Ben Affleck‘s thing with Jennifer Lopez “was probably bad for my career,” he admits in a Details interview meant to promote Gone Baby Gone (Miramax, 10.19), a Boston-based thriller cum procedural that Affleck has directed.

“What happens is this sort of bleeds 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.”

I turned positive on Affleck after he discussed the political situation with Hardball‘s Chris Matthews during the ’04 Democratic Convention and held his own very well. He could be a political commentator, a candidate…he’s got it.

“Bennifer” — a derogatory moniker coined by Kevin Smith — is the one everybody went with, but I always preferred “B. Lo.”