Jennifer Garner, an A-lister parent, revealed a time where, feeling unsafe, she once turned to a surprising but familiar face: her longtime paparazzo.
Garner is an advocate for public safety laws in the state of California when it comes to paparazzi around children. In 2013, she joined fellow actor Halle Berry to testify at a California State Assembly Committee on Public Safety hearing to support a bill that would penalize taking photos of children without permission.
That bill was signed into law in September 2013. Asked to reflect on the “current landscape” of paparazzi culture years later, Garner described her personal experience with the camerapeople who’ve followed her for over two decades.
“I have two every day who’ve been assigned to me for 20-plus years, 25 years,” Garner said on the July 21 episode of Evan Ross Katz’s podcast, “Shut Up Evan.” “It’s really interesting. I have a very interesting relationship with my main guy. … We have an odd respect for each other. We’ve had some really real-life moments together.”
Garner described a specific instance where, despite having “done anything to ask him to leave” over the years, she felt unsafe and turned to him for help.
“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,” Garner said.
“There’s kind of a Stockholm Syndrome kind of thing,” she added. “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?’”
Earlier on the podcast, Garner discussed the invasive environment that developed around her life and the particular danger facing her children.
“Kids were at the center of it. 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 (Affleck). They wouldn’t follow Matt Damon.”
Garner and Affleck, who divorced in 2018, share and co-parent three children together: Violet, 20, Fin, 17, and Samuel, 14. Garner opened up about the dangerous situations that paparazzi presence created at their children’s schools.
“Kids were getting knocked over coming out of preschool by photographers who were so hungry to get to me or to Ben, trying to get to our kids,” Garner said. “You don’t belong at a school, you know?”
Garner even said one of her children was asked to leave a soccer league because of all the cars that would surround the area.
“It was a danger to everyone around us,” she said. “If I went through a yellow light, 15 cars would go through the red behind me.”
