Scandal, Obsession and a Shocking New Claim
The man who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan is back in the headlines again, this time with a disturbing claim about one of Hollywood’s most private icons, Jodie Foster.
In a new interview promoting his memoir, John Hinckley Jr. tells TMZ he believes his attempt on Reagan’s life and his public fixation on Foster are the reason she is attracted to women. It is a theory rooted in his own obsession, not in anything Foster has ever said about herself.
Hinckley insists that dragging her into his violent fantasy scarred her so deeply that she “turned away from men and became a lesbian.” TMZ reports that Foster’s representatives declined to comment, leaving his words hanging in the air as his version of events, not hers.
‘Taxi Driver’ Fixation Becomes Real Life
According to Hinckley, it all began when he saw Foster in the film “Taxi Driver” in 1976. He says he became obsessed with the teenage star and with the movie’s disturbed loner, Travis Bickle, who plots to shoot a presidential candidate after being rejected by his love interest.
Hinckley says that while Foster attended Yale University, he went to the college registrar’s office, obtained her dorm and phone number, called her and slipped poems under her door. TMZ writes, “John says he was obsessed with Jodie ever since 1976,” and he admits he never even asked her on a date because she did not seem interested.
Instead, Hinckley says he sank deeper into depression, delusion and fantasy. He tells TMZ he saw himself as Bickle, and that he believed he “could impress Jodie by killing the president.”
Trying To Impress Her by Shooting a President
Hinckley explains that he decided to copy the twisted storyline he thought he saw in “Taxi Driver.” In the film, Bickle ultimately does not shoot the candidate, but he becomes a local hero after killing the men who are exploiting Foster’s character, Iris, a young girl forced into prostitution. On screen, his love interest seems impressed.
In Hinckley’s mind, he could rewrite his own life the same way. He tells TMZ he took a bus from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. in March 1981 with a single goal, to assassinate President Reagan and finally win over Foster’s attention.
He says he sold two .38 caliber guns to pay for his bus ticket and lodging in Washington, then went to the Hilton Hotel where Reagan was speaking, carrying a .22 caliber revolver in the crowd outside.
Hinckley recalls thinking Reagan was waving directly at him when the presidential motorcade arrived. He says he waited until after the speech, then as Reagan walked past, he pulled out the revolver and fired six shots within seconds. The bullets wounded Reagan, police officer Thomas Delahanty, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and White House press secretary James Brady.
Hinckley tells TMZ he assumed the Secret Service would kill him on the spot. Instead, he says the crowd around him tackled and beat him until agents handcuffed him and took him to jail.
In court, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a mental institution for more than three decades. Hinckley now says the jury “got his verdict correct.”
The Bizarre Claim About Jodie Foster
After spending more than 30 years in psychiatric care, Hinckley is now speaking at length to TMZ while promoting “John Hinckley Jr.: Who I Really Am” and revealing what he calls a long-held theory about Foster’s personal life.
Hinckley claims that when he first fixated on her, Foster was dating men. He argues that she “only became a lesbian” in the years after his assassination attempt and his relentless public obsession dragged her name into one of the most infamous crimes in American political history.
Foster, who has long guarded her privacy, spoke openly about being gay during a Golden Globes speech, thanking those closest to her and referencing her family on stage. Hinckley is now trying to stitch that moment into his own narrative, telling TMZ this is the first time he has ever publicly shared his belief that he somehow influenced her sexuality.
There is no evidence to support his claim, and Foster herself has never tied her identity or her relationships to Hinckley’s violence. Her team declined to engage with his theory at all.
Life After a Not Guilty Verdict
Hinckley tells TMZ he has been on anti-depressants for many years and that he currently chooses to take Zoloft and Risperdal for anxiety. He spent more than 30 years in psychiatric care after the verdict, and now he is presenting himself as a medicated man looking back on the wreckage of his past.
What his new remarks make brutally clear is how fully he once blurred the line between fiction and reality, between a young actress doing her job on a film set and a stranger who decided her existence was his to rewrite.
His “Taxi Driver” fantasy left real people bleeding on a sidewalk and sent a president to the hospital. It turned a college student into a central figure in a crime she never chose, then followed her name for decades as she built a career on performances, awards and work entirely separate from that nightmare.
Now, as Hinckley promotes “John Hinckley Jr.: Who I Really Am,” the most jarring part of his story is not just the violence. It is the way he still tries to fold Jodie Foster into his own mythology, even as she remains silent. Her life and identity are hers alone. The rest is his delusion laid bare for everyone to see.
