Tycoon's Date With Jane Fonda Did Not Go How He Planned

90-year-old Richard Lugner invited her to Vienna Opera Ball, she 'went rogue'
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 16, 2023 12:07 PM CST
Tycoon's Date With Jane Fonda Did Not Go How He Planned
Jane Fonda, left, and her host, businessman Richard Lugner, right, arrive for a news conference in Vienna on Wednesday.   (AP Photo/Heinz-Peter Bader)

For more than three decades, Richard Lugner has been cajoling famous women—Pamela Anderson, Ivana Trump, Goldie Hawn—to accompany him to the Vienna Opera Ball, and he's still going strong in this tradition at age 90. This year, however, the building contractor managed to recruit what Euronews calls "his most formidable date yet": Jane Fonda, who conceded in a Wednesday presser with Lugner that she accepted his invite to the Austrian event because, well, she needed the cash. Lugner offered to pay the 85-year-old actor and activist "quite a bit of money," and "I support a lot of people," she said, per the AP.

But all was not exactly as it seemed. Fonda apparently "went rogue" on Lugner, per the Irish Times, which notes that she rebuffed the private limo he sent for her upon her arrival in Vienna on Monday and spent the next two days visiting museums and art galleries without him, instead of sticking to their original itinerary. At the Wednesday news conference, Fonda slammed her date, saying he'd been talking behind her back, and mentioned she was "sorry" to have discovered that an Austrian oil and gas company was sponsoring the event.

"These fossil fuel companies are criminal. ... They're killing people," she said, while Lugner stood there with a "tragic smile," per the Times. Later, when asked how he felt about the bait and switch pulled off by Fonda, a known advocate for climate change awareness, he simply said, "I'm happy." This isn't the first time one of Lugner's celebrity dates has gone awry: One of his previous escorts was Kim Kardashian—and it didn't go well. Lindsay Lohan, meanwhile, ended up standing him up. (More Jane Fonda stories.)

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