Jane Fonda Shares the One Thing That Made Little Impression on Her Fellow Inmates

On Wednesday, Jane Fonda opened up about her 2019 prison stint on Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s podcast “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.”

The 86-year-old Oscar winner revealed that she was the only white woman on her block that night and that no one she met seemed to care who she was — except for her relationship with Jennifer Lopez.

“They might not have cared who I was. They had more important things to think about, and none of them had seen any of my movies,” Fonda began. “Jennifer Lopez, yes. They had seen ‘Monster-in-Law.’ I pulled that card and they were slightly impressed, but not really. They came back and told me what they were struggling with, which was the struggles of survival. It was an eye-opener, I’ll tell you.”

The conversation began with Fonda recounting her experience with Danson, who was arrested with her in 2019 during a climate protest in Washington, D.C. Fonda was jailed overnight after being charged by U.S. Capitol Police with mobbing, obstructing, or impeding, her fifth arrest.

“We’re white and famous. We’ll never really know what it’s like to be black or brown in this country,” Fonda says at the beginning of the clip.

“And most people in this world, especially people of color, get arrested in other ways,” Danson said.

“And yet, there’s something very liberating about engaging in civil disobedience. It’s like putting your whole body on the line, where your deepest values ​​are, and you don’t get many opportunities in life to do that,” Fonda reflected, nodding to her decades of wide-ranging activism. “Even if we’re treated okay once we’re there because they don’t want to make a fuss because we’re white and famous, it still, as you said, matters.”

Danson asked Fonda what that night in prison was like, because “I’ve never asked you that before.” Fonda recounted that a female guard watched over her that night — she later realized it was probably for her own safety.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting. I’m in prison… I’m locked up. Why is there a guard there?’ But I also noticed that there were a lot of posters on the walls about sexual harassment, if you’ve been in prison or assaulted or something like that,” she said, before admitting: “I don’t even want to get into that. It was clear why I was being guarded.”

Fonda continued, “Meanwhile, in the hallway, there’s just screaming. There’s these psychotic breaks and guys are screaming and shouting and banging on the doors, and you realize they should be somewhere else, like a mental health facility. They shouldn’t be in prison. I was the only white person there, and in the morning I ended up in another place with a lot of other inmates, black women, and it was, you know, really interesting.”

The actress explained that this isn’t her first time in prison. “I’d been in prison before in 1970 in Cleveland, where I was accused of drug smuggling by Nixon and someone who was coming off heroin put me in a cell,” she said. “It wasn’t good and I got a little roughed up, but you know, we got off easy.”

Watch the entire clip of “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” a new production from SiriusXM and Team CoCo, in the video above.