Jennifer Garner has opened up about what it has been like living with constant paparazzi attention for more than 20 years, including the unusual bond she says developed with one photographer who was regularly sent to follow her and her family.
Speaking on the Shut Up Evan podcast on July 21, the actress reflected on the intense scrutiny that surrounded her during her marriage to Ben Affleck, whom she was married to from 2005 until 2018. The former couple share three children: Violet, 20, Seraphina, 17, and Samuel, 14.
Garner and Affleck first crossed paths while working on 2003’s Daredevil, and in recent years they have still been spotted together while spending time with their children as co-parents.
In a separate July 2026 interview promoting her Peacock series The Five-Star Weekend, Garner also described Affleck as an “incredible co-parent,” saying that arrangement has given her more freedom to work while still prioritizing family.
During the years they were together, though, the attention on their private lives was far more intense, and Garner said that pressure did not just affect them personally.
At times, she suggested, it affected the people around them and even raised safety concerns.
Garner said she became so accustomed to seeing the same photographers that she ended up in a complicated dynamic with one man in particular, as two shooters had effectively been assigned to cover her day after day for decades.
“I have two [photographers] every day who’ve been assigned to me for 20-plus years, 25 years,” Garner said. “I have a very interesting relationship with my main guy. I’ve done anything to ask him to leave, and at the same time, we have an odd respect for each other.”
She explained that, despite repeatedly wanting distance from him, there were also moments when familiarity overrode that frustration.
“We’ve had some really real-life moments together,” the actress shared. “I was followed by someone who, for whatever reason, I thought was gonna hurt me, and I ran to him because I knew him and trusted him, and I knew he and I would be OK.”
Garner said the relationship felt contradictory, describing it as both unsettling and oddly reliable at different times.
Garner added: “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?’”
She also described how chaotic the situation could become when multiple paparazzi cars started following her.
Recalling the moments where she was surrounded by people with cameras during this time of yo-yoing her relationship with these men, she said: “If I went through a yellow light, 15 cars would go through the red [light] behind me. They would drive up onto people’s lawns, even on a hillside.”
One of the clearest examples, she said, came when the media attention began interfering with everyday activities for her children.
Garner then revealed a time when she was asked to ‘stop’ by one of their children’s soccer organizers due to the paparazzi.
“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 just an industry that had gotten out of control.”
According to Garner, the disruption went beyond sports and family outings, and in some situations it could have affected access to medical care.
She told host Evan Ross Katz: “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.”
Jennifer Garner reveals the hard truths of living with the paparazzi
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She also remembered occasions when the rush to capture photos put other children at risk too, saying photographers sometimes pushed so aggressively to reach her or Affleck that kids leaving preschool were getting knocked over.
Recalling an instance where paparazzi were a risk to other children around her, she noted there was a time where ‘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 added that the attention often seemed stronger when she was the parent accompanying the children, rather than Affleck, and she pointed out that plenty of people with even bigger profiles did not appear to attract the same kind of pursuit.
Garner has spoken for years about the toll paparazzi attention can take on children, and she previously campaigned for laws in California aimed at protecting celebrity kids from harassment by photographers.
While her children are much older now, public fascination with her life has not entirely gone away.