Jennifer Garner and Halle Berry testified before California legislature on behalf of an anti-paparazzi bill. Garner choked up during her testimony (0:47 in the above video) and described her children as “hav[ing] a bounty on their heads”:
I chose a public life and understand that this means sacrifices in terms of privacy for our jobs. In my case this means that I am sometimes photographed. However my three children are private citizens and more than that — at one-, four-, and seven-years-old — they’re just little kids.
Literally everyday there are as many as fifteen cars of photographers waiting outside our home. In the course of our ordinary day — trips to school, pediatrician, ballet, or the grocery store — paparazzi swarm. Large aggressive men swarm us causing a mob scene, yelling, jockeying for a position, crowding around the kids.
Garner described her children crying, then recounted how a violent stalker hid in a crowd of paparazzi outside her daughter’s preschool:
There are violent, mentally ill stalkers who can now get close to my kids by simply following mobs of photographers and blending in — like the very man who threatened to cut the babies out of my belly. Who was arrested waiting behind our daughter’s preschool, standing among the throng of paparazzi. That man is still in prison, but I have no doubt there are others like him still out there.
Well. That certainly takes the cheer out of all those cute celebrity baby galleries.
