American kidnapping victim and actress (born 1954)
Patricia Campbell Hearst (born February 20, 1954) is an American actress and member of the Hearst family. She is the granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. 
She first became known for the events following her 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was found and arrested 19 months after being abducted, by which time she was a fugitive wanted for serious crimes committed with members of the group. She was held in custody, and there was speculation before trial that her family's resources would enable her to avoid time in prison.
At her trial, the prosecution suggested that Hearst had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army of her own volition. However, she testified that she had been raped and threatened with death while held captive. In 1976, she was convicted for the crime of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years in prison, later reduced to seven years. Her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and she was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
In the 1990s, she began acting in films and television after being approached by film director John Waters.
Early life.
Hearst, who prefers to be called Patricia rather than Patty, was born on February 20, 1954, in San Francisco, California, the third of five daughters of Randolph Apperson Hearst and Catherine Wood Campbell. She was raised primarily in Hillsborough and attended the private Crystal Springs School for Girls there, Sacred Heart in Atherton, and the Santa Catalina School in Monterey. She attended Menlo College in Atherton, California before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. 
Hearst's grandfather William Randolph Hearst created the largest newspaper, magazine, newsreel and film business in the world. Her great-grandmother was philanthropist Phoebe Hearst. The family wielded immense political influence and had opposed organized labor, gold mine workers' interests, and communism since before World War II. Hearst's father was among a number of heirs to the family fortune and did not control the Hearst interests. Her parents had not considered it necessary to take preventive measures to ensure their children's personal security. At the time of her abduction, Hearst was a sophomore at Berkeley studying art history. She lived with her fiancé Steven Weed in an apartment in Berkeley.
Symbionese Liberation Army.
Kidnapping.
On February 4, 1974, 19-year-old Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment. A small urban guerrilla left-wing group called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) claimed responsibility for the abduction. Hearst's kidnapping was partly opportunistic, as she resided near the SLA hideout. According to testimony at trial, the group's main intention was to leverage the Hearst family's political influence to free SLA members Russ Little and Joe Remiro, who had been arrested for the November 1973 murder of Marcus Foster, superintendent of Oakland public schools.
After the state refused to free the men, the SLA demanded that Hearst's family distribute $70 worth of food to every needy Californian, an operation that would cost an estimated $400 million. In response, Hearst's father obtained a loan and arranged the immediate donation of $2 million worth of food to the poor of the Bay Area for one year in a project called People in Need. After the distribution descended into chaos, the SLA refused to release Hearst.
According to Hearst's testimony at her 1976 trial, she was held for a week in a closet, blindfolded and with her hands tied. During this time, SLA founder Cinque (Donald DeFreeze) repeatedly threatened her with death. She was allowed to leave the closet for meals, still blindfolded, and began to participate in the group's political discussions. She was given a flashlight for reading and SLA political tracts to memorize. Hearst was confined in the closet for weeks. She said, "DeFreeze told me that the war council had decided or was thinking about killing me or me staying with them, and that I better start thinking about that as a possibility. ... I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs." In an April 1974 account, Hearst claimed that she had been offered the choice of being released or joining the SLA.
When asked for her decision, Hearst elected to remain and fight with the SLA. The blindfold was removed, allowing her to see her captors for the first time. After this, she was given daily lessons on her duties, especially weapon drills. Angela Atwood told Hearst that the others wanted Hearst to share in the sexual freedom among the unit. Hearst later claimed to have been raped by William "Willie" Wolfe and DeFreeze.
Bank robbery.
On April 3, 1974, two months after she had been abducted, Hearst announced on an audiotape released to the media that she had joined the SLA and adopted the name Tania, a tribute to Che Guevara's comrade Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider.
On April 15, 1974, Hearst was recorded on surveillance video wielding an M1 carbine while robbing the Sunset District branch of the Hibernia Bank at 1450 Noriega Street in San Francisco. Hearst, identified under her pseudonym of "Tania", yelled, "I'm Tania. Up, up, up against the wall, motherfuckers!" Two men entered the bank while the robbery was occurring and were shot and wounded by the SLA. According to testimony at her trial, a witness thought that Hearst had been several paces behind the others when running to the getaway car.
Attorney General William B. Saxbe said that Hearst was a "common criminal" and "not a reluctant participant" in the bank robbery. James L. Browning Jr. said that her participation in the robbery may have been voluntary, contrasting with an earlier comment in which he said that she might have been coerced into taking part. The FBI agent heading the investigation said that SLA members were photographed pointing guns at Hearst during the robbery. A grand jury indicted her in June 1974 for the robbery.
Rescue of Harris.
On May 16, 1974, the manager at Mel's Sporting Goods in Inglewood, California, observed a minor theft by William Harris, who had been shopping with his wife Emily while Hearst waited across the road in a van. The manager and an employee followed Harris out and confronted him. There was a scuffle and the manager restrained Harris, when a pistol fell out of Harris's waistband. Hearst discharged the entire magazine of an automatic carbine into the overhead storefront, causing the manager to dive behind a lightpost. He tried to shoot back, but Hearst began aiming closer.
Fugitive.
Hearst and the Harris couple hijacked two cars and abducted the owners. One was a young man who found Hearst so personable that he was reluctant to report the incident. He testified at the trial to her discussing the effectiveness of cyanide-tipped bullets and repeatedly asking if he was okay. Police had surrounded the main base of the SLA in Los Angeles before these three returned, so they hid elsewhere.
The six SLA members inside the hideout died. There was an hourslong gunfight with police, and two members were fatally shot; a fire broke out in the house, in which the remainder died, but DeFreeze first killed himself by gunshot. It was initially thought that Hearst had also died during this confrontation. Warrants were issued for the arrest of Hearst and the Harrises for several , including two counts of kidnapping.
Emily Harris went to a Berkeley rally to commemorate the deaths of Angela Atwood, Soltysik, DeFreeze, and other founding members of the SLA who had died in Los Angeles during the police siege. Harris recognized Atwood's acquaintance Kathy Soliah among the radicals whom she had known from civil rights groups. Soliah introduced the three fugitives to Jack Scott, an athletics reformer and radical, and he agreed to provide them help and money.
Involvement in later SLA crimes.
Hearst helped make improvised explosive devices. These were used in two unsuccessful attempts to kill police officers during August 1975; one of the devices failed to detonate.
Marked money found in the apartment when she was arrested linked Hearst to the SLA armed robbery of Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California; she was the getaway car driver for the robbery. Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four who was at the bank making a deposit, was shot dead by a masked Emily Harris. Hearst was potentially at risk for felony murder charges and could testify as a witness against Harris for a capital offense.
Legal consequences.
On September 18, 1975, Hearst was arrested in a San Francisco apartment with Wendy Yoshimura, another SLA member, by San Francisco Police Inspector Timothy F. Casey and his partner, Police Officer Laurence R. Pasero, and FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Padden and his partners, FBI agents Jason Moulton, Frank Doyle, Jr., Larry Lawler, Monte Hall, Dick Vitamonte, Leo Brenneissen, and Ray Campos. While being booked into jail, Hearst listed her occupation as "Urban Guerilla". She asked her attorney to relay the following message: "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."
Brainwashing claims.
At the time of her arrest, Hearst's weight had dropped to 87 pounds (40 kg), and she was described by psychologist Margaret Singer in October 1975 as "a low-IQ, low-affect zombie". Shortly after her arrest, doctors recorded signs of trauma: her IQ was measured as 112, whereas it had previously been 130; there were huge gaps in her memory regarding her pre-Tania life; she was smoking heavily and had nightmares. Without a mental illness or defect, a person is considered to be fully responsible for any criminal action not done under duress, which is defined as a clear and present threat of death or serious injury. For Hearst to secure an acquittal on the grounds of having been brainwashed would have been completely unprecedented.
Psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, a professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), was appointed by the court in his capacity as a brainwashing expert and worked without a fee. After the trial, he wrote a newspaper article asking President Carter to release Hearst from prison.
Hearst wrote in her memoir, "Every Secret Thing" (1982), "I spent fifteen hours going over my SLA experiences with Robert Jay Lifton of Yale University. Lifton, author of several books on coercive persuasion and thought reform, [...] pronounced me a 'classic case' which met all the psychological criteria of a coerced prisoner of war. [...] If I had reacted differently, that would have been suspect, he said."
After some weeks in custody, Hearst repudiated her SLA allegiance. Her first lawyer, Terence Hallinan, had advised Hearst not to talk to anyone, including psychiatrists. He advocated a defense of involuntary intoxication: that the SLA had given her drugs that affected her judgment and recollection.
He was replaced by attorney F. Lee Bailey, who asserted a defense of coercion or duress affecting intent at the time of the offense. This was similar to the brainwashing defense which Hallinan had warned was not a defense in law. Hearst gave long interviews to various psychiatrists.
Trial.
Hearst alone was arraigned for the Hibernia Bank robbery; the trial commenced on January 15, 1976. Judge Oliver Jesse Carter ruled that Hearst's taped and written statements after the bank robbery, while she was a fugitive with the SLA members, were voluntary. He did not allow expert testimony that stylistic analysis indicated the "Tania" statements and writing were not wholly composed by Hearst. He permitted the prosecution to introduce statements and actions Hearst made long after the Hibernia robbery, as evidence of her state of mind at the time of the robbery. Judge Carter also allowed into evidence a recording made by jail authorities of a friend's jail visit with Hearst, in which Hearst used profanities and spoke of her radical and feminist beliefs, but he did not allow tapes of psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West's interviews of Hearst to be heard by the jury. Judge Carter was described as "resting his eyes" during testimony favorable to the defense by West and others.
According to Hearst's testimony, her captors had demanded she appear enthusiastic during the robbery and warned she would pay with her life for any mistake. Her defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey provided photographs showing that SLA members, including Camilla Hall, had pointed guns at Hearst during the robbery. In reference to the shooting at Mel's Sporting Goods Store and her decision to not escape, Hearst testified that she was instructed throughout her captivity on what to do in an emergency. She said one class