SerpApi.Org
Jennifer Garner is opening up about the dangerous lengths that paparazzi have gone to in order to photograph her and her family.
The Five-Star Weekend actress, 54, spoke out about the impact the "ludicrous" paparazzi behavior had on her children with ex-husband Ben Affleck—Violet, 20, Fin, 17, and Samuel, 12— during a recent episode of Evan Ross Katz's Netflix podcast, Shut Up Evan, calling it "a danger to everyone around us."
"If I went through a yellow light, 15 cars would go through the red behind me," she recalled. "They would drive up onto people’s lawns, even on a hillside."
Garner also revealed that one of her children had to stop playing soccer because of the photographers' attention. "We were trying to have our little one play soccer, and the association asked us to stop because there were 20 cars coming," she said. "It wasn’t just about us. It was an industry that had gotten out of control."
The 13 Going on 30 actress, who previously testified in favor of a 2013 bill to protect children from photographers' harassment in California, even recalled being blocked by paparazzi when trying to get her sick child in to see the pediatrician. "There’s something wrong with that, and the kids are paying the price," she said.
The harm wasn't limited to Garner's own children either. "Kids were getting knocked over coming out of preschool by photographers who were so hungry to get to me or Ben, trying to get to our kids, that it was just like, ‘You gotta stop, you gotta watch for the little kids. You don’t belong at a school, you know?’" she recalled.
Garner also noted that there were far more "famous and successful" people living on the same street as she and Affleck, 53, at the time, but that photographers would zero in on her because she was with her children. "They wouldn’t follow Ben. They wouldn’t follow Matt Damon," she pointed out.
Today, Garner said she still has two photographers who follow her every day and who have been "assigned" to her for more than 20 years. One she has a "very interesting relationship" with, which includes an "odd respect" for each other.
“We’ve had some really real-life moments together. I was followed by someone who, for whatever reason, I thought was going to hurt me, and I ran to him because I knew him and trusted him, and I knew that he and I would be OK,” she recalled. “There’s kind of a Stockholm Syndrome thing, and at the same time, I’ve called the cops on him a million times and been like, ‘Can you please just give me a walk around the block with my kids and my dog?'”
