The actor who injured Jane Fonda and refused to apologise: “It cut me open across my eye”
If you’re planning to injure Jane Fonda, first of all, what is wrong with you? And second of all, you’d better apologise. After more than six decades in the business and two Academy Awards to her name, she deserves to be bowed to, not assaulted.
Fonda’s career took off in the 1960s, with movies like Cat Ballou and Barefoot in the Park launching her to global stardom that eclipsed even her famous father’s Hollywood profile. With roles in all-time classics like 9 to 5, she became industry royalty for generations of movie fans.
Like any hard-working actor, Fonda’s filmography has had its ups and downs, and sadly, her violent incident with a co-star occurred in a movie that absolutely did not need to be made. The 2005 film Monster-in-Law stars Jennifer Lopez as an innocent young woman who becomes engaged to a man with no personality. Unfortunately for them, his mother (Fonda), is exploding with unexplained hatred for her future daughter-in-law and will do anything to stop the marriage from happening.
The whole thing is based on a broad, reductive stereotype that was stretched into an utterly superfluous 101 minutes, but apparently, Lopez decided to go Method at just the wrong moment. Speaking on The Drew Barrymore Show in 2023, Fonda remembered the event.
“We have a slapping scene – I slap her, she slaps me,” she said. “Well, Jennifer, as per Jennifer, she had this enormous diamond ring, and so when she slapped me one of the times, it cut open across my eye — my eyebrow.” Even more astonishingly, Fonda revealed that Lopez never apologised.
The ability to slap an actor of Jane Fonda’s calibre and not fall into a puddle of remorse – let alone not even apologise – should be studied by scientists. Unfortunately, Barrymore didn’t follow up with “And how did you exact your revenge?” But the gasps from the audience suggest that they, at least, recognised the gravity of the moment. Lopez went on to earn a well-deserved ‘Worst Actress’ nomination at the Razzies that year, though she arguably deserved worse.
It might be surprising to learn that there was a lawsuit relating to Monster-in-Law and that it didn’t have anything to do with the slapping incident. Instead, it was, rather mind-blowingly, a liable suit. According to Sheri Gilbert, a woman in North Carolina, the plot was eerily similar to a script she had written based on her own experience. She wasn’t messing around, either. Her lawsuit named over 50 defendants, including Fonda, Lopez, director Robert Luketic, producers Chris Bender, JC Spink, and Paula Weinstein, and, just for good measure, New Line Cinema and Warner Bros.
Not surprisingly, the defence attorneys in the case were supremely unimpressed. “Plaintiff contends that she can ‘own’ the well-worn, general ‘mother-in-law’ character type simply by filing a copyright application,” their response said. “Such is not the law.” The case backfired for Gilbert. In the end, not only was it thrown out of court, but she was forced to pay nearly $900,000 to the defendants for wasting everyone’s time.
