Here are some photos of Jane Fonda appearing on the Italian TV show Che Tempo Che Fa over the weekend. I think she looks good for her age (she’s 77) but she might want to rethink the size of her wig, you know? The color is fine, it’s just the SIZE. It’s very big. Anyway, Fonda has been out and about promoting her new TV show, and it seems that wherever she goes in America, she greeted by protesters. Vietnam veterans are still angry about the Hanoi Jane stuff, for which Fonda has apologized many, many times over the decades. But her current press tour is turning into yet another apology tour.
This isn’t the first time Jane Fonda has apologized for the infamous 1972 photos that earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane.” But it seems her apologies have fallen on deaf ears. Her latest mea culpa, in which she calls the photo “a huge, huge mistake,” comes in response to an incident in Maryland on Friday where 50 veterans, protesting her appearance at the Weinberg Center for the Arts, carried signs that read “Forgive? Maybe. Forget? Never.”
That’s right, 43 years later, protests still follow Fonda wherever she goes. There are, in fact, several Facebook groups dedicated to targeting Fonda at every public event. This past Friday, Fonda said she understood the anger and has tried several times to make amends:
“Whenever possible I try to sit down with vets and talk with them, because I understand and it makes me sad. It hurts me and it will to my grave that I made a huge, huge mistake that made a lot of people think I was against the soldiers. I’m a lightning rod. This famous person goes and does something that looks like I’m against the troops, which wasn’t true, but it looked that way, and I’m a convenient target.”
Back in 2012, during an episode of Oprah’s Master Class, Fonda tried to explain the context of the photos which depicted her laughing, smiling, and sitting on an anti-aircraft battery:
“I was an emotional wreck by [then]. I don’t know if I was set up or not. I was an adult. I take responsibility for my actions. . .These soldiers sang a song; I sang a song in feeble Vietnamese. Everyone was laughing. I was led to a gun site and I sat down. And I was laughing and clapping, and there were pictures taken. . .I understand the anger about that.”
And on Saturday, the day after Fonda made her most recent apology, the actress appeared on the Italian chat show Che tempo che fa and gleefully demonstrated how her grandson was born with his fist in the air.
[From Vanity Fair and The Guardian]
This happens pretty much every time Jane promotes anything. Her press tour gets hijacked by veterans and she has to issue another apology or explanation. But you know what bugs me? It feels like Jane is constantly trying to tell her side, her version of events, and it’s just making things worse at this point. It’s like she’s still trying to offer some defense, when the best PR (all these years later) would probably be to simply fall on one’s sword completely. Say you’re sorry. Apologize profusely. Don’t try to explain how you were really anti-war and never anti-soldier. Don’t try to explain what actually happened.
Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.
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