HEARST, PATTY
In the 1990s, she could be seen in John Waters’s motion picture Crybaby, and heard as an off-screen caller to a radio talk show on the TV series Frasier. She had appeared on the runways of Paris as a fashion model, wearing a sequined evening gown designed by friend Thierry Mugler. Her story had been told as a movie, Patty Hearst, in which she was played by Natasha Richardson, and even as an opera, Anthony Davis’s Tania.
Ever since the 1970s, Patricia Campbell Hearst
has been very much in the public eye.
On February 4, 1974, Hearst, the nineteen-
year-old daughter of Randolph A. Hearst and
Catherine C. Hearst, of the Hearst newspaper
chain, was KIDNAPPED by a tiny group of politi-
cal extremists who called themselves the Sym-
bionese Liberation Army (SLA). They locked
Hearst in a closet for many weeks, where she was
taunted, sexually assaulted, and raped repeat-
edly. The SLA held her for an unusual form of
ransom: they demanded that the Hearst family
distribute millions of dollars of food to poor
and needy people of the San Francisco Bay area.
Although the Hearsts complied with this and
other SLA demands, the young woman did not
return to her parents. Instead, she sent them a
tape recording in which she announced that she
had decided to become a revolutionary, join the
SLA, and go underground.
On April 15, 1974, the members of the SLA,
accompanied by Hearst, robbed the Hibernia
Bank in San Francisco. A month later, a botched
shoplifting attempt at a sporting goods store by
