Violet Affleck says she argued with mother Jennifer Garner over Palisades Fire in Yale essay: "She was shell-shocked"

The eldest child of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner used her experience living through the Palisades Fire with her celebrity mom as content for her recently published college academic essay.

Violet Affleck is currently a student at Yale University, and her essay titled "A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles" was published in The Yale Global Health Review this month. 

She began by writing, "I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room."

Affleck continues to explain her mother's reaction to the massive wildfire. "She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings," Affleck wrote. "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."

Her academic analysis continued to link the situation to the climate crisis, where noting that the "danger to places like LA will only increase as the planet heats."  

The essay transitioned into a discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Affleck saying that the end to the pandemic was "more a matter of public relations than public health." She noted that science had proven that vaccination did not prevent infection and transmission of the virus.

"Furthermore, 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," Affleck wrote.

In 2024, the then 18-year-old Affleck spoke at a Los Angeles Board of Supervisors meeting, wearing a mask, advocating for air filtration and far-UVC light in government facilities and mask mandates in county medical facilities.

She demanded increased mask availability to combat the long COVID crisis and stated the county must oppose mask bans. "They (mask bans) do not keep us safer; they make vulnerable members of the community less safe," she wrote.

Affleck's essay noted that at least 10 percent of infections are understood to result in long COVID. She also made comparisons between the effects of each crisis to communities and people of privilege versus those who are more vulnerable.

"The FEMA assistance quickly rushed to homeowners in the Palisades – many of whom are significant political donors – has flowed much more slowly to Asheville, North Carolina, where thousands were stranded in disastrous floods in 2024," she wrote.

"The stringent COVID-19 precautions observed earlier in the pandemic melted away as it became known that Black and disabled people were most vulnerable to serious illness and death, and as Long COVID entered the canon of chronic illnesses ascribed to 'hysteria' or 'malingering' among their mostly-female sufferers."