Jane Fonda says her 1972 visit to a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun site, an incident that brought her the nickname “Hanoi Jane,” was a “betrayal” of American forces and of the “country that gave me privilege.”
“The image of Jane Fonda, ‘Barbarella,’ Henry Fonda’s daughter ... sitting on an enemy aircraft gun was a betrayal ... the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine,” Fonda told Lesley Stahl in a “60 Minutes” interview that will air Sunday night.
Fonda, whose memoir “Jane Fonda: My Life So Far” comes out next week, said she did not regret meeting with American POWs in North Vietnam or making broadcasts on Radio Hanoi. “Our government was lying to us and men were dying because of it, and I felt I had to do anything that I could to expose the lies and help end the war,” she said.
But she said she wouldn't make the same sort of broadcasts in Iraq today.
"I don't think it's the same situation at all. When I went [to North Vietnam] ... we had been fighting in Vietnam for eight years. The majority of Americans ... [and] Congress opposed the war. It was a desperate time," she said, according to CBS News' Web site.
Solicited call girls
Also on “60 Minutes,” Fonda acknowledged that she had participated in sexual threesomes, at the encouragement of her first husband, French film director Roger Vadim.
"One night Vadim brought another woman into my bed and I went along with it. ... I'm competitive ... I was going to keep up with the Joneses. It was the '60s and whatever," she said.
She told the program she isn't sure if she enjoyed the ménage à trois, but said she consented because she worried he would leave her otherwise.
Fonda told CBS she even solicited the call girls herself, using her experience from her Oscar-winning role as a prostitute in "Klute."
"Hey, if that's what he wanted, I'd give it to him in spades," she said.