Ted Danson admitted that his arrest with Jane Fonda was worked out with the police ahead of time.
While talking with Jesse Tyler Ferguson on his podcast “Dinner’s On Me,” Danson explained that the police were clued in on what he and Fonda were doing in 2019 when the two were arrested during a climate protest in Washington D.C..
“We crossed an intersection and blocked an intersection. And that was against the law,” Danson said. “But it was all worked out with the police. This was the champagne of arrests.”
He added: “But it was one of the things, they’d come to you and they’d say, ‘Okay, this is the last time Mr. Danson, that you will be warned, and if you don’t leave now we will have to put handcuffs on you, and we’ll arrest you. I said, ‘Yes, please. I’m going to be arrested.’ And then they start bringing out the cuffs of theirs – the straps. But I have a really bad shoulder. ‘Can you cuff me in the front?’ ‘Oh, yes. Mr. Danson.’ So to say that I was arrested is a little bit of a wink.”
The “Cheers” alum and Fonda were arrested by United States Capitol Police with crowding, obstructing or incommoding. Fonda also spent the night in jail after the arrest and recounted it to Danson on his podcast “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” when she guested on it.
“I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting. I’m in jail … I’m locked in. Why is there a guard out there?’ But I noticed also there were a lot of posters all over the walls about sexual abuse, if you have been in jail, attacked or anything like that,” she said, before admitting, “I don’t even want to go into it. It was very clear why I was being guarded.”
She added: “Meantime, down the hall, nothing but screams. Psychotic breaks are happening and guys are screaming and screaming and banging the doors, and you realize they should be in another kind of place, like a mental health place. They shouldn’t be in jail. I was the only white person there, and then in the morning I ended up being put some place else with a lot of other prisoners, Black women, and it was, you know, it was really interesting.”
This was not the first arrest Fonda experienced either. It was the fifth time she’d been cuffed by the police and not even the first time she spent time in prison.
“I’d been in jail before in 1970 in Cleveland where I was accused by Nixon of smuggling drugs and I was put in a cell by somebody kicking heroin,” she said. “That was not good and I got roughed up a little, but you know, we get off easy.”
You can watch Danson’s “Dinner’s On Me” appearance in the video above.
