Jane Fonda has said she was raped and sexually assaulted as a child in a new interview with Brie Larson for Net-A-Porter’s “The Edit.”
“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,” the two-time Academy Award winner told Larson. “I always thought it was my fault; that I didn’t do or say the right thing.”
The 79-year-old actress has long been a passionate advocate for women’s rights for years — according to People, Fonda is a supporter of the V-Day moment which works to stop violence against women, and in 2001, she founded the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health which helps to prevent teen pregnancy.
“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,’” she added. “One of the great things the women’s movement has done is to make us realize that [rape and abuse is] is not our fault. We were violated and it’s not right.”
In 2014, Fonda said that her mother, Frances Ford Seymour, had been sexually abused as a child before committing suicide at the age of 42.
At the 40th anniversary of the Rape Treatment Center, Fonda said she reviewed her mother’s medical records while writing her memoirs and discovered that she had been sexually abused when she was eight years old. Her mother committed suicide when Fonda was 12.
“The minute that I read that, everything fell into place,” Fonda said. “I knew why the promiscuity, the endless plastic surgery, the guilt, the inability to love or be intimate, and I was able to forgive her and forgive myself.”
Read Fonda’s interview with Larson here.