Ben Affleck Soap Opera Continues: Gawker Publishes First Finding Your Roots Script

Ben Affleck by Jaguar PS/Shutterstock

Ah, and the saga persists. Ben Affleck, clearly the first person on Earth to be embarrassed by his distant family’s past, was outed thanks to Sony and WikiLeaks for hiding a detail about an ancestor owning slaves on PBS show Finding Your Roots. After a (somewhat) apology, an explanation from Henry Louis Gates, an investigation prompted by PBS, and a public reveal of said slave-owning ancestor, Ben Affleck cannot catch a break. And the events keep unfolding.

Gawker now posted the original script of the interview in which Affleck finds out about his third great-grandfather Benjamin Cole:

AFFLECK: There’s Benjamin Cole, owned 25 slaves.

GATES: Your third great-grandfather owned 25 slaves. He was a slave owner.

AFFLECK: God. It gives me kind of a sagging feeling to see, uh, a biological relationship to that. But, you know, there it is, part of our history.

Gawker has the rest of the script, but this is essentially it. This is the big reveal that Affleck suppressed from appearing on TV. The drama! Oh, Affleck, you’re the melodramatic type.

[Gawker]