The man who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 now says he wishes Jodie Foster well, but also admits the actress herself "definitely could have been a target" of his gun violence.
John Hinckley Jr., 71, made the remarks during a virtual appearance on an upcoming episode of The Mark Joseph Show podcast, a preview of which the Daily Mail reported was shared exclusively by Entertainment Weekly. Forty-five years after he fired a.22 long rifle bullet into a sitting president outside a Washington, D.C. hotel, the man found not guilty by reason of insanity is now a free man, and talking publicly about the woman whose image drove him to attempt an assassination.
Hinckley told podcast host Mark Joseph that his feelings toward Foster have settled into something he frames as benign. But the interview also produced a far more unsettling admission: that Foster herself could have ended up in his crosshairs instead of Reagan.
When Joseph asked whether Foster could have been a potential target of his violence, Hinckley did not hesitate.
"She definitely could have been a target. It's just, fate went the other way."
He added, flatly: "As fate turns out, it was Reagan instead of her."
That statement reframes the 1981 shooting in a way the public rarely hears from Hinckley himself. For decades, the standard account held that Hinckley shot Reagan to "impress" Foster, a delusional romantic gesture aimed at a woman he had never met. The admission that Foster could have been the one shot instead strips away whatever thin layer of tragic-romance mythology has built up around the case and replaces it with something blunter: a young woman was in danger from a man who chose a different victim by chance.
Hinckley described the delusion that drove him in 1981, when he was 25 years old. He had become fixated on Foster after watching her in the 1976 film Taxi Driver.
"I wanted to have a union with Jodie Foster and live the rest of my life with her and all these things that, of course, were delusional."
He went further, explaining that even after shooting the president, he expected Foster to come to him, wherever he ended up.
"I thought she would, you know, after things settled down, join me wherever I was. I wasn't sure if I was gonna be in jail or the hospital or what. But after things settled down, I had this notion that she was gonna join me wherever I was."
The words describe a man who believed an act of political violence would function as a courtship gesture. That belief resulted in four people being shot and a president nearly dying.
On March 30, 1981, Hinckley opened fire outside the Washington Hilton as Reagan left a speaking engagement. The president was struck in the torso by a bullet that ricocheted off the presidential limousine. The round punctured Reagan's lung and caused serious internal bleeding.
The New York Post has detailed how Hinckley fired six shots from a.22 caliber Röhm revolver in just 1.7 seconds, wounding not only Reagan but also press secretary James Brady, police officer Thomas Delahanty, and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy. Secret Service agent Jerry Parr saved Reagan's life twice that day, first by shoving him into the limousine and out of Hinckley's line of fire, and then by rerouting the motorcade to George Washington University Hospital after noticing frothy blood, a sign of a lung injury. Author Del Quentin Wilber, who wrote Rawhide Down about the assassination attempt, put it simply: "Had they not gone to the hospital, Reagan would have died."
Brady was paralyzed. He died in 2014, more than three decades after the shooting robbed him of his mobility and his career.
A jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity. He was confined to a mental hospital in Washington for more than 20 years. Beginning in 2003, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman began allowing Hinckley to live for longer stretches in the community, with conditions including mandatory therapy and travel restrictions. By 2016, Hinckley was living full-time in Virginia. In June 2022, Judge Friedman granted him unconditional release from all remaining restrictions, on the condition that he continued to do well.
That is the legal system's final word on the matter. A man who shot a president, paralyzed a press secretary, and wounded two law enforcement officers walks free with no conditions whatsoever.
In the podcast interview, Hinckley's message to Foster was brief and delivered in a tone the preview clip presents as casual.
"I just wish Jodie Foster well. I don't really see her movies, but I wish her well, and I know she's doing quite well. And that's all I can say: I just, I wish Jodie well, and I hope she has a good life."
Foster, now 63, has rarely spoken publicly about Hinckley or the 1981 shooting. But in June 2024, she addressed it in an interview with Interview magazine, describing the lasting damage the ordeal inflicted on her life. Fox News reported on Hinckley's statements in the context of that earlier Foster interview.
Foster told Interview magazine she had been performing in a college theater production at the time of the shooting. The play ran over two weekends, and between the first and second weekends, Hinckley shot the president.
"He shot him in order to impress me, and he had written letters to me, so it was a big moment in my life."
She described the experience as deeply traumatic.
"I'm finally able to admit that the one bit of theater I did when I was in college, there was so much trauma involved in it."
Foster was a teenager and college student when a stranger decided her image justified shooting the leader of the free world. Decades later, she is still processing it. Hinckley, meanwhile, is doing podcast interviews.
The romantic-obsession narrative Hinckley himself promotes, that he acted out of love for Foster, has been challenged by forensic experts who examined him. Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist, offered a different assessment of Hinckley's motivations, as the New York Post reported.
"His goal was to get on the cover of Time magazine; the Jodie Foster thing was real; but if it was not her, it would have been somebody else."
That assessment complicates the picture Hinckley paints of himself in the podcast, a man driven by delusion who has since recovered and now simply wishes his former obsession well. If Dietz's analysis holds, the fixation on Foster was interchangeable. The desire for fame and notoriety was the constant.
The Daily Mail reached out to a representative for Foster for comment on Hinckley's latest statements. No response was reported.
Hinckley's case has long been a flashpoint in debates over the insanity defense and the criminal justice system's handling of political violence. The not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict in 1981 provoked widespread public outrage and led Congress to tighten federal insanity defense standards. But those reforms did not change Hinckley's outcome. He served no prison sentence. His confinement in a psychiatric facility gradually loosened over two decades of court hearings, and by 2022 he was free without conditions.
Now he sits for media interviews, discusses the woman he stalked, and casually notes that she "definitely could have been a target." The system that released him placed no restrictions on his ability to do so.
Foster, for her part, spent decades avoiding the subject publicly. When she finally spoke about it last year, she used the word "trauma." Hinckley used the word "fate."
When the man who shot a president can go on a podcast and muse about who else he might have shot, the system has not delivered justice. It has delivered a second act no one asked for.
