celebrity more adeptly and more adroitly than I have, Jennifer among them.
My temperament is to be a little bit more reserved and private than hers. As happens in relationships, you don’t always have the same attitude towards these things. And so I thought, Oh, this is interesting because how do you reconcile that? Because exactly what [the interviewer] said is true. I love and support this person. I believe in them. They’re great. I want people to see that.
And I think the thing that I said in that documentary or the piece that they used was where I said, You don’t marry a ship’s captain and then say, ‘Well, I don’t like going out in the water.’ You’ve got to own what you knew going into any relationship. And I think it’s important to say that wasn’t the cause of some major fracture. It’s not like you can watch that documentary and go, ‘Oh, now I understand the issues that these two had.'”
7. Cher dated bagel shop employee Rob Camilletti from 1986 to 1989. Dubbing him “Bagel Boy,” the tabloids relentlessly scrutinized Rob for working a regular job and for being 18 years younger than Cher. It came to a head when his Ferrari crashed into a photographer’s car outside Cher’s house. At a press conference, Cher said, “I know Robert. He is not a violent man. … I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and so I’m pretty much used to having my private life destroyed and lies told about me. It’s something that you pretty much have to get used to.”
“After a while, it really bothers you and disrupts your family life. I’m usually pretty good about it. I’m getting really, really angry,” she said.
They reportedly broke up because of the media scrutiny, but in 2020, she told the Guardian that he was one of the loves of her life. She said, “Robert was completely different. He was like a rock.”
8. Idina Menzel and Taye Diggs were married from 2003 to 2014. Taye told Redbook, “I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times when I thought, ‘Oh, man, people are going to trip out [if we split].’ Maybe they thought it was cute that we met in Rent. There weren’t a lot of couples like us in the theater community — and I know there aren’t a lot of performers as talented as she is… and then you have the whole mixed [race] thing. It was easy for people to root for us. Right now, we’re still trying to figure out a lot of stuff because we’re on different coasts, and our son is getting older.”
However, in 2023, Idina told Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, “The thing that came into play more, I would say — he’s talked about it, too — is the interracial aspect of it. When you’re in the theater, it’s just not a thing. We all love each other, sleep with each other, and are best friends with whoever wants to be, whatever sexual orientation. But when you leave that cocoon, that bubble, in his case, he’s [in] People’s 50 most beautiful people… He was on the cover of Essence, Ebony, being interviewed by all these Black journalists. He had his own stuff to deal with in that…”
“It seemed like there was disappointment in the community with him because he was married to a little white Jewish girl from some show that we don’t even remember… It was less about being successful and more about that kind of stuff,” she said.
9. Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez were in an on-and-off relationship for nearly a decade. After their first date in December 2010, they were together for about two years. They got back together around the end of 2015, but it didn’t last long. Then, in the fall of 2017, they seemingly rekindled their relationship, but they broke up for good the following March. In November 2015, he told i-D magazine, “I put so much of myself on the line with her, because I was so distant with everyone else. So it’s like, you have the world who’s loving you, but it’s not like they know my heart — they don’t know me. So when I found that love, I was just like, ‘Woah, I want to hold on to this.'”
“And I just put everything into it, and in reality, there’s just no holding back. You’re just like, ‘This love feels so good.’ It’s, like, magical. There’s nothing like it. So I felt that, and I just didn’t want to let it go. When it was hard, I was just like, ‘I want to stick this out. So it was on again, off again, on again, off again. We were working out how to be in a relationship, how to be ourselves, who we were, in the middle of having people judge our relationship through the media. I think that really messed my head up too. Because then, it’s like trust and all this other stuff that starts messing with your mind. You’re on the road. And there are beautiful women on the road. And you’re just getting yourself into trouble,” he said.
10. During their three-year relationship, Florence Pugh and Zach Braff faced a lot of public criticism over their 21-year age gap. When they broke up in 2022, she told Harper’s Bazaar, “Whenever I feel like that line has been crossed in my life, whether it’s paparazzi taking private moments, or moments that aren’t even real, or gossip channels that encourage members of the public to share private moments of famous people walking down the street, I think it’s incredibly wrong. I don’t think that people, just because they have this job, that every aspect of their life should be watched and written about. We haven’t signed up for a reality TV show.”
“We’ve been trying to do this separation without the world knowing, because it’s been a relationship that everybody has an opinion on. We just felt something like this would really do us the benefit of not having millions of people telling us how happy they are that we’re not together. So we’ve done that. I automatically get a lumpy throat when I talk about it,” she said.
Previously, she told Elle, “People need to realize that it’s hurtful. I have the right to hang out and be with and go out with anyone I want to… People have no right to educate me on my private life. I know that part of being in the spotlight is that people might invade your privacy and have opinions on it, but it’s bizarre that normal folk are allowed to display such hate and opinions on a part of my life that I’m not putting out there.”
11. And finally, Jamie Dornan and Keira Knightley dated from 2003 to 2005. He reportedly later told the Mail on Sunday, “There is a big pressure when you go out with someone like Keira. You can feel a bit second-rate, and that’s what started to happen. It’s not like I was bringing the bread to the table – and that can start to affect everything. … The man is meant to be the Alpha in the relationship on the money and power front, and clearly, I was not. You feel you have to be dominant in other areas, and that leads to problems.”
However, in 2015, he addressed his past controversial comments, telling the Evening Standard, “That was taken totally out of context. I didn’t mean that.”
