HGTV Star Reveals Shocking Way She Found Out Her Husband Was Cheating

HGTV’s Jen Hatmaker is opening up about the shocking end of her marriage.

In the My Big Family Renovation personality’s new memoir, Awake, Jen shares the moment she learned her husband of 26 years, Brandon Hatmaker, had been cheating on her with another woman.

The HGTV star recalls in the memoir waking up at 2 a.m. in July 2020 and hearing Brandon whispering on the phone to someone else, telling her, “I just can’t quit you,” as per The New York Post.

That moment was “the end” of Jen’s life as she knew it, the bestselling Christian author told the Post. “To some degree, I almost disassociated,” she recalled to the outlet. “It was so outside the realm of what I would have ever considered a possibility for our life, our marriage, our story.”

Jen said she spent four hours going through her husband’s computer that night, finding a “trail of betrayal” that she details in the book as including “expensive and lavish gifts” that her now-ex-husband purchased for his girlfriend that plunged the family into “financial chaos.”

When Brandon woke up in the morning, Jen threw him out of the house, and he made “no reconciliation effort” in the aftermath, she wrote in her book. “He [told] me clearly that ‘trying requires certain feelings to be there’ and they aren’t anymore and they won’t be coming back,” she continued, noting that her ex was engaged to another woman a year later.

Having married her husband at age 19 after meeting at a Baptist youth camp in Oklahoma, Jen and Brandon had founded the evangelical Austin New Church together in 2008 and welcomed five kids.

But even before Jen discovered her husband’s infidelity, she told the Post that her marriage had been “in trouble,” going two years without having sex, as per her memoir.

The pair had been going to marriage counseling and had “kind of reconnected sexually,” so Jen said she was shocked to learn that her husband actually wasn’t trying to repair their relationship, despite “warning signs” that had popped up.

“There were a lot of unaccounted absences, and the phone was never ever, ever, ever out of his hand or sight,” Jen recalled. “All the warning signs were there, but I did not want to face those.”

In the aftermath of the collapse of her marriage, Jen said she was left questioning her place in the church in which she had spent her life. “I found the environment so triggering,” she said. “I had to bear the weight of everyone else’s shock, their sadness and even worse, their pity. I just couldn’t handle it.”

“I am not saying that I will ever go back to church, but I am also not saying that I will never go back to church,” she explained. “Right now, I am finding a meaningful faith outside of those [traditional] spaces.”