~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

[Year 1997]
[Year 1998]
[Year 1999]
[Year 2000]
[Year 2001]

Fonda sorry for Hanoi Jane image

NEW YORK - The reinvention of Jane Fonda as an all-American conformist gathered pace yesterday with the abandonment of one of her longest-cherished positions, support for the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war. "I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft carrier, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes," said the 62-year-old Oscar-winning actress, referring to a 1972 picture of her with North Vietnamese soldiers which earned her the soubriquet of Hanoi Jane.

"It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanised such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless." Fonda has rethought large areas of her life recently, splitting up with her husband, the CNN cable news founder Ted Turner, and embracing Christianity. "You have to be able to say 'I was wrong'. You have to be able to accept responsibility for your mistakes and learn from them," she said in an interview with the chat show personality Oprah Winfrey in O magazine.

Fonda said that at the time of the Hanoi picture she was living a "fun but rather empty life" in France with her first husband, the late film director Roger Vadim. Ed Croucher, executive director of the Vietnam Veterans of America, was unimpressed by her change of heart. "There are many of us who will never forgive her for what she did," he said. "Because of her, prisoners were tortured or denied basic necessities.

"She could start by helping the groups she harmed the most, such as surviving prisoners of war or the families of those who died in captivity." Fonda said of her conversion to Christianity: "It's been difficult. People come up to me in airports and throw their arms around me." The former apostle of the 1980s fitness video-tape industry also said that she was bulimic up to the age of 36. "I think I lived on apple peels and the crust of bread because if I went any further into the food there'd be no stopping.

"It has something to do with living a lie. Not being authentic. Faking it. It's like becoming a woman and then rejecting it. Like alcoholism, it's a disease of denial."

By Michael Ellison - The Guardian - June 22, 2000.