Teen actress Jodie Foster said Wednesday she cried upon learning she had received ‘love-type’ fan mail from the man accused of trying to kill President Reagan, but that none of the letters mentioned Reagan or any assassination plot.

‘In none of these letters and notes … was any mention, reference, or implication ever made as to violent acts against anyone, nor was the president ever mentioned,’ the 18-year-old Miss Foster told a news briefing.

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Miss Foster, a freshman drama student at Yale University who played a 12-year-old prostitute in the 1976 movie ‘Taxi Driver,’ confirmed she received last September and again early in March letters and notes signed either by a John W. Hinckley, or with the initials J.W.H.

‘I have never met, spoken to, or in any way associated with one John W. Hinckley,’ Miss Foster said.

Miss Foster, dressed in black corduroy jacket, a red shirt, chino slacks and black boots, was flanked by her mother, Brandy, and New Haven attorney Howard Jacobs.

When she realized the possible relationship between herself and Hinckley, Miss Foster said, ‘I felt very shocked, very frightened, very distressed.

‘I sort of reacted badly,’ she said. ‘I guess I cried, or whatever.’

Hinkley is known to have registered in his own name at the Park Plaza Hotel in New Haven March 1 and March 2 and may have slipped the notes under the door of Miss Foster’s room at Welch Hall on the Old Campus.

None of the notes or letters bore a postmark.

CBS News Tuesday reported that a number of Yale students said they drank with Hinkley in a bar on one of those nights and that he showed Miss Foster’s picture around, bragging she was his girlfriend.

Following the attack on the president Monday, FBI agents searched Hinckley’s Washington, D.C., hotel room and found an unmailed letter addressed to Miss Foster.

‘I am leaving now for the Hilton Hotel to get Reagan. I hope by doing this, you will notice me later,’ the letter said, in part.

The actress said she heard about the assassination attempt late Monday afternoon and chose not to think about it.

 

When she returned to her room at 9 p.m. Monday, however, her roommate, aware of the notes and letters, said, ”John Hinckley’ and ‘I said, John Hinckley what,” Miss Foster said.

She said she then made the connection between the letters and Hinckley and within 10 minutes of the exchange with her roommate was advised by telephone the FBI wanted to talk to her.

Miss Foster said she received three letters last September from Hinckley and threw them away. She said she receives a great deal of unsolicated mail and seldom reads it.

However, she said, she turned over the letters she received early last month to Calhoun College Dean Eustace Theodore because she was continuing to receive them. Theodore turned the notes over to the Yale campus police, she said.

Miss Foster declined to divulge the contents of the letters and notes because ‘I don’t want to jeopardize the prosecution.’ But when asked if they were of a threatening or amorous nature, she said, ‘I believe the letters were assumed to have been love-type letters.’

She said, for example, she received a greeting card with the words, ‘I love you,’ written several times.

Miss Foster was asked during the briefing how it felt to read news accounts the alleged assassination attempt might have been inspired by ‘Taxi Driver,’ which touches upon an assassination plot that is aborted.

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The film was a piece of fiction, Miss Foster replied, and ‘in no way have I ever been sorry about any film I have done.’

‘It disturbs me,’ she said. ‘Anything to do with an assassination attempt, especially with presidents … but I know I’m not involved.’

She said she was ‘very scared’ in talking to the reporters Wednesday.

‘I try to be as clear and precise about things because this is the last I’ll get the opportunity to comment about all of this to the press … I must admit I was pretty jumpy’ on Tuesday and people who saw her then would not have said she was very calm.

Asked why she was jumpy, she said, ‘It’s quite a traumatic thing. I would have been jumpy if I were a normal citizen who witnessed the attempted assassination of the president.’

She said she wants to resume her normal life at Yale and return to her role in a play presented by the Educational Center for the Arts, an off-campus group of Yale students.

In the play, ‘Getting Out,’ she portrays a prostitute who kills a taxi driver.

‘I want to get back to a normal life,’ she said. ‘I feel very well. I feel very secure.’