When heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by revolutionaries in 1974, her shocking transformation from socialite to urban guerrilla raised questions about brainwashing, free will, and identity.
This episode explores the extraordinary case of Patricia Hearst, granddaughter of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment on February 4, 1974, by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). What began as a straightforward kidnapping quickly transformed into one of America's most puzzling criminal cases when, within two months, security cameras captured the wealthy heiress wielding a rifle during a bank robbery. Calling herself "Tania" and denouncing her parents as "pigs," Patty appeared to have undergone a complete ideological transformation from privileged socialite to urban guerrilla. The episode features extensive interviews with journalist Roger Rapoport, who covered the case from its earliest days and co-wrote a book with Patty's fiancé Steven Weed, providing unique insights into both her pre-kidnapping life and the immediate aftermath of her abduction.
The case raised fundamental questions about identity, coercion, and free will that remain unresolved fifty years later. Was Patty Hearst brainwashed through sophisticated psychological manipulation, or did she genuinely convert to revolutionary ideology? Her 1976 trial centered on competing narratives of victimhood versus voluntary participation, with celebrity attorney F. Lee Bailey arguing she was subjected to "coercive persuasion" while prosecutors pointed to her continued criminal activity and missed opportunities to escape. The episode also examines conspiracy theories surrounding the SLA itself, including questions about whether the group was a genuine revolutionary organization or a government operation designed to discredit leftist movements. Despite her conviction, Patty served only 21 months after President Carter commuted her sentence, and she received a full pardon from President Clinton in 2001, yet the central mystery of her transformation continues to captivate America's imagination.
Rapoport offers a unique perspective on the case, having spent months living with Steven Weed while they collaborated on a book manuscript that was ultimately never published when Weed decided it didn't tell the story he wanted to tell. Frustrated by the limitations of traditional journalism and the inability to fact-check key claims due to the deaths of six SLA members, Rapoport later turned to fiction to explore the case's psychological complexity. His novel approach acknowledges the fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the Hearst saga, inviting readers to draw their own conclusions rather than pretending to resolve questions that may be fundamentally unanswerable. Through interviews with both Weed and SLA member Bill Harris, Rapoport uncovered conflicting narratives about Patty's experience, including Harris's controversial claim that she wrote her own revolutionary communiqués and that the SLA sometimes had to tone them down because they were too strident.