November 3, 1999
(with updates)
Email rumors blending fact and fiction about actress Jane Fonda's activities as an antiwar protester during the 1970s have reopened old wounds for Vietnam veterans and inspired a new round of recriminations for things the actress did long ago, and things she never did.
The rumors (see next page), which first surfaced in an email text in late September 1999, focus on Fonda's tour of North Vietnam in 1972, during which she posed for photo ops with communist soldiers and broadcasted anti-American propaganda over Radio Hanoi. She also participated in a staged press conference accompanied by American servicemen held captive by the Viet Cong, the purpose of which was to "prove" that the POWs weren't being mistreated by their captors. Years afterward when the then-released POWs described the very real torture and degradation they had suffered at the hands of the North Vietnamese, Fonda dismissed them as "hypocrites and liars."
Those basic facts aren't under dispute. Fonda's behavior at that time, considered treasonous by some, earned her the nickname "Hanoi Jane" among the veterans and POWs of the Vietnam War, some of whom hate her to this day. However, the rumors circulating today wander far astray from the facts, falsely accusing Fonda of intentionally betraying American POWs to their captors during her visit to North Vietnam.
Since the 1970s, "Hanoi Jane" Fonda (as she is known to her detractors) has revamped her public image several times over, rededicating herself to acting, becoming a fitness guru, marrying and divorcing billionaire media mogul Ted Turner. In 1988 she delivered a televised apology to Vietnam veterans and their families, a gesture that failed to mollify everyone but established some distance between the new Fonda and the old, whose actions, she now admitted, had been "thoughtless and careless."
As the '90s progressed, Jane Fonda's radical past came to be raised less frequently as an issue and actually seemed to be dwindling in importance -- until 1999, when Barbara Walters chose to honor Fonda in a television special called "A Celebration: 100 Years of Great Women." The announcement of that program — which aired in April of that year and did, in fact, honor Jane Fonda among others -- prompted an instant outcry from veterans, ex-POWs, and their families, many of whom took to the Internet to vent their indignation. Angry recriminations were posted in newsgroups, newsletters, and on website, and circulated via forwarded email.
Bits and pieces of these texts, along with a few shameless fabrications, were cobbled together by person(s) unknown to create the "Hanoi Jane" email which still circulates on the Internet today. Only parts of it are true.
