Actor Jane Fonda, 87, is a climate-change hero among Democrats
Celebrated for decades as Hollywood royalty, Jane Fonda could easily be living a comfortable life of extravagance and leisure.
Instead, the 87-year-old actor and Vietnam War-era provocateur is as likely to be seen knocking on voters’ doors in Phoenix on a balmy summer afternoon as sashaying down a red carpet at a glitzy movie premiere.
Politically active for more than a half-century, Fonda is now focusing her energy, celebrity, connections and resources on fighting climate change and combating the “existential crises” created by President Trump.
Calling fossil fuels a threat to humanity, Fonda created JanePAC, a political action committee that has spent millions on candidates at the forefront of that fight.
“Nature has always been in my bones, in my cells,” Fonda said in a recent interview, describing herself as an environmentalist since her tomboy youth. “And then, about 10 years ago … I started reading more, and I realized what we’re doing to the climate, which means what we’re doing to us, what we’re doing to the future, to our grandchildren and our children.
“Our existence is being challenged all because an industry, the fossil-fuel industry, wants to make more money,” she said. “I mean, I try to understand what, what must they think when they go to sleep at night? These men, they’re destroying everything.”
Rather than hosting fancy political fundraisers or headlining presidential campaign rallies, Fonda devotes her efforts to electing like-minded state legislators, city council members, utility board officials and candidates in other less flashy but critical races.
Fonda said her organization took its cue from successful GOP tactics.
“I hate to say this, but you know, in terms of playing the long game, the Republicans have been better than the Democrats,” she said. “They started to work down ballot, and they took over state legislatures. They took over governorships and mayors and city councils, boards of supervisors, and before we knew what had happened, they had power on the grassroots level.”
Fonda said her PAC selects candidates to back based on their climate-change record and viability. The beneficiaries include candidates running for state legislature and city council. Some of the races are often obscure, such as the Silver River Project board (an Arizona utility), the Port of Bellingham commission in Washington and the Lane Community College board in Oregon.
“Down ballot, if you come in, especially for primaries, you can really make a difference. You know, not all Democrats are the same,” she said. “We want candidates who have shown public courage in standing up to fossil fuels. We want candidates who can win. We’re not a protest PAC. We’re in it to win it.”
On Wednesday, Fonda announced that she is relaunching the Committee for the First Amendment, which was initially formed after the blacklisting of Hollywood actors, directors, screenwriters and others who were labeled communists or sympathizers by the House Un-American Activities Committee after World War II.
Her father, the late actor Henry Fonda, was among the members of the committee.
“The McCarthy Era ended when Americans from across the political spectrum finally came together and stood up for the principles in the Constitution against the forces of repression,” Fonda said. “Those forces have returned. And it is our turn to stand together in defense of our constitutional rights.”
The Trump administration has pressured media companies, law firms and universities to concede to its demands or face repercussions. The suspension of ABC’s late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel, which has been rescinded, is among the most prominent examples.
“The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry,” Fonda said.
Since her birth, Fonda’s life has been infused by political activism.
Her father witnessed the lynching of a Black man during the 1919 Omaha race riots when he was 14, casting him into becoming a lifelong liberal.
Though such matters were not discussed at the dinner table, Fonda’s father raised money for Democratic candidates and starred in politically imbued films such as “The Grapes of Wrath,” about the exploitation of migrant workers during the Dust Bowl, and “12 Angry Men,” which focused on prejudice, groupthink and the importance of due process during the McCarthy era.
But his daughter Jane did not become politically active until her early 30s.
“Before then, I kind of led a life of ignorance, somewhat hedonistic,” she said. “Maybe deep down, I knew that once I know something, I can’t turn away.”
In “Prime Time,” Fonda’s 2011 memoir, she describes the final chapter of her life as a time of “coming to fruition rather than simply a period of marking time, or the absence of youth.”
“Unlike during childhood, Act III is a quiet ripening. It takes time and experience, and yes, perhaps the inevitable slowing down,” she wrote. “You have to learn to sort out what’s fundamentally important to you from what’s irrelevant.”
In 1972, Fonda appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Tout Va Bien,” about workers’ rights in the aftermath of widespread street protests in France four years earlier. It was her first role in a political movie and coincided with her off-screen move into activism.
Fonda’s most noteworthy and reviled political moment occurred the same year, when she was photographed by the North Vietnamese sitting atop an antiaircraft gun.
Actor and political activist Jane Fonda at a news conference in New York City on July 28, 1972. Fonda spoke about her trip to North Vietnam and interviews with American prisoners in Hanoi, Vietnam.
(Marty Lederhandler / Associated Press)
The images led to Fonda being tarred as “Hanoi Jane” and a traitor to the United States, which had deployed millions of American soldiers to Southeast Asia, many of whom never returned. Fonda says it is something she “will regret to my dying day.”
“It is possible that it was a setup, that the Vietnamese had it all planned,” Fonda wrote in 2011. “I will never know. But if they did, I can’t blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake.”
Fonda married liberal activist Tom Hayden in 1973. He served in the California Legislature for 18 years and was a force in Democratic politics until his death in 2016.
Fonda’s political beliefs have been a through line in her Hollywood career.
In 1979, she played a reporter in “The China Syndrome,” a film about a fictional meltdown at a nuclear power plant near Los Angeles. The movie’s theatrical release occurred less than two weeks before the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
The 1980 movie “9 to 5,” starring Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, was a biting comedy that highlighted the treatment of women in the workplace and income inequality long before such issues were routinely discussed in workplaces.
Dolly Parton, left, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda are harassed office workers in the 1980 movie “9 to 5.”
(20th Century Fox)
Two years later, as home VCRs grew popular, Fonda created exercise videos that shattered sales records.
She urged women to “feel the burn,” and revenue from the videos funded the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a political action committee founded by Fonda and Hayden.
This year, Fonda offered signed copies to donors to JanePAC, which she created in 2022.
“I’m still in shock that those leg warmers and leotards caught on the way they did,” Fonda wrote to supporters in April. “If you’ve ever done one of my leg lifts, or even thought about doing one, now’s your chance to own a piece of that history.”
UCLA lecturer Jim Newton, a veteran Los Angeles Times political journalist and historian of the state’s politics, described Fonda as confrontational, controversial and unapologetic.
“She’s remarkable, utterly admirable, a principled person who has devoted her life to fighting for what she believes in,” said Newton, who quotes Fonda in his new book, “Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening.”
Newton added that Fonda’s outspoken nature certainly harmed her career.
“I’m sure that there are directors, producers, whatnot, especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s, who passed on chances to work with her because of her politics,” he said. “And I’m sure she knew that, right? She did it. It’s not been without sacrifice. She’s true to herself, like very few people.”
A year after Fonda and Hayden divorced in 1990, she married CNN founder and philanthropist Ted Turner, who she once described as “my favorite ex-husband.” Though Fonda largely paused her acting career during their decade-long marriage, she remained politically active.
In 1995, Fonda founded a Georgia effort dedicated to reducing teenage pregnancy. Five years later, she launched the Jane Fonda Center for Reproductive Health at Emory University.
After Fonda and Turner divorced, she worked with Tomlin on raising the minimum wage in Michigan and then launched Fire Drill Fridays — acts of civil disobedience — with Greenpeace in 2019.
Jane Fonda speaks during a rally before a march from the U.S. Capitol to the White House as part of her “Fire Drill Fridays” rally protesting against climate change on Nov. 8, 2019.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Fonda said she decided to create her political action committee after facing headwinds persuading Gov. Gavin Newsom to create setbacks for oil wells in 2020.
“He wasn’t moving on it, and somebody very high up in his campaign said to us, ‘You can have millions of people in your organization all over California, but you don’t have a big enough carrot or stick to move the governor. … You don’t have an electoral strategy,’” Fonda recalled. “Since we’ve started the PAC, it’s interesting how politicians deal with us differently. They know that we’ve got money. They know that we have tens of thousands of volunteers all over the country.”
Initially concentrated on climate change, JanePAC has expanded its focus since Trump was reelected in November.
“We’re facing two existential crises, climate and democracy, and it’s now or never for both,” Fonda said. “We can’t have a stable democracy with an unstable climate, and we can’t have a stable climate unless we have a democracy, And so we have to fight both together.”
Fonda’s PAC has raised more than $9 million since its creation through June 30, according to the Federal Election Commission.
In 2024, JanePAC supported 154 campaigns and won 96 of those races. The committee gave nearly $700,000 directly to campaigns and helped raise more than $1.1 million for their endorsed candidates and ballot measures. In 2025, they have endorsed 63 campaigns and plan to soon launch get-out-the-vote efforts in support of Proposition 50, Newsom’s ballot measure to redraw California’s congressional districts that will appear on the November ballot.
Arizona state Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, the minority leader in the state’s House of Representatives, recalled Fonda’s support during the 2024 election, not only for his reelection bid but also a broader effort to try to win Democratic control of the state Legislature.
In addition to raising $500,000 at a Phoenix event for candidates, De Los Santos recalled the actor spending days knocking on Arizona voters’ doors.
“It is a moral validator to have Jane Fonda support your campaigns, especially at a time when corporate interests have more money and more power than ever, having somebody in your corner who’s been on the right side of history for decades,” said De Los Santos, who represents a south Phoenix district deeply affected by environmental justice issues.
Voters are often stunned when Fonda shows up on their doorstep.
“I’ve had people walking out of their laundry room and dropping all the laundry,” Fonda said with a laugh.
But others don’t know who she is and Fonda doesn’t tell them.
Jane Fonda
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s amazing. You wouldn’t think that in just a few minutes on someone’s doorstep, you can really find out a lot,” Fonda said, recalling discovering her love of canvassing when she was married to Hayden.”I loved talking to people and finding out what they care about and what they’re scared of and what they’re angry about.”
Fonda does not walk in lockstep with the Democratic party. In 2023, she joined other climate-change activists protesting a big-money Joe Biden fundraiser. They argued that the then-president had strayed from the environmental promises he made when he ran for election, such as by approving a massive oil drilling project on the North Slope of Alaska.
Fonda said she supported Biden’s 2024 reelection despite disagreeing with some of his policies because of the threat she believed Trump poses.
“When you see what the choice was, of course you’re going to vote,” she said. “I get so mad at people who say, you know, ‘I don’t like him, so I’m not going to vote.’ [A] young person said to me, we already have fascism. They don’t know history. You know, we don’t teach civics anymore, so they don’t understand that what’s happening now is leading to fascism. I mean, this is real tyranny.”
But she also faulted Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris after she became the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for failing to speak to the economic pain being experienced by Americans who backed Trump.
“They’re not all MAGA,” she said.
Many were just angry and hurting, she said, because they couldn’t afford groceries or pay medical bills. Fonda believes many now have buyer’s remorse.
Fonda reflected on the parallels between the turmoil in the 1960s and today. In the interview, which took place before the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, she argued that today’s political climate is more perilous.
“I’m not sure that what we have right now in the U.S. is a democracy,” she said. “It’s far graver. Far, far graver now than it was.”
Fonda said she remains driven, not by blind optimism, but by immersing herself in work that she believes makes a difference.
“This is what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life,” she said.
