Jessica Biel said she and Justin Timberlake left Los Angeles in hopes that their children would have a better quality of life.

The couple had their first child, Silas Timberlake, in 2015 and their second, Phineas Timberlake, in 2020. Since 2018, there have been numerous reports of Biel and Timberlake moving out of LA to properties in Tennessee and Montana.

More and more wealthy families have been ditching LA over a combination of high interest rates, higher insurance costs, and a “mansion tax” of 4% on homes costing over $5 million and 5.5% on ones costing more than $10 million.

Meanwhile, states including Florida and cities such as Dallas and Nashville, where Timberlake bought a mansion in 2015, have been big targets for relocation, partly because those areas have bigger, cheaper homes, warm weather, and lower or no personal income taxes.

However, Biel said on Wednesday’s episode of SiriusXM’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa” that the couple moved because they wanted to keep their children away from the paparazzi. Biel said the media did not always respect their children’s privacy.

“You get hammered on the East Coast. You kind of get hammered on the West Coast. That’s why we don’t really live there anymore,” she said, seemingly referring to her former home of LA. “We’re just trying to create some normalcy for these kids.”

In 2021, Forbes reported that the celebrity couple put their Los Angeles estate on the market for $35 million, and in 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported Timberlake had sold his apartment in New York.

In 2023, Realtor.com reported that Timberlake was trying to sell his property outside Nashville, though this has not been confirmed. Timberlake and Biel are said to live in Big Sky, Montana, People reported, citing unnamed sources.

Timberlake’s and Biel’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Timberlake and Biel out and about for Halloween with their son on October 31, 2018, in New York City.Robert Kamau/GC Images/Getty
Biel added that she understood that the public would always be interested in their family because she and Timberlake are celebrities. But she said that her children, who are 4 and 9, were too young to be able to choose this lifestyle.

“I don’t want to expose them, in a way, until they have an ability to make that decision for themself,” she said. “This very social-media world is where they exist and where they live, and that will be a very big part of their life and their reality. I just don’t want it to be on my account.