Jane Fonda Supports Megyn Kelly Despite Plastic Surgery Feud: ‘I Feel Badly… I Wanted Her to Make It’

Jane Fond is standing behind her former rival Megyn Kelly following blackface comments that led to Kelly’s Today exit.

Speaking with Entertainment Tonight Thursday night’s Women’s Media Center Awards in New York City, the 80-year-old actress admitted that she feels “badly” for Kelly following the recent cancellation of her show, Megyn Kelly Today, prompted by her controversial comments about wearing blackface for Halloween.

“I feel badly, because, you know, I wanted her to make it, I did,” Fonda told the outlet. “That’s always how everyone learns is through making mistakes, you know. It’s through failure that we grow and learn. I know that has been true for me, and I think it is for everybody.”

Fonda had been at the center of one of Kelly’s first scandals on her hour of Today after the host asked the Grace and Frankie actress about her plastic surgery during an interview in September of 2017, the same week that Kelly’s show premiered.

“You admit you’ve had work done, which I think is to your credit, I think you look amazing,” Kelly said during the interview, which was supposed to focus on her recent film, Our Souls at Night. “Why did you say, I read that you said, you’re not proud to admit you had work done. Why not?”

Fonda was noticeably uncomfortable by the comment and attempted to get the interview back on track by asking, “We really want to talk about that right now?”

Fonda later dubbed the interview as “inappropriate,” telling Variety that “it showed that she’s not that good of an interviewer.”

In January 2018, Kelly finally acknowledge the awkward situation, which had prompted backlash from both celebrities and viewers.

“The truth is, most older women look nothing like Fonda, who is now 80,” the former Fox News anchor said on her show. “And if Fonda really wants to have an honest discussion about older women’s cultural face, then her plastic surgery is tough to ignore. Fonda herself knows this, and that is why — to her credit — she’s discussed her cosmetic surgery pretty much everywhere before coming on our show. Apparently when she came here, however, again to promote her film about aging, I was supposed to discern that this subject was suddenly off-limits.”

Kelly has found herself and her show at the subject of a number of controversies since its premiere, though her recent comments alleging that blackface was “OK as long as you were dressing up like a character” when she was a child seemed to be the breaking point, with NBC pulling the show.