Ben Affleck on why he has ‘empathy’ for Britney Spears after she was ‘antagonised’ by paparazzi

Ben Affleck has said he empathises with Britney Spears because he’s experienced having the paparazzi “harangue you and yell at you”.

The Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting co-writer said in a new interview that, while he does not personally know the pop star, he remembered watching her endure “collective cruelty” at the hands of the media.

Speaking on a recent episode of Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast about the pressures of fame, Affleck said that he believes that the goal of a paparazzi is to “follow somebody around and antagonise them” until they “have a nervous breakdown on camera”.

He suggested that Spears is often preyed on by the paparazzi, and recalled having “empathy” while watching her navigate the media frenzy that surrounded her “years and years ago”.

“I really had a lot of empathy for Britney Spears. Because I remember it seemed like – I mean it's not somebody I knew, or hung out with – but just like everybody else, you see all this s*** that comes through,” he said.

“But having had my own experience myself, I knew that these are people who are following her around in a time where she may or may not have been having difficulty – I don't know because I don't know her.”

Affleck, who finalised his divorce from Jennifer Lopez earlier this year, said that he was familiar with the “cycle of having people harangue you and yell at you and hassle you and follow you”.

The actor was likely referencing the singer’s mental health issues that became the subject of a tabloid frenzy in 2007 and 2008, in which she had public episodes that included shaving her head and attacking a paparazzo’s car.

The Argo actor and director remembered the media “whipping up the whole thing into a tizzy”.

He said watching the events from afar was the first time he had witnessed a “weird collective cruelty”, in which the paparazzi were “waving the stick at the tiger and poking it”.

“And all you see is the growling animal or whatever it is… because somebody is coming around hitting on it to make it get active,” he said.

He added: “And that's where you think, well okay, this isn't really news. It's not even real. It's not what would be happening if this effect wasn't taking place.”

In her 2023 memoir The Woman In Me, Spears said that during her breakdown in 2007 and 2008, she was dealing with postnatal depression, grief after the death of her aunt and a custody battle with her ex-husband Kevin Federline.

The incidents led to the controversial conservatorship, which saw her father, Jamie Spears, put in control of her career, schedule, finances and personal affairs in 2008. A judge in Los Angeles terminated the legal guardianship in November 2021, a moment Spears described as “the best day ever”.

The “Toxic” singer claimed in 2024 that she was relocating to Mexico to escape the paparazzi’s “incredibly cruel” treatment of her.

“It hurts my feelings that the paparazzi make my face look like I’m wearing, like a white Jason mask. It doesn’t even look like me,” she said in a video posted online. “They’ve always been incredibly cruel to me, and the way they’ve illustrated me to be.”

“I know I’m not perfect at all, but some of it is extremely mean and cruel. And that’s why I’ve moved to Mexico,” she concluded.