Violet Affleck Recalls Arguing With Jennifer Garner

Buzz Feed

21-05-2025

In the decade they were together, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner welcomed three children: Violet, Seraphina, and Samuel.
With the exception of a few anecdotes every now and then, Ben and Jen are pretty private when it comes to their kids' lives. But now, with the trio all in their teens, we're beginning to learn more about their interests and aspirations.
'I'm okay now, but I saw first-hand that medicine does not always have answers to the consequences of even minor viruses,' the teen said at the time, calling for increased mask availability and more access to testing and medication. 'The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown that into sharper relief.'
So, as part of her studies at Yale's Davenport College, Violet published an academic research paper in the university's Global Health Review on May 18. In the essay, titled 'A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles,' Violet recounts her personal experience living through the LA wildfires that caused devastation across the Pacific Palisades in January. She compares the similarities between the response to the wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing that she and her mom, Jennifer, found themselves at odds over their conflicting reactions to the blaze.
'I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room. She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings,' Violet begins, recalling that she was 'surprised' by her mom's surprise. 'As a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of generation Z, my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when.'
Violet also mentions her 13-year-old brother, Sam, who she says was equally confused by the fires. 'The crisis was acute, a burst of bad luck. It had come from a combination of high winds and low rains,' she writes. 'What, my little brother asked, did global warming have to do with the speed of the wind?... Hopefully, most of us understand the climate crisis better than my little brother – we know, for instance, that it's existential and accelerating, meaning the danger to places like LA will only increase as the planet heats.'
The essay is lengthy, but it's definitely worth reading. She concludes by examining how we can avoid future public health crises. 'In the same way that COVID-conscious and disabled people celebrate each chain of transmission broken, climate scientists recognize that each degree of warming we avoid will be a victory,' Violet writes. 'It's time for everyone who cares about the latter to engage with the people, the methods, and the political commitments that make the former possible.'