The ordeal of Patty Hearst

Charles Foley

Los Angeles 'When I get out I'll be able to tell you all 1,Sityls of stories you just wouldn't believe. I Intend to issue a statement from a revoluti°nery femininist perspective—totally. My Politics are very different from way back

When'

Thus Patricia Hearst, in a surreptitiouslyrecorded conversation with a visitor within hours of her arrest last September. But the stories have yet to be told, the revolutionary statement yet to be made. As for her values, theY seem to have reverted—totally—to whatever is the transatlantic equivalent of Benenden.

An iron law of peer acceptance rules the Young, and Patty, for all the Hearst wealth and power, is no exception. From a fashionable Catholic girls' school to the radical chic purlieus of Berkeley, she went unzeal,°tIslY along with whatever was 'in'—she shacked up', routinely, with an older man, her tutor Steven Weed, but again with so little real feeling that she could denounce him in scornful terms when plunged into a new ambience.

A murderous little group calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army dragged her screaming from her campus home on the night of 4 February 1974, Clubbed her, jammed her half-naked into a car boot, locked her for days or weeks in that darkened closet. The shock, the hardships, the terror she suffered are undeniable.

But she was aware enough to know that, this time around, peer acceptance was a Matter of life or death. She did her best to ingratiate herself with her captors, even, according to her own account for court Psychiatrists (though not for the court Itself), taking three of them as lovers. Dutifully, the nineteen-year-old heiress t° one of America's gaudiest names and fortunes lapped up the revolutionary gruel fed her by the kidnappers, broadcast propaganda tapes on their behalf and then, to Shake all unbelievers, joined with gusto in the armed raid on San Francisco's Hibernian Bank on 15 April 1974. In deciding that Miss Hearst acted voluntarily, the jury had 'public opinion' on its side. Besides watching her commando act before the bank cameras, hearing her voice On tape spilling revolutionary rodomontade, the seven women and five men were given a Perry Mason demonstration of Pa1tY's ability to switch. In a taped message —damning now as Watergate's—she told F'f receiving from Willie Wolfe, her SLA isoulmate', a tiny Olmec carving of a moniceY. And here, said the prosecutor, triumphantly dangling the figurine on its chain, Was the very article, found treasured in her

bag on arrest, sixteen months after Wolfe's death. Was this the man who, as she testified, had raped her, and whom she 'could not stand' ?

And so the guilty verdict, which both satisfied and shocked America. If Patty Hearst, the cool, pampered princess, could so quickly change into an 'urban guerrilla' of her own free will, denouncing her 'pig' parents and the 'fascist America' which gave her everything, then who was safe from such conversion? There were more than 2,000 terrorist bombings in the US Last year. Hadn't all these revolutionaries, SLA and the rest, come almost exclusively from good,,white, middle-class homes.

Dr William Sargant, and other eminent psychiatrists, might propound, until they burst, their theories of Pavlovian conditioning, thought control, identity change under stress: to Middle-America, the true meaning of all this talk of 'brainwashing' is that she embraced, after a brief resistance, the fiercely-held convictions of her captors, in the absence of any of her own.

The future for Miss Hearst looks gloomy. The thirty-five-year prison sentence she was given on Monday was only a technicality— a way of postponing the ultimate judgment. She has to undergo further mental examinations before her fate is settled in three months time. The judge has said he will reduce the sentence, which was the maximum he could give for her part in the San Francisco bank robbery, but he does not seem likely to be specially lenient. Miss Hearst has some solid grounds for her appeal in that Judge Oliver Carter—a family friend of the Hearsts—was bent on fending off charges of favouritism to the 'poor little rich girl'—so much so that he may have moved too far in a contrary direction.

He admitted into evidence a wealth of material found in her last hideaway, and unrelated to the bank robbery with which she was charged. Yet a different judge has ruled exactly the same material to be inadmissible in the separate trial of Wendy Yoshimura, Patty's room-mate at the time.

There is one way Miss Hearst could cut short the protracted legal agony, and that is by 'snitching' on her former SLA comrades. Not merely on her two companions in that twenty-month odyssey through the underground, William and Emily Harris, now her sworn enemies, pledged to drag her through the courts for years if they can as punishment for 'selling us to save her own ass': Miss Hearst, turned state's evidence, would also have to testify against a score of other SLA members and their helpers.

She might relish giving evidence against the Harrises. But would she also want a death sentence for Steven Soliah, her last terrorist lover, now accused of a bank raid in which a bystander was shot to death ? Or denounce her close friend Wendy Yoshimura, who shared so many of her adventures? Or send to jail Jack Scott and his wife Micki, writers who sheltered and drove her about the country ?

American justice can often be tempered with mercy when the penitent embroils others, and for Patricia Hearst a rich field of atonement waits. The alternative is a series of eviscerating trials in which she stands little chance, after the San Francisco verdict, of acquittal. In Los Angeles, she faces, along with the Harrises, eleven counts of armed assault, robbery, and the kidnapping of a youth whose car the trio commandeered. Her defence—that she acted in fear of the Harrises—has already failed before one jury.

And after that, Miss Hearst could be charged with assisting in the bank robbery for which Soliah is now on trial. The FBI believe she participated in this raid, which netted 815,000 and left dead a mother of four who was depositing church funds.

Miss Hearst's parents will certainly do their best to persuade her to turn state's • evidence. Their patience and pocketbooks are wearing thin: they have run up bills of SI million already on their daughter's defence, with no end in sight—this on top of the 82 million thrown away on the fruitless food giveaway programme intended to ransom Patty, and the damage caused recently to their home by terrorist bombers.

For the US taxpayer, the Patty Hearst circus has been even costlier. The FBI estimates law enforcement spent at least 810 million on the search for the heiress, while her recent prosecution cost more than 8500,000.

'At least,' sighs Hearst lawyer F. Lee Bailey, 'those who said that money talks, that you can't convict a rich person in America, have for once been proved wrong.'