Jane Fonda compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler at the Women’s Media Awards on Thursday.
Before Jane Fonda saw Donald Trump as Adolf Hitler, she saw Jim Jones as a hero.
“We are familiar with the work of Reverend Jones and Peoples Temple,” Fonda, along with husband Tom Hayden, San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, reporter Paul Avery, California assemblyman Willie Brown, and other progressives, avowed 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.”
Fonda denied joining Peoples Temple. She did attend a Temple service. In researching
Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco, Jane Fonda’s name came up repeatedly, albeit no less shockingly each time, as a devoted supporter of Jim Jones. And other researchers uncovered a particularly damning letter sent after her visit to Peoples Temple: “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.”
Jim Jones certainly thought of her as a member of his flock. At an anti-suicide event at Golden Gate Bridge in 1977, Jones cited Fonda as a reason for releasing him from the doldrums. The Peoples Temple leader noted, eerily in light of the mass suicide at Jonestown, that “at one time or other we have all felt the alienation and despair. I think the despair got to me yesterday. If it hadn’t been for an Academy Award winning actress joining our church … I think I would have been in a suicidal mood myself today for perhaps the first time in my life, so I have a particular and personal empathy for what we are doing here today.”
In Jonestown, Peoples Temple screened the Jane Fonda film
Julia. “I was of course particularly interested,” Temple member Edith Roller reflected in her diary, “because of the connection of Fonda with the Temple.” The Temple viewed Fonda as so important that they assigned her a codename—Xavier—for use on shortwave transmissions between Guyana and the United States.
Daniel Flynn: Before Jane Fonda Called Trump Hitler, She Called Jim Jones a Hero
