Patty Hearst: How the Outlaw Heiress Became a Chameleon

[RandySF]

Almost 40 years after her release from prison, Patty Hearst finds herself -- and her confusing and compelling story -- under public scrutiny again, thanks to a CNN documentary series, The Radical Story of Patty Hearst, based on Jeffrey Toobin's 2016 book, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst. Both capture the political chaos, social unrest, and taut social hierarchy that the Hearst heiress unwittingly found herself caught up in, when she was kidnapped from her Berkeley home in 1974.

Her reasons for joining her captors, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and carrying out a series of shocking crimes while on the run with them remain muddy, but in a 2016 Conan appearance, Toobin compared Hearst's year and a half-long rampage to an ISIS recruitment.

Toobin argues in his work that Hearst wasn't brainwashed, but that a solid period of isolation and indoctrination at the hands of her captors made her believe that changing the world by any means necessary was the right thing to do.

This is not an unreasonable assertion. During her 1975 arrest, after participating in two bank robberies (the second of which resulted in the death of Myrna Opsahl), a shoot-out (that she started while trying to rescue one of her captor-comrades), and a number of car thefts, Hearst told the arresting officer that her profession was "urban guerrilla." This was after she gave a clenched-fist salute to awaiting photographers from the back of a police car. Six out of eight of Hearst's kidnappers died in a fiery gun battle with the LAPD, but she remained on the run for a full 16 months after that, until her capture.

Hearst made for a convincing and passionate revolutionary, but quickly became a sympathetic kidnap victim too. She and her family managed to convince President Carter to commute her 7-year sentence and allow her to go free after just 22 months. Utterly convinced that Hearst was "a model citizen in every way," Carter also managed to convince President Clinton to give her a full pardon in 2001.




https://www.kqed.org/pop/101956/patty-hearst-how-the-outlaw-heiress-became-a-chameleon

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I've done research about about another female SLA member, one who grew up about a mile from me.

Angela DeAngelis Atwood. She's buried in a local Catholic cemetery with her family. She was one of the women who kidnapped Hearst.

While not an heiress like Hearst, "Angel" didn't fit the profile of an urban guerilla growing up. She was head cheerleader, the star of her high school musicals, voted the Most Popular School Spirited, etc. Went to Indiana University for college and met Jane Pauley. Married while in college.

My guess is that before Women's Liberation became ubiquitous and universal, joining a small bank of "reformers" and having an equal voice in planning and executing escapades was exciting to Atwood. She joined but her husband dropped out as he was deemed to lack the same dedication to revolution.

I've poured over her yearbooks and it's hard to believe she was part of the SLA and the Hearst morass. She would have been 70 two weeks ago.