Patty Hearst News Updates

Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, is 19 when she is kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. Hearst is subsequently beaten unconscious during the abduction by members of urban guerrilla group. As her family tries to ransom her release, Hearst shocks the country by announcing on an audiotape two months after her abduction that she has changed her name to Tania and joined the SLA. Shortly after, she is seen toting a rifle in surveillance footage during a bank robbery in San Francisco. She is labeled a “common criminal” by the U.S. Attorney General, and after a spree of potentially violent activities, she is apprehended. Defiant, she claims to be an Urban Guerrilla, but some feel she has been brainwashed by her kidnappers. A sensational trial follows. Although it is revealed that Hearst had been raped and brutalized before succumbing to the ideology of her kidnappers, she is convicted of bank robbery and using a firearm in a felony and given a 35-year sentence.