Patricia Hearst (born 1954) was heiress to a wealthy newspaper publisher when she was kidnapped and held for ransom by a small leftist terrorist group in California. She was later tried and sent to prison, along with her kidnappers, on charges of bank robbery.

Patricia Hearst became an American celebrity, victim, and criminal in February 1974 when she was kidnapped by a leftist terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). This obscure Oakland, California, revolutionary group held her for a $2 million ransom. Patricia was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the wealthy California newspaper publisher, but during months of harsh captivity she was allegedly brainwashed and renamed "Tania." To obtain her release, her parents donated millions of dollars worth of food to the poor, but the giveaway became a fiasco and did not result in her release.

Urban Guerrilla

When Hearst was filmed in April 1974 assisting the SLA in a San Francisco bank robbery, the kidnapping victim was transformed in the public mind into another spoiled, rich college student whose unconventional lifestyle led to crime as a self-confessed "urban guerrilla" and "radical feminist." Patty was captured a year later during a police shoot-out. She was convicted of bank robbery in a sensational California trial in January 1976. On 24 September she was sent to prison for seven years, but President Carter commuted her sentence on 29 January 1979.

Public Skepticism

This was a major news story, but with a bizarre twist. The victim received little sympathy because the public was disgusted with assassins, radicals, and revolutionaries. The naive college student who became a gun-toting bank robber found little understanding or forgiveness. The story did not end when she was released from prison. Public fascination with the abduction of the newspaper heiress was stimulated by a 1975 biography, her own memoirs published in 1982, and a movie, Patty Hearst, in 1988.

In the 1990s Hearst tried her hand at acting. She appeared in the films Cry Baby, Serial Mom, and Ready to Wear and supplied a radio call-in voice for a 1997 episode of the television show Frasier. More recently, Hearst appeared in a film entitled Cecil B Demented in which a pampered actress is kidnapped by a group of independent film makers. The actress at first resists her abductors, but eventually joins the gang. Hearst plays the mother of the kidnap victim.

In 1999, a former associate of Hearst during her time with the SLA was arrested in St. Paul, Minnesota, after having spent more than 20 years on the run. When arrested, Sara Jane Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, was living as a respectable doctor's wife, amateur actress and "soccer mom." At the time of her capture, the 54-year-old Olson was charged with having conspired to place bombs under two police cars in Los Angeles. The bombs failed to detonate. But in her autobiography, Hearst placed Olson at the scene of the SLA bank robbery in Sacramento, California where a bank patron was shot and killed. Olson has contested Hearst's story.

Hearst, for her part, has said she resents being drawn back into the public eye. In 2001, The Guardian quoted her as saying about the Olson trial, "It has turned into my trial. And I am not going to play dead any more. I keep trying to forget these people and they keep dragging me back into it."

Further Reading

• Duncan Campbell, "'It has turned into my trial'."The Guardian (May 2, 2001). Available from http://www.guardian.co.uk/.
• Patricia Campbell Hearst and Alvin Moscow, Every Secret Thing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982).
• Patricia Campbell Hearst and Cordelia Frances Biddle, Murder at San Simeon, Scribner, 1996.
• Don West, Patty/Tania (New York: Pyramid, 1975).