After three divorces, Christina Haack knows what it’s like to deal with the media attention that comes from a public separation. So she is the perfect person to give advice to fellow HGTV stars Jen Hatmaker and Brandon Hatmaker amid their own divorce drama.
Speaking to Us Weekly on Wednesday (October 1), the Flip Off star credited her publicist/best friend for teaching her from the very beginning to “ignore it” when it comes to the headlines and gossip. She added that it’s best to just “shut up,” take a step back, and try not to react to the reports and online speculation.
“If you buy into it, no matter how much you’re hurting, no matter how much you want your story out there, like, it’ll never end,” she told the outlet. “So I think my best advice is to, like, just try to stay in your tight-knit group and literally, do not Google. Don’t read the comments.”
“I feel very bad for them,” she added, referring to Jen and Brandon. “[It’s] so hard to go through that publicly.”
Jen and Brandon, who rose to fame on the HGTV series My Big Family Renovation, divorced back in 2020 after 26 years of marriage. However, the separation returned to the headlines in recent weeks following the release of Jen’s new memoir, Awake, in which she reveals the moment she found out Brandon was cheating on her.
In the book, Jen claimed that she woke up to the sound of Brandon whispering on the phone to another woman. She said he smelled of booze, and before he drifted off to sleep, he whispered, “I just can’t quit you.”
That moment was “the end of my life as I [knew] it,” Jen added, noting that she kicked Brandon out of the house the next morning, effectively ending their marriage. The former couple married in 1993 and went on to welcome five children, two of whom were adopted from Ethiopia.
After Jen’s comments made headlines, Brandon took to his Substack page to respond with a lengthy post. “There are no excuses. But I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to have an affair. I didn’t fall out of love overnight,” he wrote last month. “Our love was coming to a slow and painful ending. And I privately mourned the death of our marriage years before our divorce.”
He returned to Substack later in September to announce he’d no longer be “addressing the details” of his past marriage, noting, “It’s time to close that chapter.”
Haack, meanwhile, is well-versed in divorce. She and her Flip Off co-star, Tarek El Moussa, were married from 2009 to 2016. After they split, Haack got into a relationship with Ant Anstead, marrying him in 2018. Haack’s divorce from Anstead was finalized in June 2021, and later that same year, she married Josh Hall, with whom she split in July 2024.
In February 2025, Haack went public with her new relationship, sharing an Instagram photo with her new beau, Christopher Larocca, the president and CEO of Network Connex.