Politics - News Analysis
What Is the Deal With Those Rumors About Barack Obama and Jennifer Aniston Being a Couple? Here’s How They Started
Have you heard the one about the former president and the Friends star?
The hilarious and completely false rumor that’s been going around regarding Barack Obama and Jennifer Aniston is bizarre, for sure. But there’s a reason it’s happening, and it shouldn’t surprise you.
Okay, there’s a couple of things behind it, actually. Some of it explains why it started, and the rest is why it’s still going on.
Number one, there’s a whole cross section of America that likes to imagine bad things about Barack and Michelle Obama. They really hate that he was ever president and she was ever first lady, and I’ll leave it to you to decide why you think they might be so mad about it.
There have been more rumors about Barack Obama than probably any other president, almost all of them unkind. At least LBJ was rumored to have, let’s say, an “enviable” trait in his nether regions. Obama has been accused of being a non-citizen, a Muslim, any number of things — not that those are bad things to be, but they were said with malice.
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Since summer, however, the rumor that’s been going around has been that Barack and Michelle are “living separate lives” and under the specter of a looming divorce — and that he’s been having an affair with actress Jennifer Aniston.
Now, other than the fact that I’m in a committed relationship myself, I don’t really see the downside of people thinking that Jennifer Aniston might want to be with me. In fact, if I were a woman, I wouldn’t be terribly offended by people suggesting I might have bagged myself a former president who’s none too shabby himself.
But suggesting that (a) the Obamas are on the rocks or (b) that Barack Obama is the kind of guy who would cheat, well… Those things are just offensive.
Nonetheless, it’s getting repeated in larger and larger circles. Not because there’s any truth to it, but because right-wingers are just like that. You watched it happen before the presidential debate last year, when a bunch of conservative buffoons insisted Haitians were stealing dogs out of yards and barbecuing them.
It was most recently repeated, as you might expect, after Michelle Obama notably did not appear at either Jimmy Carter’s funeral or Donald Trump’s inauguration, both of which her husband attended.
But I’m pretty sure she made it clear that she wouldn’t even have considered going to Trump’s inauguration by what she said on her podcast about his first inauguration:
“To sit on that stage and watch the opposite of what we represented on display, there was no diversity, there was no color on that stage. There was no reflection of the broader sense of America. Many people took pictures of me and they’re like, ‘You weren’t in a good mood.’ No, I was not.”
Why on earth WOULD she go? And as the most recent ex-first couple besides the Trumps at the time of Carter’s funeral, she’d have been seated as close to him as her husband famously was. Trump cooties? No thanks, she seemed to say. I can’t say as I blame her.
But the whole Aniston rumor started in a tabloid magazine, which in turn had based it on a satirical essay from The Economist — from 11 years ago. In that piece, which was almost an exact copy of a piece from the BBC on French then-president François Hollande, America was compared to France in terms of how we respond to scandal. It specifically imagined Aniston and Obama in the affair, and if you’ll remember, Obama was still president at that time.
I don’t know if InTouch magazine just ran with that old story, but last summer, they ran a cover that screamed “The Truth About Jen & Barack!”
Snopes has already covered the podcast episode that InTouch referenced in their story:
In a summary of the episode, [Bobby] Finger and [Lindsey] Weber linked to a 2014 piece from the Economist that mentioned an “affair” between Obama and Aniston. That Economist piece, it’s worth pointing out, was a satirical essay that imagined a hypothetical version of American politics based on the premise that the U.S. shared the French attitude toward scandal — it did not contain any factual reporting regarding any relationship between Obama and Aniston.
Aniston herself actually spoke up about it on Jimmy Kimmel Live last October, telling the late night host that there was absolutely no truth to it, but even admitting that she “was not mad” about the accusation, because of who it was. She clarified that she met the former president once, and that she knew Michelle better than she knows Barack.
Watch Jen on Kimmel’s show here:
I searched for this to repost it, and it took me FOREVER to find a tweet that wasn’t some wingnut insisting that it’s true, or she’s a man and Obama’s gay, or she took too long answering about a possible affair with Michelle instead, and I just have to say: You guys are weird. pic.twitter.com/edlZdAzckx
— Drewbear (@infuzi0n) January 28, 2025
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