Patty Hearst Kidnapped: Heiress Vanishes into Extremism

Armed men burst into a Berkeley, California apartment on February 4, 1974, beat Patty Hearst’s fiance with a wine bottle, and dragged the nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress out the door in her bathrobe. The kidnappers were the Symbionese Liberation Army, a tiny radical group with fewer than a dozen members led by escaped convict Donald DeFreeze, who called himself "Field Marshal Cinque." What followed was one of the strangest criminal sagas in American history: the hostage appeared to become a revolutionary. The SLA had formed in the ferment of early-1970s radical politics in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its ideology was a confused mix of Marxism, Black liberation rhetoric, and apocalyptic violence, driven by DeFreeze’s charisma and the guilt-fueled idealism of several white, middle-class college students. The group had already murdered Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster in November 1973. Kidnapping the granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst was calculated to generate maximum attention. Hearst was held in a closet for weeks, blindfolded and subjected to physical and psychological abuse. The SLA demanded that her father, Randolph Hearst, distribute millions of dollars in food to the poor of California. He complied with a $6 million food giveaway that descended into chaos at distribution sites. Then, on April 15, a security camera in a Hibernia Bank branch captured Hearst carrying a carbine during an SLA robbery, apparently participating willingly. She issued taped communiques denouncing her family and declaring herself a revolutionary named "Tania." Six SLA members, including DeFreeze, died in a televised shootout with Los Angeles police in May 1974. Hearst was captured in September 1975 and convicted of bank robbery. Her defense argued she had been brainwashed. She was sentenced to seven years, commuted by President Carter after twenty-two months, and fully pardoned by President Clinton in 2001. The case became a landmark debate about coercion, free will, and the limits of personal responsibility under extreme duress.