Patty Hearst's SLA Hideout
Unfinished History
1827 Golden Gate (between Baker and Broderick) Apt. 6.
photo: Chris Carlsson
You think your place is crowded! This small studio apartment with a bed that folded into one wall housed an entire army--the Symbionese Liberation Army--during its brief war against the Hearst Empire and the U.S. Government. Patty, a.k.a. Tania, spent more than eight weeks in these cramped quarters along with SLA members Donald DeFreeze, Bill and Emily Harris, Willie Wolfe, Angela de Angelis, Patricia Mizmoon Soltysik, Camilla Hall, and Nancy Ling.
The SLA had kidnapped Patty on February 4, 1974, demanding that the press print its revolutionary communiques and that newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst give away millions of dollars worth of food to the poor. Though the food giveaways were bungled, Old Man Hearst did spend a fraction of his fortune on the effort, and America's newspapers dutifully printed every last piece of SLA propaganda. But the food giveaway problems, and a series of mixups, gave Patty the impression that her family wasn't working hard enough to get her back. At the same time, she was swayed by the SLA's criticism of America's obscene maldistribution of wealth, its domination by the fascist military-industrial complex that had murdered JFK, and so on. At the beginning of those weeks, Patty was an SLA captive; by the end, she was a willing, gun-toting participant in the robbery of the Hibernia Bank.
Some say she was brainwashed -- the best legal team money could buy managed to convince a court of law that this was the case. In any event, Patty escaped the fate of most of her comrades, who were burned alive by the murderous Los Angeles Police Department. She spent little time behind bars, and quickly resumed what passes for a normal life in Hearst social circles. In 1979 she was seen wearing a T-shirt that said "Pardon me" on the front and "Being kidnapped means always having to say you're sorry" on the back. Since then, she has appeared in the wonderful films of cine-sleazemeister John Waters.
--Dr. Weirde