Jane Fonda says she was raped; sexually abused as child

March 3 (UPI) -- Hollywood superstar Jane Fonda says she was raped and sexually abused in the past.

The 79-year-old actress opened up about her history with sexual abuse in the March 2 issue of The Edit while discussing feminism with Room star Brie Larson.

"I grew up in the '50s and it took me a long time to apply feminism to my life," Fonda told Larson. "Eventually I decided I wasn't going to give up who I was in order to please the man I was with ... It took a long time, though, because I was brought up with the disease to please."

"To show you the extent to which a patriarchy takes a toll on females; I've been raped, I've been sexually abused as a child and I've been fired because I wouldn't sleep with my boss and I always thought it was my fault; that I didn't do or say the right thing," she confessed.

"I know young girls who've been raped and didn't even know it was rape," the star added. "One of the great things the women's movement has done is to make us realize that [rape and abuse is] not our fault. We were violated and it's not right."

Fonda, who split from music producer Richard Perry in January after eight years of dating, is a longtime supporter of women's causes, including V-Day, and co-founded the Women's Media Center in 2005. She previously discussed her "convoluted journey to feminism" in an essay for Lenny Letter in 2016.

"When I turned 60 and entered my third and final act, I decided that, no matter how scary it was, I needed to heal the wounds patriarchy had dealt me. I didn't want to come to the end of my life without doing all I could to become a whole, full-voiced woman," the star wrote.

"The personal became political, and I became an embodied feminist. I had gone from believing that women's issues were a distraction, mere ancillary problems to be addressed after everything else had been taken care of, to the realization that women are the issue, the core issue," she said.

Fonda plays Grace Hanson on the Netflix series Grace and Frankie, which will return for a third season March 24. She will also appear in the movie Our Souls at Night with Judy Greer and Robert Redford.