Meet J. Lo’s first husband, Ojani Noa, who said Bennifer ‘won’t last’: Lopez first met him when he was a waiter in Miami, and has said he was the kind of man who’d prefer her at ‘home doing dishes’

After months of public speculation, Jennifer Lopez has officially filed for divorce from her fourth husband, Ben Affleck.

As reported by the BBC, the “Jenny From the Block” singer filed divorce papers on Tuesday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court. The former couple, dubbed “Bennifer” by the media, tied the knot in Las Vegas in July 2022, and had a second, larger ceremony in Georgia that same year. Affleck was previously married to Daredevil actress Jennifer Garner for 13 years and they share three children together – Violet, Seraphina and Samuel.

But what do we know about Jennifer Lopez’s first ever husband, Ojani Noa, who she met when he was still a waiter in Miami?

In a 2021 interview on The Jenny SuShe Show podcast, he revealed how he emigrated to America with friends on a raft from Cuba when he was just 15 years old.

According to his Instagram bio, Noa currently works as an actor, model, presenter, entrepreneur, writer, producer and personal trainer. IMDb notes that he has had minor roles on films Rappin-n-Rhyming and Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy, and made appearances as a fighter on Celebrity Boxing Miami videos.

It’s been widely reported that Lopez met her first husband while he was working as a waiter at a Cuban restaurant in Miami. They tied the knot in 1997, but their marriage was short-lived: the former lovers divorced just 11 months later in 1998, per Harper’s Bazaar.

It’s unclear why they split up, but according to British media, the Selena actress opened up about him in a brutal 1998 interview with Movie Line in which she brought up the topic of their salaries. “It’s tough for me because the men I’m attracted to, for some reason, haven’t gotten it together,” she said, per the source. “Even my husband, I feel, has a lot of potential but he’s not at the point where … I mean, even though he has lots of contacts, even though he’s doing his own thing, opening a club and restaurant here, whatever business he gets in, he’s not gonna make as much money as me. That’s something he has to deal with and to live with, which is tough for someone like him.”

In another interview, she reportedly said he would have preferred her to be at home doing housework. “If you asked him right now, he’d rather have me home washing dishes, with us living in a small apartment, with him making the money rather than me making millions of dollars a year, living in a house that I mostly pay for!”

After they broke things off, Lopez hired Noa to help manage a Cuban restaurant she opened in Los Angeles in 2002, reportedly paying him US$1,000 a week, indicating that they remained on good terms for some time, per Harper’s Bazaar. However, she fired him six months later, and Noa clapped back by suing her for breach of contract, per the same source.

Things got more complicated years later in 2009, when Lopez sent cease-and-desist letters to her ex after discovering he was working on a mockumentary called How I Married Jennifer Lopez: The J. Lo and Ojani Noa Story. The film’s producer tried to sue Lopez back, but the judge dismissed the lawsuit, per Harpers Bazaar. Noa later threatened to release home videos of Lopez from their honeymoon, but a judge put a stop to that too.