Longtime HGTV viewers may wonder whatever happened to the Hatmakers from My Big Family Renovation! Well, the answer is messier than you might have expected from the wholesome-on-the-surface family…
Jen Hatmaker and her hubby Brandon first gained fame in the mid-2010s as a “cool” religious family, something that almost demanded they get their own reality show. And they did, doing home renovations at first for themselves and then for others. However, the series was short-lived. And the marriage didn’t last much longer after that either… In 2020, Jen revealed to her fans that after 26 years of marriage they were getting a divorce. She called it “completely unexpected” in her social media announcement at the time.
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Now, five years later, we’re learning just how big a shock Jen actually got. She learned her pastor husband Brandon was cheating on her! And the way she found out is like every spouse’s nightmare!
The Whisper
In her new memoir Awake, coming out on Tuesday, the former reality star reveals the exact moment she got the gut punch. She was woken up in the middle of the night to hear the words:
“I just can’t quit you.”
But Brandon wasn’t speaking to her. The evangelical church leader was texting his mistress. The whispered words were a voice text. He was drunk and amorously whispering to another woman. While he lay in his bed next to the wife he thought was asleep.
In an interview about the upcoming book, Jen told The NY Post she spent the next four hours investigating, going through his computer and following the “trail of betrayal.” That trail revealed an affair that had lasted a “devastating time span.” JFC, we can’t even imagine!
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Not only had the pastor been screwing around for a long time, he’d spent a lot of money on this affair, too — buying his mistress “expensive and lavish gifts.” The Hatmakers may have been successful, but they also had FIVE kids! Brandon’s reckless spending on his girlfriend threw the whole family into “financial chaos.” Oof.
The Breakup
Jen was 46 years old, the mother of five kids, and a beacon of Christianity and morality for thousands of fans… And her pastor husband had thrown away their marriage behind her back. She told the outlet of her shocking discovery:
“To some degree, I almost disassociated. It was so outside the realm of what I would have ever considered a possibility for our life, our marriage, our story.”
She continued:
“It was so shocking and stunning, and I almost could not process it. I couldn’t even cry.”
After everything she saw that morning she knew what she had to do — she kicked out Brandon when he woke up. And she tried to figure out how to move on, with one less husband, with a LOT less money than she’d thought… all while raising five kids during a pandemic:
“I did not know if I was ever going to be happy again.”
In her book, Jen writes about how the couple had problems before this — and in fact didn’t have sex for two whole years. But they were working on it, going to therapy:
“I thought that we were deeply working to repair… We had kind of reconnected sexually… And so there, at the very bitter end, I thought that we were trying, but we actually weren’t.”
There were red flags, of course — she just didn’t see them until she already knew the truth and looked back:
“There were a lot of unaccounted absences, and the phone was never ever, ever, ever out of his hand or sight. All the warning signs were there, but I did not want to face those.”
She wrote that Brandon never even tried to make excuses or beg forgiveness — he made “no reconciliation effort” whatsoever, telling her “that ‘trying requires certain feelings to be there’ and they aren’t anymore and they won’t be coming back.”
Sounds like he was ready to move on with the mistress anyway. A year later, he was engaged.
Leaving The Church
Innerestingly, this whole thing has turned Jen off of church — something that had been the foundation of her entire public persona. While she’s still religious, she said when she set foot in a church after experiencing the worst betrayal of her life at the hands of a pastor, she “found the environment so triggering” she couldn’t go back:
“I am not saying that I will ever go back to church, but I am also not saying that I will never go back to church. Right now, I am finding a meaningful faith outside of those [traditional] spaces.”
Jen explained to the Post that she’d always been part of the church. Her father was a minister, too. She’d gotten married when she was just 19 — to a man studying to be pastor. And that culture — where the men are the leaders and “women are essentially the support staff” — was all she knew.
She’d always held progressive views for someone from such a conservative space — she supported LGBT rights and was pro-choice. But now she’s truly outside that culture… and she’s thriving. Good for her!
Brandon’s Response
Brandon wasn’t just going to let Jen say whatever she wanted without giving his own side. As he wrote on his Substack on Monday, his ex’s book “has stirred the pot quite a bit” and he’s not please that he’s seeing only “a piece of the story” being reported. And while he allows Jen has “every right to share her piece of the story” he thinks he should get to speak his truth, too. And that is?
“The lowest moment of my life was my very public affair five years ago. I caused so much pain, so much humiliation, and I brought so much confusion into the lives of many people that I loved. It was the culmination of a three-year personal spiral in which I had lost my anchor, felt no hope, and was the loneliest I’ve ever been in my life.”
He notes, however, that “while that was the lowest moment of my life, a very close second, is having to relive it today”:
“Even harder, to watch others who I love, having to do the same. I’ve owned my mistakes, I’ve made amends, I continue to do the work, I’ve worked hard to restore relationships, and I’ve started over.”
OK, guy. Let’s go a little easy playing the victim card. Especially because we get the impression the “others who I love” having to relive the past refers to his new wife? Are we wrong??
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Brandon admits:
“I’m not saying what she wrote is untrue. I’m saying that what’s left unsaid isn’t her responsibility to tell. The only one who can do that, is me.”
He makes a point of saying he isn’t “making excuses” because “there are no excuses” for cheating like that. BUT…?
“But I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to have an affair. I didn’t fall out of love overnight. Our love was coming to a slow and painful ending. And I privately mourned the death of our marriage years before our divorce.”
Privately, as in… without the knowledge of your wife? You were just making your peace with it and deciding it was time to move on, all while letting her believe in couples counseling that y’all were going to fix things? He laments:
“I felt invisible in my marriage, and I kept spiraling until there was no lower place to go. Jen and I eventually went to three therapy sessions together – but to be honest – it was too late.”
He also says he doesn’t think it’s fair to say he was living a “double life”:
“I had one life, and in that one life, after three years of cohabitating with no intimacy or sex, I had an affair… While I had met my affair partner four months prior, it was literally the exact month at the three year mark without physical intimacy that I stepped out of my marriage sexually. Never before had I done that.”
What happened to no excuses again?? He sounds like he’s blaming Jen for his cheating AND like he wants credit for not cheating before that! He’s admitting guilt, but in that very special Sandovalian way where nothing is his fault…
As for the parts Brandon feels he can flat-out deny? He wants everyone to understand he didn’t abandon Jen as a mom with all the kids as three were already grown adults and the youngest were teens already. However…
“Jen was certainly the sole parent who had to carry them emotionally through the trauma of my affair, but I have beautiful memories of heartfelt and honest conversations about that, as well.”
Speaking of “honest conversations” he’s upset that “some of the discussion has painted the picture that I was cold and uncaring after my affair was exposed.” He wants credit for speaking honestly to Jen about his affair after she already discovered it:
“On the early morning everything happened, Jen gave me the ultimatum to share the entire truth right in that moment. I just remember not wanting to say anything that I couldn’t unsay, so I left. After a day or two, we sat down and I shared everything. Metaphorically speaking I said that ‘everything for the past two years was a lie.’ That has been taken out of context some as well.”
Brandon clarifies he wasn’t a pastor at the time of the affair, or even active in church leadership at that time. As if that fixes how it felt to her to have a church leader betray her, whether it was technically accurate in the moment or not.
Anyway, you can get Awake: A Memoir on Tuesday and read Jen’s whole story for yourself… and decide if his version really was worth telling or not.
[Image via HGTV/YouTube/Jen Hatmaker/Brandon Hatmaker/Instagram.]
The post HGTV Star Jen Hatmaker Reveals Husband Brandon Cheated -- And The JAW-DROPPING Way She Found Out! appeared first on Perez Hilton.