In 1974, Patty Hearst was just your average college aged white girl, attending a west coast school and getting into all sorts of hijinks involving revolting against her parents and their staunchly conservative belief system. Oh yeah, she was also the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, who had created the largest media empire in the world in his time, which is probably why she got kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).
The SLA was a far left group of violent radicals which originally started as a small college group, entirely made up of middle class white kids, with the much less radical mission of tutoring black prison inmates. However, things kind of went off the rails when one of the inmates being tutored, a man named Donald DeFreeze, escaped prison, by literally just casually walking off, and took refuge with a few of his study buddies. DeFreeze, apparently being a charming son of a bitch, soon after took control of the group, shifting it from an extracurricular activity to an urban guerilla group/sex cult. At first, this group, which for some reason went with the name Symbionese Liberation Army, spent its time writing manifestos, training in firearms, and the usual wanton free love that goes with such things; all of this might sound weird, but remember, it was the 1970’s. However, it didn’t take long for them to kick things up a notch. The dozen or so members of the SLA wanted to create a racially equal communist utopia. For whatever reason, it was decided the best way to go about this was to murder a man named Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of the Oakland school district. While the SLA had a lot of heart, they really didn’t have a lot of smarts. This was probably why the assassination didn’t go quite so well. On the one hand, they did manage to murder an innocent man for being unsupportive of the idea of introducing student IDs, which was the same stance held by the SLA. On the other, the assassination didn’t go so well, resulting in two SLA members getting arrested.
Not wanting to leave their chums in prison, the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst in February of 1974 with the hope of using her as a bargaining chip. She was chosen because she lived nearby. Apparently overestimating Patty’s importance, the SLA members than completely forgot about their imprisoned members and instead demanded that the Hearst family give $70 of free food to every needy person in California. The Hearst family was less than willing to do this, probably because it would have cost around $400 million, which was quite a bit more money than they had. Instead, as a show of good faith, the family did take out a $2 million loan to give food to the needy in just the Bay Area, but this went badly with fights breaking out at the distribution centers.
While all of these shenanigans were going on, Patty was kept in a dark closet with just a flashlight and SLA reading materials to keep herself entertained. After only about three or four weeks of this, she denounced her former life and joined the SLA as a full fledged member. She then participated in a bank robbery with the group, waving around an automatic rifle and screaming like a madwoman, which of course made the national news because holy shit. Patty then helped with a couple of carjackings in order to enable the group to flee south to Los Angeles. Things just got worse from there. In Los Angeles, a shoplifting incident gone bad resulted in Patty shooting up the front of the store with a machine gun. Soon after, a two hour standoff with police ended with a burnt down house and six dead SLA members, including DeFreeze.
The surviving members of the group, including Patty, then fled back north to the Bay Area to lay low and try and recruit new members. After a year of failing to do this, they decided to rob a bank, which ended with a mother of four being shot. Not being good at pattern recognition, they then tried to bomb two police cars, but it turned out they were too inept to make bombs that actually worked. It wasn’t long after, in September of 1975, that the majority of the remaining group, including Patty, were arrested. During the trial, Patty claimed she had been brainwashed. Not buying it, the jury convicted her to seven years in prison. However, her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and she received a full pardon from President Bill Clinton in 2001. After her release, Patty married a policeman and became prominent in the East Coast society and charitable fundraising scene.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patty_Hearst-_Hibernia_bank_robbery.jpg