Jane Fonda Reveals She Was Sexually Abused & Raped As A Young Girl

Actress Jane Fonda, 79, revealed that she was “rapes and sexually abused as a girl” in an interview with fellow activist Brie Larson.

JANE FONDA TALKS RAPE AND SEXUAL ABUSE WITH BRIE LARSON

Larson, a supporter and activist for sexual assault survivors, interviewed Fonda for The Edit. Fonda spoke about her own past, and about the terrible toll such assault can take on a person.

“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,” Fonda said. “I know young girls who’ve been raped and didn’t even know it was rape. 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 realize that [rape and abuse is] not our fault. We were violated and it’s not right.”

Fonda joins a long list of female celebrities who are finally opening up about having been sexually abused. Ashley Judd said in January that she had been “molested at the age of seven, raped at 14, and then again in 1998.” Lady Gaga, Madonna and Pamela Anderson have also all revealed their harsh pasts with sexual assault.

“I grew up in the ’50s and it took me a long time to apply feminism to my life,” Fonda explained to Larson. “The men in my life were wonderful, but victims of a [patriarchal] belief system. 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.”

In 2014, Fonda also told that her own mother, who had committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 42, had also been sexually abused as a child. “Unlike you Brie, it took me 60 years to learn how to say no,” Fonda said.