Patty Hearst

Patty Hearst (born February 20, 1954, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an heiress of the William Randolph Hearst newspaper empire who was kidnapped in 1974 by leftist radicals called the Symbionese Liberation Army, whom she under duress joined in robbery and extortion.

The third of five daughters of Randolph A. Hearst, she attended private schools in Los Angeles, San Mateo, Crystal Springs, and Monterey, California, and took courses at Menlo College and the University of California, Berkeley. On the night of February 4, 1974, she and her fiancé, Steven Weed, were at her Berkeley flat when three members of the Symbionese Liberation Army broke in, beat up Weed, and abducted Hearst. She was allegedly coerced and brainwashed under humiliating conditions of confinement in the closet of an apartment hideaway and thereafter began making public statements, through tape recordings, condemning the capitalistic “crimes” of her parents. Hearst became known as “Tania,” the nom de guerre of Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, who fought with Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara. The Symbionese Liberation Army extorted from her father $2 million in a food giveaway to the poor and allegedly forced her to join in at least two robberies, of a San Francisco bank and a Los Angeles store.

The Symbionese Liberation Army probably never had more than 11 or 12 members, six of whom—including the leader, Donald DeFreeze—were killed in a police shootout and house fire in Los Angeles on May 17, 1974. Hearst remained at large with her captors or confederates (notably William and Emily Harris), crisscrossing the country as far as New York City and Pennsylvania. On September 18, 1975, back in San Francisco, she and another confederate, Wendy Yoshimura, as well as the Harrises, were captured by the FBI.

Hearst was tried and convicted in March 1976 for bank robbery and felonious use of firearms. Her defense attorney was F. Lee Bailey. Sentenced to seven years, she spent the next three years partly in prison and partly at liberty (during appeals). She was released in February 1979 after U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. Shortly thereafter she married her former bodyguard Bernard Shaw. She wrote (with Alvin Moscow) an account of her ordeal from 1974 to 1979: Every Secret Thing (1982). In 2001 she was granted a full pardon by outgoing U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton. Hearst occasionally acted, notably appearing in several John Waters’s films, including Cry-Baby (1990) and Cecil B. DeMented (2000).