Jennifer Aniston, 57, appeared alongside her boyfriend, hypnotherapist Jim Curtis, 50, at a sold-out book launch event in Manhattan on Wednesday night, putting their relationship in the spotlight in a rare joint public appearance.
The pair shared laughs and adoring glances on stage as Aniston helped promote Curtis's latest self-help book. But a source told Page Six that some of the actress's friends are not yet convinced by her boyfriend of 18 months. "Some of Jen's friends aren't totally sold on Jim yet. They worry he could be an opportunist and feel like he can come off a bit performative," the source said.
So far, there has been no sign the concerns are warranted. But long before Curtis became the new Mr Aniston, his life included messy relationships, drug use as a young man and a period estranged from his own son.
During the event, Curtis acknowledged his personal struggles and health problems. In a Q&A after their 30-minute conversation, Aniston said Curtis had helped her overcome a "deep fear" by having her moderate the event.
Drugs, drinking and a fake motorcycle crash
"I am no angel," Curtis has admitted. "I have made questionable life choices, to put it lightly." In his 2017 book, The Stimulati Experience, he confessed to dabbling in drugs and heavy drinking in his youth. He described crashing his car after taking hallucinogenic mushrooms and getting into a barroom brawl while an intravenous catheter was threaded into his body.
Curtis also admitted he spent years lying to people, including dates and prospective employers, about being involved in a motorcycle crash that never happened. In reality, he wrote, he was masking a debilitating illness that struck him in his late teens, leaving him in chronic pain, struggling to walk and with lesions on his spinal cord. "I was lying to everyone I met out of shame," he wrote. "The motorcycle accident that never happened could explain my disabilities rather than admitting to people that I was sick."
A health crisis that began in 1995
Curtis traced his health problems back to the summer of 1995, when he was a 19-year-old college student spending the summer on Cape Cod engaged in what he called "heroic drinking, drugging, and Grateful Dead shows." He wrote that one night he ate an eighth of an ounce of psychedelic mushrooms before driving his Toyota Camry to meet friends.
After his fake ID was confiscated at a bar, he fled and crashed the car into the side of the building, then hit a parked car later that night without reporting the damage, according to his book. The next day he noticed numbness in his foot that began to spread. In the years that followed he suffered migraines, chronic pain and difficulty walking while doctors struggled to diagnose him.
Curtis wrote that he kept "self-medicating with drugs and alcohol to avoid reality" before his family staged an intervention. During one aggressive course of intravenous treatment through a PICC line in his arm, he wrote that he ended up in a brawl at a New York bar, rupturing the catheter. He took a leave of absence from the University of New Hampshire because of his illness but later earned a business degree and built a corporate career, rising through the ranks at WebMD and Remedy Health Media. "Most of the time I was lying," he said of the motorcycle story, adding in a 2018 interview: "I was more charming than I am now. 'Charming' became a word I hated because it is so fake."
Marriage, a son and a rocky relationship
Long before Aniston, Curtis had a 200-person wedding and a son. He met his future wife, Rachel Napolitano, in 1999 while she was working at a West Village bar, proposed on a Cape Cod beach with a two-carat diamond ring, and married her in 2003. The couple split soon after having a son, Aiden Curtis.
Curtis has previously written about a strained relationship with his son. "I wish I had a better relationship with my son," he wrote, "but he lives with his mother most of the time, and he's pissed at me." Aiden, now 18, played varsity football and baseball at Hastings High School in upstate New York before graduating this summer and enrolling at the University of Tennessee. He lives with his mother and her second husband. Neither was reachable for comment, but Curtis has since said his relationship with his son has improved.
From heartbreak to hypno-coaching
Curtis's path into wellness traces back to Momentum, a Manhattan-based human potential training program he joined around 2015. There he met a woman he refers to in his book only by the apparent pseudonym Lucy Lou, describing her as his "kryptonite" and revealing he bought an engagement ring intending to propose. He has never disclosed why the relationship ended, but wrote that afterward he obsessively checked her and her new boyfriend's Facebook, spiraling into feelings of inadequacy and what he called "not enough-ness."
To heal, Curtis studied meditation and alternative medicine, went on a "soul journey" in Arizona involving horses, a sweat lodge and Native American-inspired energy healing, and visited the Brazilian faith healer known as John of God, years before the healer's conviction for sex crimes. He went on to study transformative education, neurolinguistic programming and hypnosis, eventually becoming a health coach and developing what he now calls "hypno-coaching."
How the romance with Aniston began
Curtis was introduced to Aniston by mutual friends in early 2025. Aniston had reportedly followed him on Instagram for roughly two years and had already read his book. She was not a client of his, though a friend of hers reportedly was.
The couple made their relationship Instagram official last November with a black-and-white photo to mark Curtis's birthday. Since then, Aniston has repeatedly praised him publicly. "He's very special, very normal and very kind, and wants to help people heal, move through their trauma and stagnation into clarity," she said late last year. "He's quite extraordinary and helps many, many people."
A source previously told the Daily Mail that Aniston values the lack of competition in the relationship, unlike with famous exes Brad Pitt, Vince Vaughn, John Mayer and Justin Theroux. "It is all about her and how she feels and what she needs," the source said. "He never talks about his career or tries to network with her contacts, he has no interest in being an actor or being famous. She has said with him she can exhale, she can let herself go and breathe because there is no pressure."
At Wednesday's event, Aniston also made a joke about Curtis after recalling attending gym classes at the same venue as a teenager at Steiner school. Describing having to play dodgeball with "huge red balls" and no field to hide in, she told the crowd it was "quite a full circle moment to be back here with you," before turning to Curtis and quipping: "Well... speaking of dodging balls...!" Curtis has previously said the pair "chatted for a long time" before their romance began.
The Daily Mail reached out to representatives for both Aniston and Curtis for comment.
