The puzzle of Patty Hearst
That a young California heiress was kidnapped at gunpoint was shocking enough. When she then declared allegiance to her captors’ left-wing revolution, the story of Patty Hearst wandered into the surreal.
It was on this week in 1979 that Hearst, granddaughter of the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, was released from prison after being convicted in a crime spree carried out by the radical group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Five years earlier, the S.L.A. had abducted Hearst from her apartment in Berkeley, where she was a college sophomore. According to her later testimony, she was held blindfolded in a closet, raped, and coached in guerrilla warfare.
But just two months after the kidnapping, Hearst declared in a tape-recorded message that she was now “Tania,” and that her captors had offered to let her go, but, “I have chosen to stay and fight.”
As Hearst helped the ragtag group rob banks and plant bombs, her face was plastered on F.B.I. wanted posters. The police caught up with her in San Francisco after more than a year on the run. She signed herself into jail listing the occupation “urban guerrilla.’’
During her trial on charges of armed bank robbery, Hearst’s defense argued that she had been coerced into acts of crime under threat of death. Unconvinced, a jury found her guilty, and she was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Hearst said later that she was galled by the outcome. “It would have been crazy to not have joined because they would have just killed me,” she told a reporter. She added, “I’m sorry. I’m a coward. I didn’t want to die.”
Whether Hearst joined the S.L.A. of her own volition is still debated. In his 2016 book “American Heiress,” Jeffrey Toobin argued that Hearst acted at first out of duress, but later embraced the cause.
None of it would have happened had she not been kidnapped. That’s why President Carter commuted Hearst’s sentence after she had served only two years in prison. In 2001, President Clinton issued a pardon.
The lenience, argued Toobin, epitomized how American justice favors the powerful.
“If the United States were a country that routinely forgave the trespasses of such people, there would be little remarkable about the mercy she received,” Toobin wrote. “But the United States is not such a country; the prisons teem with convicts who were also led astray and who committed lesser crimes than Patricia.”
Hearst, now Patricia Hearst Shaw, is 63 and lives in Manhattan. She raised two daughters and likes to show her prize-winning French bulldogs.
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