They have been hiding since June 2014, got busted

Mar 30, 2015 09:40 GMT  ·  By
Casper Smart and Jennifer Lopez lied about breaking up last year, to boost interest in their respective movie careers
   Casper Smart and Jennifer Lopez lied about breaking up last year, to boost interest in their respective movie careers

In June 2014, Jennifer Lopez announced that she’d broken up from former backup dancer / choreographer Casper Smart, whom she’d been dating for almost 2 and a half years. She denied that he had cheated on her with transgender women, saying only that they’d grown apart and the time had come to go in different directions.

As it turns out, she lied. Jennifer and Casper never really broke up, choosing to sell this lie to the media and the fans so as to boost interest in their upcoming movie outings.

A breakup for publicity purposes

It’s no secret that entertainers, be they musicians and actors, present more interest if they’re (perceived as) single. This is why managers often advice their clients not to talk about their personal life and most definitely not to confirm that they’re “spoken for,” or else they will suffer in sales.

Jennifer and Casper know that, so they agreed to arrange a “split” just so they could drive up their market share, TMZ claims. The signs that they were never broken up are there: since June, they have often been photographed together and, when caught unawares, they always tried to make a run for it.

As per the report, the two did go on a break for a few weeks that month, following the announcement, but that was more as a safety measure than an actual split: they just wanted to make sure they wouldn’t be seen together when everyone thought they were no longer an item.

“JLo was hawking her movie, ‘Boy Next Door,’ and honchos on the film felt creating a buzz that she was hooking up with co-star Ryan Guzman would help sell tickets. It's hard to do that when you're not single. […] Casper was up to the same thing because he was shooting ‘Street,’ a UFC fighter movie where he buffed up. Again, he was more appealing single,” TMZ reports.

Over the past couple of weeks, Jennifer and Casper have apparently stopped trying to hide the fact that they’re an item, though they’re yet to confirm it officially. Still, he came to her movie premiere and walked the red carpet, and they were even spotted on date nights, holding hands.

At this point, verbal confirmation isn’t even necessary anymore.

Milking it for all it’s worth

If Lopez’s fans feel cheated on hearing that she’s been lying to them for almost a year, they have every reason to feel so.

Jennifer didn’t just announce that she was single again, she made sure she got plenty of media attention for it. She did magazine interviews and TV appearances where she spoke about living the single life and how good it was for her to be on her own at last.

She talked a lot about her problem with being single and how she was finally learning to be so, to get to know herself without having the company of a man. In other words, she made a lot of fuss about the breakup.

Clearly, Jennifer didn’t make it in the industry for so long without knowing how to play the game dirty, if need be; but still, it’s somewhat shocking to see she’s getting so good at it.