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L. Thomas Rouse
Which Hollywood actors or actresses’ careers were ruined because of a lie?
Jean Seberg was a pretty young girl from Iowa who managed to land the title role in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan. Her selection as a total newcomer got great press, but the critics panned both her and the film. A second attempt in a French film did not do much better, and for the next few years, she bounced between French and American cinema before hitting her stride in The Mouse that Roared. Her career was on a steady upward arc through the late 1960s as she appeared in Paint your Wagon and Airport.
Beginning in the late 1960s, she donated to groups that supported the civil rights movement, including the NAACP and various Native American rights groups, which put her on the radar of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. They initiated a COINTELPRO operation against her.
The operation uncovered donations she made to the Black Panther Party and seizing on that, the FBI created a false story that she was made pregnant by Raymond Hewitt, a prominent Black Panther leader. The story was reported by the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. She was pregnant at the time by her husband, Romain Gary, and she became so upset at the stories that she went into premature labor, and the baby died after two days. Seberg and her husband sued Newsweek for defamation and won. Newsweek paid $10,000 in damages and was ordered to print a retraction in their magazine and several newspapers.
But the harassment didn’t stop.
The FBI kept her under aggressive surveillance in that their agents made little to no effort to disguise their presence, her phones were tapped for years, and they enlisted Army Intelligence and the CIA to keep her under watch when she was abroad. Records released under FOIA requests revealed Hoover kept the Nixon White House apprised of the status of her case through reports to John Ehrlichman.
At the peak of her career and the height of the FBI harassment, her roles in Hollywood suddenly dried up. She was being offered parts that, in her words, bordered on pornography or were minor characters. Researchers who have reviewed the records of the operation believe she was effectively blacklisted because no production company wanted to deal with the FBI harassing their productions. She moved to France, where she spent the rest of her life.
On August 30, 1979, her body was found wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of her car in Paris, not far from her home. There was a note to her son found with the remains, a bottle of pills, and an empty mineral water bottle. The following year, charges were filed against “persons unknown” for failing to provide assistance to an endangered person. Her autopsy revealed a blood alcohol level that would have prevented her from getting into the car by herself, but there were no alcohol containers found. The French police surmised someone must have put her in the car and left her. Her first husband, Romain Gary said that the FBI harassment was the primary cause of the mental health issues she experienced in her last years.
The FBI not only ruined an innocent person’s career with their lies, they effectively took her life.
