Ben Affleck has blamed his spate of duff movies on dating Jennifer Lopez.

After the critical and commercial success of Good Will Hunting, Ben’s career floundered with a string of turkeys, culminating in the dismal double-whammy of Gigli and Jersey Girl, in which he co-starred with then girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez.

Now Ben has admitted that the Bennifer years (2002-2004) hurt his career.

“It was probably bad for my career,” he tells the new issue of Details magazine.

“What happens is this sort of bleed-over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once.

"But the tabloids and Internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody. I ended up in an unfortunate crosshair position where I was in a relationship and [the media] mostly lied and inflated a bunch of salacious stuff for the sake of selling magazines.

“And I paid a certain price for that. Then, in concert with some movies that didn’t work...”