Violet Affleck has officially completed her first year at the prestigious Yale University. The 19-year-old daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner has kept a low profile but made headlines while in school after an essay she wrote detailed an argument with her mother. Now that she’s back in Los Angeles, she was spotted spending time with one very important person in her family - her grandma, Christopher.
Christopher is Ben's mom and has always been close to her grandchildren. On June 4, the pair were seen taking a stroll through Brentwood, where both Jennifer and Ben own homes. Violet showed off her style in a floral maxi skirt, a black printed shirt, white sneakers, and a furry Chloé purse that has caused controversy for no good reason.
Violet has become somewhat of an easy target since it was reported that she wrote an essay for her university's Global Health Review titled A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles. In the essay, which she likely didn’t expect to be leaked to the public, she detailed a fight with her mom, writing, "I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room."
The young woman explained that while Jennifer “was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings,” she was “surprised at her surprise.” “As a lifelong Angeleno and climate-literate member of Generation Z, my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when,” she wrote eloquently.
Since the essay leaked, people have zeroed in on her designer items, like her vintage Chloé Marcie Bucket Bag and Chloé Nama shoes. There are many obvious reasons why this criticism is absurd, the main one being that the major destruction caused by climate change isn’t the fault of a 20-year-old wearing designer shoes, but of decades of unchecked emissions, deregulation, and corporate pollution.
Still, the internet latched onto Violet’s perceived hypocrisy, turning a deeply personal and nuanced essay into a meme about privilege.
Yale wrapped up classes on May 19, so summer has officially begun for the celebrity kid. She’s set to return to New Haven, Connecticut, ahead of her first day back on August 27, and hopefully, this time, she’ll get to enjoy classes like a normal college sophomore, without her essays getting leaked to the press.