Ben Affleck's Daughter Violet Tells the World In Excruciating Detail Why an Argument Exploded Between Her and 'Shell-Shocked' Mom Jennifer Garner
Violet Affleck revealed she had a huge argument with her mom Jennifer Garner while they stayed in a hotel during the Los Angeles wildfires.
May 21 2025, Updated 11:16 a.m. ET
Violet Affleck has let slip a shocking family rift which sparked a huge argument with her mom Jennifer Garner.
RadarOnline.com can reveal the Yale student, the eldest daughter of Garner and ex-husband Ben Affleck, fell out with the '13 Going On 30' actress over the Los Angeles fires in January.
Harsh Words
Violet admitted in an essay she wrote at Yale she clashed with her famous mom over climate change.
She made the revelation in an essay titled A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles, published in her school's Global Health Review.
Violet, 29, claimed in the essay she had a huge argument with her mother regarding climate change while they were staying in a hotel to avoid the smoke from the fires.
While waiting out the fires in a luxury accommodations, the nepo baby – who frequently jets around between the East and West coast – also complained that the behavior of the "wealthiest citizens" was a driving force behind the "climate crisis."
She began her essay by writing: "I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room."
Violet said: 'I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room.'
While her mom – who volunteered to help her devastated community amid the fires – was "shell-shocked" and "astonished" by the inferno, Violet said she was "surprised at her surprise."
She added: "My question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when."
Violet added about Garner – who also has son Fin (formerly Seraphina), 16, and Samuel, 13, with her ex-husband Ben, 52: "She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings.
"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."
Violet with her dad Ben Affleck in 2019 before she enrolled at Yale.
She went on: "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 crisis was acute, a burst of bad luck. It had come from a combination of high winds and low rains."
Violet also recalled how her younger brother, Samuel, was seemingly skeptical of her linking the wildfires to climate change, as he asked, "what did global warming have to do with the speed of the wind?"
Violet, pictured here with a pal, has described the climate crisis as 'existential and accelerating.'
"Hopefully," Violet also wrote "most of us understand the climate crisis better than my little brother."
In her essay, the teenager reflected on broader generational differences and society's approach to crises like COVID-19.
She argued society mishandles systemic crises like climate change and pandemics – specifically COVID-19 – treating them as isolated events rather than ongoing, interconnected problems needing long-term solutions.
Violet went on to describe the "climate crisis" as "existential and accelerating."
She said it was "driven by unsustainable consumption patterns concentrated among the wealthiest citizens of the wealthiest countries, all of which have already subjected most of this country and the world to deadly temperatures, fire-flood cycles, rising seas, and dying crops."
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Violet, here on a lunch date with her mom Garner, also discussed the government's handling of COVID in her essay.
She then went on to discuss the government's handling of COVID and the pressure for society to "return to normal."
Speaking of the disease, she wrote: "While vaccines have been extremely effective in reducing death rates, those of us who have never stopped "following the science" know that even mild COVID infections are dangerous."
Violet went on to claim that "Long COVID" – when a person experiences health problems long after their initial COVID-19 infection – "can even affect very healthy people."
She then warned: "We haven't treated bird flu as a serious health problem, and probably won't until it explodes into the population with the onset of airborne human-to-human transmission, at which point – if the COVID response is our example – we'll have lost hope of controlling it before the virus's significantly higher mortality rate strikes a meaningful blow."
