SerpApi.Org
Garner says she has an “odd respect” for the photographer despite calling the cops on him “a million times.”
Key Points
- In a new interview, Jennifer Garner opens up about the paparazzi.
- The actress says she has a “Stockholm syndrome thing” with one photographer who’s followed her for 25 years.
- Garner admits it’s “totally ludicrous” what she, Ben Affleck, and their kids have dealt with.
As a public figure, Jennifer Garner has faced decades of intrusion by the paparazzi, and still struggles with the invasion of privacy today.
During a chat with Evan Ross Katz on his Netflix podcast show, Shut Up Evan, Garner admitted that she has a weird relationship with one paparazzo who has followed her for the last 25 years.
“I have two [photographers] every day who’ve been assigned to me for 20 plus years, 25 years,” Garner told Katz. “I have a very interesting relationship with my my main guy. I mean, I’ve done anything to ask him to leave and, at the same time, we have an odd respect for each other. I don’t know. We’ve had some really real-life moments together.”
Garner was once followed by a stranger whom she thought “was going to hurt me” and, surprisingly enough, she ran to the paparazzo for protection.
“I ran to him because I knew him and trusted him, and I knew that he and I would be okay. You know what I mean? Like, there’s kind of a Stockholm syndrome thing,” she says. “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?’”
The Five-Star Weekend star, 54, also opened up to Katz about her scary experiences with the paparazzi targeting her and ex-husband Ben Affleck’s children —Violet, Seraphina, and Samuel. (Garner spearheaded a campaign for California anti-paparazzi legislation to shield celebrity children from aggressive photographers in 2013. Senate Bill 606, which increased penalties for harassing minors by stalking or taking unauthorized photos, was eventually passed.)
“It was totally ludicrous,” she said of the lengths photographers would go to get a shot of her family. “I mean, it was, and it felt like, ‘Poor little me. You know, my poor little kids who have everything in the world.’ But it was a danger to everyone around us. If I went through a yellow light, 15 cars would go through the red behind me. They would drive up onto people’s lawns, even on a hillside.”
When one of their kids was younger, Garner said she and Affleck signed them up to play soccer but the association asked them to stop coming as their presence became a safety issue.
“There were 20 cars coming to try to [take our photo],” Garner explained. “So it wasn’t just about us. It was just an industry that had gotten out of control. If you show up and you’re trying to get into the pediatrician and you have a sick kid on your shoulder and you’re scared, and you can’t get into the door because you’re blocked by photographers, there’s something wrong with that. And the kids are paying the price.”
The mom-of-three also noted that innocent children were “getting knocked over coming out of preschool” due to photographers’ hunger to get snaps of her and her kids with Affleck, whom she was married to from 2005 to 2015.
“It was just, like, you got to watch for the little kids. You don’t belong at a school, you know?” she went on. “So, as much as I recognize that we are privileged and lucky and grateful for all that [fame] has afforded us, and all that that’s made available, at the same time, it just got silly. And kids were at the center of it.”
Garner also insisted that she didn’t understand why she was of such interest over other A-listers in her neighborhood.
“I mean, I lived on the street with a lot of much more famous and successful people than I, but they followed me because I had the kids,” she claimed. “They wouldn’t follow Ben. They wouldn’t follow Matt Damon. They wouldn’t. They were like, ‘There’s the chick with the kids.’ And that’s when you know it’s just not right.”
Affleck has also spoken out against the paparazzi, telling Theo Von on the This Past Weekend podcast in 2025 that he has experience with “the cycle of having people harangue you and yell at you and hassle you and follow you.”
The actor said he is mostly photographed looking “bummed” because he’s usually just trying to spend time with his kids when paparazzi are following him.
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“It’s this selective experience of, like, take a picture of somebody every time they’re feeling irritated, they’re going to look irritated,” Affleck explained, adding that the whole cultural influence of paparazzi is “kind of collective cruelty.”
“[They] follow somebody around and antagonize them. Then hopefully they’ll have like a nervous breakdown and go crazy on you and then your video will be worth more money, you know?” he stated.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
