“Make no mistake: empathy is not weak or woke,” Jane Fonda explained upon accepting a Lifetime Achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild this weekend. “And, by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
The 87-year-old actress told fellow members of her guild, “Community means power.”
She learned this, or did not, the hard way half a lifetime ago.
In 1977, after attending service at Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in San Francisco, Fonda wrote the cult leader, “How deeply moved I was by the experience that Sunday — the atmosphere, the obvious need you have so remarkably filled in thousands of lives, how humanly, passionately, and articulately you have redefined the role of the Church, Christ, religion — I also recommit myself to your congregation as an active full participant — not only for myself, but because I want my two children to have the experience.”
She assured Jones that “when we get back we will return to the Temple” after filming wrapped on her next movie.
Jones cited “an Academy Award-winning actress joining our church” as one of his motivations for continuing his work.
When reporters exposed misdeeds in the Temple, Fonda ran interference.
“We are familiar with the work of Reverend Jones and Peoples Temple,” Fonda, along with husband Tom Hayden, San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, California assemblyman Willie Brown, and other left-wingers, wrote in a public statement in 1977, “and have no hesitancy in commending them for their example in setting a high standard of ethics and morality in the community and also for providing enormous material assistance to poor, minority and disadvantaged people in every area of human need.”
And those “poor, minority and disadvantaged people” looked at the rich, often white, advantaged people supporting the Temple as a reason to stay in it and as evidence of Jim Jones’s power should they ever think about getting out of it.
Jones eventually grew frustrated with Fonda and denounced her as a “sellout.” Fonda never, at least in public, returned the favor by expressing frustration with Jones and denouncing him during his life.
I detailed the Bay Area left’s love affair with this mass murderer in Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco. Fonda’s admirers act — and deserve awards for the acting — as though these inconvenient truths never occurred. But they did. And Fonda refuses to own up to this dark, horrific portion of her past.
Given her outspokenness on unions, Vietnam, Donald Trump, and almost any hot-button issue one can imagine, Fonda remaining silent on Peoples Temple and her role as a booster seems not just out of character but cowardly. She used her celebrity to burnish the image of a rapist, kidnapper, and murderer. Then, when he orchestrated the murders of more than 900 people in Guyana in November of 1978, she did not apologize as loudly as she had promoted Jim Jones. If she had said sorry at all, it escaped widespread notice.
Her letter pledging membership in the Peoples Temple for her and her kids did not follow Jane Fonda. In fact, the Academy awarded her an Oscar the following year. Probably that’s for the best, as awards recognize good acting and not political wisdom (and Ms. Fonda acts very well). But what explains the continued compulsion to provide this foolish — there is no fool like an old fool — woman a perch upon which to pontificate? Long before she won Sunday’s Lifetime Achievement Award, she bestowed a lifetime shut-up award upon herself by championing the cause of Jim Jones and blinding herself to his misdeeds merely because he subscribed to the same progressive tenets as she did.
“This is big-time serious folks,” she told her fellow screen actors on Sunday. “So, let’s be brave. We must stay in community. We must help the vulnerable.”
If only Jane Fonda had heeded her own advice 57 years ago. So many African Americans and senior citizens — who disproportionately constituted the ranks of Peoples Temple — might have lived had she used her celebrity on their behalf instead of on behalf of their captor.
It’s never too late, even at 87, to say sorry.
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