American actress and political activist Jane Fonda has said she was the victim of rape and of child sex abuse.
“I’ve been raped, I’ve been sexually abused as a child and I’ve been fired because I wouldn’t sleep with my boss and I always thought it was my fault; that I didn’t do or say the right thing,” she told actress Brie Larson during an interview for Net-a-porter Magazine.
This is the first time the Academy Award winner has spoken publicly about being sexually assaulted.
“I know young girls who’ve been raped and didn’t even know it was rape,” she said. “They think, ‘It must have been because I said ‘no’ the wrong way.’ One of the great things the women’s movement has done is to make us realise that [rape and abuse is] not our fault. We were violated and it’s not right.”
“I grew up in the ’50s and it took me a long time to apply feminism to my life,” Fonda told Larson. “I felt diminished. Eventually I decided I wasn’t going to give up who I was in order to please the man I was with.”
Fonda campaigned ferociously against the Vietnam war, undertaking a controversial visit to Hanoi. She opened a centre for adolescent reproductive health in Georgia in the US. She is a supporter of V-Day, to stop violence against women. She has mentored transsexual actors on stage. In 2004, she led a march through Mexico to raise awareness around the murders of hundreds of women and girls.
It doesn’t stop there; she has worked in environmentalism; to end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; and has spoken out against the war in Iraq.