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Henry Mark and Erika Holzer: Jane Fonda: Guilty as Charged

Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, in the Frontpagemag.com (6-11-05)

For three decades Jane Fonda obfuscated, distorted and lied about virtually everything connected with her wartime trip to
North Vietnam: her motive, her acts, her intent, and her contribution to the Communists’ war effort. With the aid of clever handlers, she so successfully suppressed and spun her conduct in Hanoi that many Americans didn’t know what she had done there, and, more important, the legal significance.

Three years ago, our book, “Aid and Comfort”: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam (McFarland & Co.), laid bare the incontrovertible facts, applied the American law of treason to them —and proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Jane Fonda should have been indicted for (and would have been convicted of) treason.

With the recent publication of Fonda’s autobiography, My Life So Far —which, with one minor exception, does not contain a single cited source to support any claim she makes in her text, or any quotation she uses—the woman justly dubbed “Hanoi Jane” makes statements and provides details that inadvertently lend support to every key charge against her.

Especially noteworthy is that she devotes 50 pages of her nearly 600 page book—which spans about seventy years of her life—to the two-week trip to Communist North Vietnam that tarnished her public image forever. One of these chapters is called “Framed” which is a pun referring to the infamous photograph of her sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-craft gun and also the characteristically perverse claim of innocence by a defendant whom that same photograph has caught in the act. Since her conduct in wartime Vietnam continues to inflame Americans – vets harassed and even spat on her during her book tour -- and to dog her heels at every turn, one might have expected her to put some substance into her account of this period in her life. Instead, the public is served up with lies that are transparent and omissions designed to bury the truth.

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