Brandon Hatmaker says being publicly outed in 2020 for having an extramarital affair as his wife, Jen Hatmaker, filed for divorce, was the “lowest point in my life.” But in a lengthy Substack essay published on September 22, 2025, Brandon wrote that a “close second” has been reliving those days as Jen, who starred with him and their five kids on HGTV’s “My Big Family Renovation,” promotes her latest book.
Jen is on tour promoting her new memoir, “Awake,” to be released on September 23, and much of the media coverage has focused on her detailing the night she overheard Brandon whispering on the phone and discovered he was having an affair.
Brandon is not shying away from the fact that it happened, noting in his essay, “The lowest moment of my life was my very public affair five years ago. I caused so much pain and I brought so much humiliation into the lives of people that I loved.”
But Brandon is hoping to set the record straight on some contextual details he believes are not clear in Jen’s book or interviews, he wrote.
Brandon Hatmaker Says His Marriage Was ‘Coming to a Slow & Painful Ending’ When He Had an Affair
When the Hatmakers launched their HGTV series in 2015, they appeared to be a picture-perfect family. They’d started an evangelical church in Austin, Texas, were raising their kids in a charming 1908 farmhouse that needed some updating, and Jen was a hugely popular Christian mom influencer in the early days of social media.
Jen thought all was well, too, until she discovered the affair, she told the New York Post, explaining that after discovering the affair, “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.”
Now a popular author and speaker on female empowerment and authentic living, Jen later admitted there were cracks in the marriage she didn’t want to see because she knew admitting to issues in their union would go against the values and image they portrayed publicly.
While appearing on Jamie Kern Lima’s podcast on September 9, Jen said, “It was devastating. I was married for 26 years and I was married to a pastor and together, we had sort of built this whole life. This will remain one of the most shocking things that has ever happened to me.”
In Brandon’s essay, he shared, “The truth is that people in a healthy marriage don’t just wake up one day and decide to have an affair. I didn’t fall out of love overnight. Our relationship was coming to a slow and painful ending. And I privately mourned the death of our marriage years before our divorce.”
“I often choose not to stand up for myself out of fear of it coming across as making excuses,” Brandon noted. “There are no excuses. Nothing can make this wrong a right. But I do hope it to be helpful if some of you find yourself in my story.”
Later in the essay, he wrote, “To have an affair was extremely new to me and not who I truly am. I had completely lost myself. My anger had turned to resentment, which turned to entitlement. There’s no affair story that isn’t gross, or secret, or deceptive. Mine was no different. I was in the middle of giving up and trying not to. And then I did.”
Brandon Hatmaker & Jen Hatmaker Have Both Found Love Since Their Divorce
In his essay, Brandon also wanted to address rumors that he’d married the woman with whom he had an affair.
“It’s been assumed by some that Tina, my wife, was my affair partner,” he wrote. “She was not. Articles have referenced that we got engaged within a year of my divorce which is not true.”
“In no way was Tina involved or a part of my divorce in 2020,” Brandon continued. “Jen verifies this in her book. To be clear, Tina and I had never met until after the divorce was filed. This was also after Jen told me that for her ‘there was no path back to reconnection.'”
Brandon remarried in December 2022 and wrote, “Tina may have saved my life. Not figuratively, but literally. That’s another story I hope to share one day.”
Meanwhile, Jen has also found love since the heartbreak of the affair and divorce. She met actor, author and activist Tyler Merritt in early 2022, writing in a February post that they “went completely bonkers for each other,” shocked to be finding love later in life.
