Jane Fonda is remembering Ted Turner not as a media monument, but as the complicated, charismatic man who changed her life.

The Oscar-winning actress, who was married to the CNN founder for 10 years before their 2001 divorce, posted a lengthy tribute on Instagram on May 6 after Turner died at 87.

Fonda’s tribute to Turner

“I loved Ted with all my heart,” Fonda wrote. “He swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same.”

She described Turner as someone who brought both scale and vulnerability into her life, writing that he “needed me,” and that no one had ever made her feel that so directly before.

“This wasn’t your average human being that needed me,” she continued. “This was the creator of CNN, and Turner Classic Movies, who had won the America’s Cup as the world’s greatest sailor.”

Fonda said Turner had “a big life, a brilliant mind and a soaring sense of humor,” but her tribute focused just as much on the emotional care she said he gave her.

“To be needed and cared for simultaneously is transformative,” she wrote. “Ted Turner helped me believe in myself. He gave me confidence. I think I did the same for him, but that’s what women are raised to do. Men like Ted aren’t supposed to express need and vulnerability. That was Ted’s greatest strength, I believe.”

She also singled out his drive, adding, “Next to Katharine Hepburn, Ted was the most competitive person I have ever met and that was fascinating to witness.”

His family and conservation legacy

Fonda also nodded to Turner’s lifelong interest in nature, hunting and fishing, imagining him surrounded by the wildlife he worked to protect.

“I see him in heaven now with all the wildlife he helped bring back from extinction,” she wrote, adding that they were “gathered at the pearly gates applauding and thanking him for saving their species.”

She closed her message by speaking about Turner’s five children, whom he shared with his former wives Jane Shirley Smith and Julia Gale Nye.

“Five talented, complex kids who I had the privilege of becoming stepmother to,” Fonda wrote. “I had four stepmothers growing up and I know how important stepmothers can be, so we all did our best to build an extended, rag tag family, and I love them to this day.”

She added, “If it was complicated to be married to him, think how complicated it was being his child. And they are all doing fine.”

CNN remembers its founder

Turner’s death also prompted a tribute from CNN, the network he founded in 1980 after establishing TBS in 1975.

“Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement,” CNN Worldwide Chairman and CEO Mark Thompson said in a statement. “He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand, and we will all take a moment today to recognize him and his impact on our lives and the world.”

That impact was not small. Turner helped redefine cable television, first through TBS and then through CNN, which made 24-hour news a global fixture. Media executives like to use the word “disruptive” generously; in Turner’s case, it actually fits.

His diagnosis and later years

Eight years before his death, Turner revealed he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia. According to Mayo Clinic, the condition involves protein deposits called Lewy bodies affecting nerve cells in the brain, which can impact thinking, memory and movement.

“It’s a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer’s. It’s similar to that. But not nearly as bad. Alzheimer’s is fatal,” Turner told CBS News at the time. “Thank goodness I don’t have that.”

He said the illness left him feeling “tired, exhausted,” and added, “That’s the main symptoms and forgetfulness.”

Beyond television, Turner was a major philanthropist. He established the United Nations Foundation in 1998, advocated against nuclear weapons and became known as a conservationist and one of the largest landowners in the United States.

The cause he shared with Fonda

Turner and Fonda also built something together outside their marriage. In 1995, they founded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, known as G-CAPP.

Fonda, who is mother to Mary Luana Williams, 58, and Vanessa Vadim, 57, with former husband Roger Vadim, and Troy Garity, 52, with former husband Tom Hayden, reflected on that work at G-CAPP’s November gala last year.

“It was a very challenging time in Georgia,” she told the crowd. “Had I not been with Ted, this was something, had he not stood by me with his love and support, we never would have survived.”

Turner was not present at the event, but Fonda made clear that his role in the organization remained central.

“He is here in my heart,” she said, becoming emotional, “and I know he is here in a lot of our hearts.”