EP 83: Patty Hearst

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Patty Hearst who -- in 1974 at only nineteen-years-old -- was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California. A few days after her kidnapping, a tape was received by a Berkeley radio station from the Symbionese Liberation Army that stated that they were holding Hearst as a prisoner of war and demanded that the Hearst family give millions of dollars worth of food to needy Californians in exchange for their daughter. Dissatisfied with the family’s response to this demand, the group continued to hold Hearst, seemingly against her will. Everything changed though when, two months after her kidnapping, surveillance footage at a San Francisco bank captured Hearst participating in an armed robbery alongside the group and later personally declared in tape recordings that she had officially joined the Symbionese Liberation Army of her own free will.

Patty Hearst instantly became one of the most hated people in America. When she was eventually arrested nearly two years after her capture, the country stood divided on their beliefs about her involvement. Was she a traitor? Had she really joined the SLA of her own volition? Or had she been brainwashed? Does Patty Hearst represent one of the most classic cases of Stockholm Syndrome in History?

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- Rachel and Leah