On This Day: Newspaper Heiress Patty Hearst Is Kidnapped

The 19-year-old Hearst was living with her fiancé in Berkeley, Calif. when armed members of the Symbionese Liberation Army invaded their apartment, beat her fiancé and kidnapped her. It was the opening act in a multi-year saga that had the nation spellbound.

The kidnapping was soon followed by public negotiations during which the SLA denounced the "corporate state" and made a series of demands for distribution of food to the poor, with which the Hearst family clumsily tried to comply. The SLA sent a series of audiotapes on which Patty Hearst denounced her family's efforts; in early April, Hearst announced that she had joined the SLA and adopted the name "Tania," after a confederate of Che Guevara.

On April 15, 1974, the nation was shocked to see photos of "Tania" Hearst, dressed in guerilla garb and carrying a machine gun, participating in a bank robbery with members of the SLA. Hearst was recorded as saying, "I am a soldier of the people's army," according to Court TV. The public struggled with whether Hearst should now be considered primarily a victim or a perpetuator of a crime.

In mid-May, 1974, she fired 27 rounds into a storefront to enable her colleagues to escape after a possible botched robbery. The next day, the drama reached its apogee as a special news bulletin appeared on television sets around the nation, showing an SLA safehouse in Los Angeles engulfed in flames after a stand-off with the LAPD. Until the six bodies were positively identified the next day, it was not known whether Hearst had been killed. It was generally presumed that Hearst was in the house, but it was later learned that she was not.

Hearst remained on the run for another 16 months, and was arrested in September 1975. F. Lee Bailey’s defense of Patty Hearst claimed that she suffered from "Stockholm Syndrome," in which captives come to sympathize with their captors. Douglas O. Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law says that “under Bailey's theory, Hearst was never a free agent or voluntary member of the SLA, up to and including the time of her arrest.”

A jury rejected her brainwashing defense, and she was found guilty of armed bank robbery and sentenced to 7 years in prison. 

According to Time magazine, when booked into jail, Hearst listed her occupation as "urban guerilla." She asked her lawyer to convey this message to the public:  "Tell everybody that I'm smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there."

President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence after she served 21 months, and President Clinton granted her a full pardon in 2001.

The saga returned to the headlines in June 1999 when one of Hearst's alleged compatriots, formmer SLA member Kathleen Ann Soliah, was arrested in Minnesota, having changed her name to Sara Jane Olson and become a pillar of her community.

“The SLA adopted its rhetoric from Communists and South American revolutionaries,” according to a 2002 article from Slate. The group of “Berkeley radicals” was very small in comparison to 1960s and 1970s radical organizations like the Black Panthers, and they were not “of real historical significance." A seven-headed cobra was the group’s symbol, and the “Symbionese” name stemmed from “symbiosis,” suggesting “the union of classes and races.”

The 2002 trial and sentencing of Sara Jane Olson, a former member of the SLA, brought new attention to the dismantled group that created so much controversy in the 1970s. A Los Angeles Times piece about the Olson trial says, “there are those who will declare that, three decades after the fact, a generation is being put on trial.” But the article argues that that is exactly the “myth” that the SLA had always tried to “exploit.”

In a New York Times opinion piece from February 2002, Brent Staples asserts that in the 60s, “A substantial number of these children of privilege clearly saw 'the revolution' as a fashionable game that would be forgiven once timeout was called.” Staples proceeds to reflect on Bill Clinton’s pardon of Hearst, which occurred at the end of his presidency, and the recent trial of five other former members of the SLA. But, according to Staples, “The only difference between Patricia Hearst Shaw, witness for the prosecution, and those at the defendants' table is that she had more money and influence.”