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Monday, September 24, 2018

Do You Think Patty Hearst Was Brainwashed?

Patricia "Patty" Campbell Hearst
She was born February 20th, 1954 in San Francisco, California to Randolph Apperson Hearst and Catherine Wood Campbell.
Patty is the granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst.
On February 4, 1974, 19-year-old Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley, California, apartment by a domestic American terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.
She was beaten and lost consciousness during the abduction.
Shots were fired from a machine gun during the incident. 
Her kidnapping was partly because she lived close to the SLA hideout. 
Another reason was to leverage the Hearst family's political influence to free two SLA members arrested for the killing of Oakland's first black superintendent, Marcus Foster. 
Since this seemed not to be working, the SLA demanded that the Patty's family distribute $70 worth of food to every needy Californian.
The estimated cost would have been $400 million. 
Patty's father took out a loan and arranged the immediate donation of $2 million worth of food to the poor of the Bay Area. 
Chaos erupted in the distribution process and the SLA refused to release her.
She was in a closet blindfolded with her hands tied for a week.
Supposedly, during this time DeFreeze, the leader of the SLA, repeatedly threatened her with death.
She was let out for meals blindfolded and began to join in the political discussions.
Hearst was confined in the closet for weeks, after which Patty claims that DeFreeze told her that the war council had decided or was thinking about killing her or her staying with them.
That she better start thinking about that as a possibility.
Patty said 
"I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs." 
She said she wanted to stay and fight with the SLA  and the blindfold was removed.
She was given lessons on her duties, especially weapons drills.
Angela Atwood told Hearst that the others thought she should know what sexual freedom was like in the unit.
Patty was then raped by William "Willie" Wolfe, and later by DeFreeze.

On April 3, 1974, she assumed the name "Tania".
On April 15, 1974, she was recorded on surveillance video wielding an M1 carbine on her hip while robbing the Sunset District branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco.
Two men were shot and wounded.
United States Attorney General William B. Saxbe said Patty was a "common criminal" and "not a reluctant participant".
The FBI agent heading the investigation had said SLA members were photographed pointing guns at Hearst during the robbery.
On May 16, 1974, a store manager at Mel's Sporting Goods in Inglewood, California, observed a minor theft by William Harris who had been shopping with Emily Harris, while Patty waited across the road in a van. 
The manager  and a female employee followed Harris out and confronted him instigating a scuffle. 
During this, one of Harris' wrists was restrained, and his pistol fell out of his waistband.
Patty, discharged the entire magazine of an automatic carbine into the overhead storefront.
This caused the manager to dive behind a light post.
He tried to shoot back with the pistol, but Patty, who was now firing single shots with another weapon, brought her fire closer, blasting fragments around him.
Patty and the Harrises hijacked two cars, abducting the owners. One, a young man, found Hearst very personable and at the trial he testified to her having discussed the effectiveness of cyanide-tipped bullets, and repeatedly asking if he was okay.

Police had surrounded their main base on May 17, 1974, six SLA members inside died in a gunfight.
Patty and the Harrises bought a car blocks away while the siege was going on, but it broke down.
They walked a few hundred yards from the car and hid in a crawlspace under a residential building. 
They spent the next two weeks in San Francisco flophouses disguised as derelicts.
Emily Harris was sent to a Berkeley rally called to commemorate the deaths of Angela Atwood and other founding members of the SLA who'd perished during the police siege. 
Atwood's acquaintance, Kathy Soliah, was among the radicals at the rally.
Soliah introduced the three fugitives to Jack Scott.
He was a radical athletics coach who had been asking for an interview with the SLA. 
During a car ride to a rural hideout, Scott claimed he offered Patty a ride to anywhere she wanted and she refused, almost insulted.
She wanted to go where her "friends" were going.

Patty helped make improvised explosive devices in two unsuccessful attempts to kill policemen during August 1975.
She was the getaway car driver for the robbery in which Myrna Opsahl, was shot dead by a masked Emily Harris, creating a potential for felony murder charges against Patty, and making her a possible witness against Harris for a capital offense.
On September 18, 1975, she was arrested in a San Francisco apartment with Wendy Yoshimura, another SLA member.
While being booked into jail, she listed her occupation as "Urban Guerilla" and 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."
Marked money found in the apartment when she was arrested. This linked Patty to the SLA armed robbery of Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California. 
Patty Hearst was described by Dr. Margaret Singer  as "a low-IQ, low-affect zombie".
Shortly after her arrest, her IQ was measured as 112, whereas it had previously been 130.
There were huge gaps in her memory from before her entrance into the SLA.
She was smoking heavily and had nightmares.
Securing an acquittal on the basis of brainwashing would be completely unprecedented.
Louis Jolyon West was appointed by the court in his capacity as a brainwashing expert.
After the trial, he wrote a newspaper article asking President Carter to release her from prison.
Patty claimed that she talked to psychiatrist,  Robert Jay Lifton  and that he pronounced her as a "classic case" which met all the psychological criteria of a coerced prisoner of war.
And that if she had reacted differently, that he said that would have been suspect.
After a few weeks, Patty disavowed her SLA alliance.

On March 20, 1976, Patty Hearst was convicted of bank robbery and using a firearm during the commission of a felony and given the maximum sentence possible of 35 years' imprisonment pending a reduction at final sentence hearing.
During final sentencing she was given seven years imprisonment.
During her time in prison she suffered a collapsed lung in prison  and underwent emergency surgery.

This prevented her from appearing to testify against the Harrises on eleven state charges which she was also arraigned for.
Patty was being held in solitary confinement for security reasons and in November 1976, was granted bail for an appeal, on condition she was protected on bond. 
Dozens of bodyguards were hired by her father.
Superior Court judge Talbot Callister gave her probation on the sporting goods store charge when she pleaded no contest.

Her bail was revoked in May 1978 when appeals failed and the Supreme Court declined to hear her case.
This time the  prison took no special security measures for Patty's safety until there was a dead rat found on her bunk the day William and Emily Harris were arraigned for her abduction. 
The Harrises were convicted on a simple kidnapping charge and were released after serving a total eight years each. 
In the weeks before he was murdered in Jonestown, Guyana, Representative Leo Ryan was collecting signatures for Patty's  release.
He had mentioned his own Synanon mass death threats, comparisons to Manson, and questions of the Patty's case. 
Western actor John Wayne spoke after the Jonestown cult deaths, said it was odd that people had accepted the fact that Jim Jones had brainwashed 900 human beings into mass suicide, but would not accept that a group like the SLA could have brainwashed a kidnapped teenage girl.
President Jimmy Carter commuted her federal sentence to the 22 months.
Patty was freed eight months before she would have had a parole hearing in 1979.
Her release was under stringent conditions and she remained on probation for the state sentence on the sporting goods store plea.
She recovered full rights when President Bill Clinton granted her a pardon on January 20, 2001.

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