Violet Affleck recalls arguing with 'shell-shocked' Jennifer Garner during LA wildfires

USA Today

21-05-2025

Violet Affleck recalls arguing with 'shell-shocked' Jennifer Garner during LA wildfires
Arguing with a parent is not new territory in adolescence. But for Violet Affleck, things were a bit more complicated.
Affleck, daughter of award-winning actors Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, reflected on a tense interaction she had with Garner during the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year in a May 18 essay, "A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles," featured in The Yale Global Health Review (Affleck is a first-year student at the Ivy League university's Davenport College.)
"I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room," Affleck, 19, wrote. "She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings."
A series of 14 wildfires, sparked in part by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, devastated the Southern California region in January, causing widespread property damage, mass evacuations and the burning of tens of thousands of acres. Numerous celebrities, including Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton and Milo Ventimiglia, lost their homes in the ravaging blaze.
"I was surprised at her surprise: as a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of generation Z, my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when," Affleck continued. "As I chatted with adults in the hotel where we'd gone to escape the smoke, though, I found my position to be an uncommon one: people spoke of how long rebuilding would take, how much it would cost, and how tragically odd the whole situation had been."
The Palisades and Eaton fires, the two largest of the California wildfires, swept through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena regions, killing at least 29 and burning over 37,000 acres, or 57.8 square miles. The fires, which were fully contained in early February, have been ranked as the second and third most destructive wildfires in California history, according to Cal Fire.
Garner previously said she's lived in or around the Pacific Palisades neighborhood for 25 years. While her home was not destroyed, the actress revealed in a Jan. 10 interview that one of her friends perished in the wildfires. Garner's family church also burned down in the blaze.
"I feel almost guilty walking through my house," Garner told MSNBC's Katy Tur. "You know, what can I do? How can I help? What can I offer? What do I have to offer with these hands and these walls and the safety that I have?"
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Affleck has previously been vocal about public health. In July 2024, she delivered remarks about COVID-19 pandemic precautions during the public comment section of a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting, which also included the health revelation that Affleck contracted a "post-viral condition" in 2019.
In her May 18 essay, Affleck likened the "bewildered" public response to the LA wildfires to that of the COVID pandemic, with people often framing the broader issue of climate change as "a question of how fast we can get back around to pretending like the problem is gone."
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"Climate disasters cannot be prevented or mitigated as easily as airborne disease transmission. But the experience of chronic illness is relevant here, too," wrote Affleck, who cited the proactive health strategies of individuals with long COVID as a possible model.
"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."
Contributing: Brendan Morrow and James Powel, USA TODAY