SerpApi.Org
Jennifer Garner says the paparazzi’s obsession with her family became so intense that it endangered her children and everyone around them.
Speaking on the Shut Up Evan podcast, the 54-year-old actress recounted photographers chasing her through traffic while she was with her children when they were younger.
Garner shares three children with her ex-husband, actor Ben Affleck: Violet Anne, 20; Seraphina Rose Elizabeth, 17; and Samuel, 13.
“It felt like ‘Poor little me, my poor little kids who have everything in the world,’ but it was a danger to everyone around us,” she told host Evan Ross Katz. “If I went through a yellow light, 15 cars would go through the red behind me. They would drive up onto people’s lawns.”
Affleck, 53, and Garner met while filming Pearl Harbor in 2000. They began dating four years later and wed in June 2005. Ten years later, they separated, ultimately finalizing their divorce in 2018. The couple continues to co-parent their children.
Crowds became so disruptive that their child’s soccer league asked the family to stop coming because nearly 20 paparazzi cars would show up, Garner told Katz.
The 13 Going on 30 star described chaotic scenes of the paparazzi blocking preschool entrances and doctors’ offices, with children “getting knocked over” as photographers rushed to snap pictures of her family.
“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,” Garner said. “They wouldn’t follow Ben. They wouldn’t follow Matt Damon. They were like, ‘There’s the chick with the kids.’”
The Alias action star helped push for California’s 2013 anti-paparazzi bill alongside Oscar winner Halle Berry, whose children Nahla Ariela Aubry and Maceo-Robert Martinez were born in 2008 and 2013, respectively.
Garner told lawmakers a man who had threatened to cut her babies out of her belly was able to hide among photographers outside her daughter’s preschool.
The bill pushed for tougher penalties for those who harass the children of celebrities, including taking photos and videos of minors without parental consent. Once the legislation passed and was signed into law, violators faced up to one year in county jail and fines of up to $10,000.
The actress said two paparazzi have been assigned to photograph her for over two decades, eventually developing what she called an “odd respect” with one, whom she does not name but refers to as her “main guy.”
“I don’t know, we’ve had some really real-life moments together,” Garner said, noting that when she was being followed by “someone who, for whatever reason, I thought was going to hurt me,” she sought help from the long-time paparazzo.
“I ran to him because I knew him and trusted him,” she said.
