Before Jane Fonda took the stage to accept her Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2025 SAG Awards, Julia Louis-Dreyfus gave the actress a touching introduction. In it, the Veep star listed all the impressive awards and accomplishments Fonda has received in her career. Among them was Fonda’s Oscar, her Emmy, her many SAG Awards and, rather unexpectedly, making it to Richard Nixon’s “enemy list.”
If you’ve heard that mention and asked yourself what Fonda’s backstory with the former president was, we’ve got you covered. As it turns out, not only did Fonda and Nixon have a known feud, but the actress, who’s a longtime civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental causes activist, sued the former president for harassment in 1973.
According to the original reporting from the New York Times, Fonda sued Nixon, who resigned from office on August 9, 1974, for $ 2.8 million alleging that the president and top government officials conspired to deprive her of her constitutional rights.
“The suit, filed in United States District Court, also named two banks; the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York and the City National Banks of Los Angeles, which allegedly gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation confidential, information on her financial transactions without consulting her,” the outlet reported.
In the years since the lawsuit, Fonda has been outspoken about the alleged crimes committed against her.
“I sued the Nixon administration for doing a number of things,” she told actress Demi Moore for Interview Magazine in 2020. “It was the first time the CIA had gone into a citizen’s bank. They got my bank records. That had never happened before.”
“My home was broken into,” Fonda continued. “I was followed for a number of years. We had a lot of death threats. We had to have someone turn on our car remotely before we would get in it because we were afraid that bombs had been planted.”
As a result, Fonda was black-listed by Hollywood and her career reportedly took a turn. “It was an interesting time, to say the least,” she said. “There wasn’t an official institutionalized blacklist the way there was in the ’50s, but there was kind of a gray list. The studios didn’t really want to work with me. The governor of Maryland issued a proclamation that I was not allowed to come into the state and that my movies were not allowed to be shown there. That kind of thing.”
She then clarified that the crimes against her were known as “COINTELPRO.” “A counterintelligence program that was used against me and Angela Davis, a lot of the Panthers, and a lot of anti-war activists at the time,” she explained.
“I think they felt I was this white, privileged young woman that they could scare away,” she reflected. “But the more they did it, the more I dug my heels in and refused to be intimidated.”
Now, decades later, Fonda still stands tall as a woman, actress, activist and fearless leader of female and civil rights. We applaud her and her decades of hard work. The Lifetime Achievement Award is well deserved!
Before you go, click here to see the best SAG Awards moments of all time.
