Fox News host Bill O'Reilly continued to promote a discredited story that while she was visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda passed secret notes from American prisoners of war to their Vietnamese captors, resulting in the POWs' torture and murder. O'Reilly pressed his case even as his guest, Reason magazine editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie, noted that “the story has been debunked.”

In fact, the sole survivor of the supposed incident, Col. Larry Carrigan, told David Emery of the Urban Legends and Folklore website at about.com, that "[i]t's a figment of somebody's imagination" and that he “never met Jane Fonda,” as Media Matters for America has documented.

From the May 17 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

GILLESPIE: I think there are two questions there, and one is about Cambodia and one is about Vietnam. And let me put it this way: I think she was right to be against the war and to be against the draft. I think she made the mistake of becoming a positive fan of the Vietnamese, of the North Vietnamese.

O'REILLY: Yes, she crossed the line.

GILLESPIE: But -- but here is -- and certainly, one of the things that's fascinating about the book [Fonda's autobiography, My Life So Far (Random House, April 2005)] is when she talks about visiting Hanoi in 1972, which is the reason why we still talk about her and why she's such a large --

O'REILLY: Yes, but Mr. Gillespie, you're giving her too much credit. Hold on just for a second. You're giving her too much credit. She didn't talk about the big thing that she did wrong, and that's the messages that were slipped to her by the POWs --

GILLESPIE: Yes, but that story's not true.

O'REILLY: Well, it is true according to the POWs. See? They believe --

GILLESPIE: That story has been debunked.

O'REILLY: By whom?

GILLESPIE: By -- if you go to Snopes.com. The urban --

O'REILLY: Who?

GILLESPIE: Snopes.com.

O'REILLY: Snope? See, look, I'm believing -- I'm believing the guys who were there. I'm not going to believe Snope.com.

GILLESPIE: OK, well, Bill, if you don't -- if you read any -- any history of the Vietnamese War that talks about that, it is absolutely not true. And you know, I'm not -- I don't have any stock in Jane Fonda.

O'REILLY: Just to clear the air here --

GILLESPIE: Bill --

O'REILLY: -- the POWs themselves stand by the story and say that their interrogators told them what happened.

GILLESPIE: Yes, but others -- others in the same group say they weren't.

O'REILLY: Who? Can you give me a name?

GILLESPIE: No, I can't. I can't give you a name.

O'REILLY: Come on.

GILLESPIE: But do you believe everything that the Vietnam vets against the war said?

O'REILLY: I've got to believe the guys who were there, and they are almost 100 percent the most embittered crew against her.

GILLESPIE: Look --

O'REILLY: Your article is interesting, but I'm not giving her a pass on it. I'm not. I'm not going to give her a pass on it. I'm going to believe the guys who were there -- John McCain.

Snopes.com, the urban legends website that Gillespie cited, concluded that the story that “Jane Fonda handed over to their captors the slips of paper POWs pressed upon her” is false:

The most serious accusations in the piece quoted above, that Fonda turned over slips of paper furtively given her by American POWs to the North Vietnamese and that several POWs were beaten to death as a result, are untrue. Those named in the inflammatory e-mail categorically deny the events they supposedly were part of.

The site provides Carrigan's denial and also noted the following statement from Mike McGrath, former president of the veterans organization Nam-POWs:

Please excuse the generic response, but I have been swamped with so many e-mails on the subject of the Jane Fonda article (Carrigan, Driscoll, strips of paper, torture and deaths of POWs, etc.) that I have to resort to this pre-scripted rebuttal. The truth is that most of this never happened. This is a hoax story placed on the internet by unknown Fonda haters. No one knows who initiated the story. Please assist by not propagating the story. Fonda did enough bad things to assure her a correct place in the garbage dumps of history. We don't want to be party to false stories, which could be used as an excuse that her real actions didn't really happen either. I have spoken with all the parties named: Carrigan, Driscoll, et al. They all state that this particular internet story is a hoax and they wish to disassociate their names from the false story.

Snopes.com, run by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson, describes itself as a set of “reference” pages for urban legends. Major media outlets have cited it repeatedly, including news articles in the Washington Post [3/18/05], the New York Times [3/11/04], and the Associated Press [3/21/04].

In addition, on the April 14 edition MSNBC'S Hardball, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said of Fonda's visit to Hanoi, “Look, I didn't like it. I don't like it. But for me to hold a grudge against her, I think, you know, it's a waste of time.” During that show, Matthews correctly noted that Fonda had visited American POWs while she was in Hanoi, but Matthews did not mention, and McCain did not bring up, the note-passing story. A further search* of the Nexis database for evidence that McCain has promoted the story, as O'Reilly suggested, produced only a anti-Fonda rant by Fox News analyst David Hunt, which Media Matters has refuted.

* Nexis search string was “McCain w/20 (note! or message!) w/20 (prisoner or POW) w/30 Fonda” on the all news source for all available dates.