Do we like Ben Affleck?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record and years of real Congo work, held back by a 2017 apology over alleged groping and a pending lawsuit over his latest film.
Ben Affleck was born in Berkeley in 1972 and was in films by 1981. The big break came with best mate Matt Damon: the pair shared the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting. He later directed and co-produced Argo, which took Best Picture in 2013, and the two founded Project Greenlight and a production company together.
The stain on the record dates from October 2017. A TRL clip resurfaced in which Hilarie Burton described him touching her on set, and a makeup artist accused him of grabbing her at a 2014 Golden Globes party. Affleck tweeted that he “acted inappropriately toward Ms. Burton” and apologised, though NBC noted he didn't spell out what he'd done. Rose McGowan also criticised him for saying he was unaware of Weinstein's behaviour. None of it went to court, and the record since is quiet.
On the harm check, we found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, no anti-vax or climate-denial run and no grievance slide in his own words. In a GQ interview he said filming the Chasing Amy kiss made him “confront some of my own internalized homophobia”, which is honest, if a bit awkward. His recent work is with Damon, Netflix and mainstream studios, nothing that raised a flag. Honest gap: searches on his views about migration, climate and politics turned up very little.
The recent stuff is messy but not nasty. Two Miami-Dade sergeants have sued over The Rip, alleging its drug-money-theft plot is close enough to a real 2016 case that people may think they did those crimes. Artists Equity's lawyer argued the film makes no claim to depict real people, and the case is pending. Separately, Netflix bought InterPositive, the AI company he co-founded in 2022 and had never mentioned publicly, which raised eyebrows given his earlier scepticism about AI. He says the tools are about “creating tools that artists can use, control and benefit from.”
The real good stuff is Congo. He co-founded the Eastern Congo Initiative in 2010, and by 2014 he'd travelled there nine times and testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, backing groups working on women's health, peace and justice. In July 2026 he and Jamie Ding won $1 million on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, with the money going to that group's work during an Ebola crisis. That's sustained effort, not a photo op.
So: would we back him? Yes. He passes on harm, and on the nice test it's an asterisk, because the 2017 apology is a real mark even if the years since have been clean. The AI deal and the lawsuit are the live stories, and neither is about hurting people. Keep an eye on how The Rip case lands.