Jane Fonda has complained in a 7.16 Wrap article about QVC having cancelled an appearance today on the network to promote “Prime Time,” her book about aging and fitness. She says QVC has caved in to right-wing pressure.

“The network said they got a lot of calls yesterday criticizing me for my opposition to the Vietnam War and threatening to boycott the show if I was allowed to appear,” Fonda writes. “I am, to say the least, deeply disappointed that QVC caved to this kind of insane pressure by some well-funded and organized political extremist groups. And that they did it without talking to me first.

“Most people don’t buy into the far-right lies,” she states, adding that “the bottom line” is that “this has gone on far too long, this spreading of lies about me! None of it is true. NONE OF IT! I love my country. I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us.”

Lies and exaggerations have, I gather, been pushed by Fonda’s right-wing antagonists. But the thing that created the strongest anti-Fonda sentiments is a photo taken of her sitting at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, and not over Fonda’s general opposition to the Vietnam War. What she said in a statement she read from Hanoi was, by my sights, humane and compassionate and correct and prophetic. But the photo is what stuck in people’s mind. Posing for it, Fonda has said, was not a wise thing.

Fonda’s Wiki bio recounts what she said about this in a 1988 interview with Barbara Walters: “I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I’m very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families. I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless.”

Here’s a transcript of a statement she made while visiting Hanoi in August 1972.