Overview

• In excerpts from Awake, Jen Hatmaker says she woke at 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, overheard her husband whisper “I just can’t quit you,” uncovered a “trail of betrayal,” and told him to leave by early morning.
• She writes that the affair lasted a “devastating” span and included lavish gifts that pushed the family into financial turmoil.
• Hatmaker says the marriage had been strained long before 2020, noting two years without sex, an attempt at counseling that April, and no reconciliation effort before Brandon’s engagement within a year.
• In a Sept. 22 Substack post, Brandon Hatmaker calls his “very public affair” the lowest moment of his life, says he has owned his mistakes and sought to repair relationships, and asserts his wife Tina was not the affair partner nor engaged to him within a year of the split.
• Following the breakup, Jen left the Austin New Church they co-founded and describes battling depression during the pandemic while parenting five children, and both have since moved on—she is dating Tyler Merritt and became a grandmother in 2024, and he remarried in 2022.