Ben Slips Off The Wagon Again

The actor’s booze and gambling demons caught up with him at Halloween – just hours after he celebrated a year of recovery

- Lindsay De Freitas

HE SEEMED to be entering his second year of sobriety on a good note.

Gone was the bloated, sweaty, puffy-eyed Ben Affleck of recent years and in his place was the ruggedly handsome film star fans have been swooning over since the ’90s.

The 47-year-old actor was spending plenty of time with kids Violet (13), Seraphina (10) and Samuel (7) and dipping his toe back into the dating pool after breaking things off with TV executive Lindsay Shookus (39) in April.

On 26 October, Ben, who’s long been open about his booze demons, penned a Facebook post announcing he’d been in recovery for a year and was using the celeb dating app Raya to test the romance waters.

But something happened soon after he published his celebratory post. Because less than 24 hours later Ben was pictured stumbling against a vehicle as he left a Halloween party in Los Angeles with a woman later identified as musician Katie Cherry (32).

Dressed in a three-piece suit and white skeleton mask, Ben “definitely seemed to have fallen off the wagon”, an onlooker says. “He nearly fell before catching himself on the vehicle.”

Ben didn’t end his evening there. He headed to a casino with Katie where he sat down at a poker table, won $1 500 (R22 500) in 12 minutes, then staggered out. “He was so inebriated he almost fell off his chair,” a witness reports.

By the next morning, however, the well-oiled machine that is the Ben Affleck/Jennifer Garner PR team was back in motion. A weary-looking but scrubbed up Ben went to his ex-wife’s house, clutching a cup of iced coffee.