Patty Hearst Eagerly Awaits The Trial
Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army almost three decades ago, says that she is eager and willing to testify in the coming trial of four former SLA associates for a fatal bank robbery in 1975. "You know, it's been so long . . . and I feel that now there can be closure to this case," said Hearst, now Patricia Hearst Shaw, in a
wide-ranging interview with Larry King. Prosecutors believe that new evidence, plus testimony from Hearst, who drove the getaway car, can convict the accused.
Hearst had little good to say about her former captors. She believes that the "small revolutionary group" had its own jihad. They wanted to overthrow the government of the United States. They called themselves an army. They planned on forming cells and going on until they started a full-scale war in this country." She compared the SLA to the men who bombed the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and to the Charles Manson cult. "Charles Manson wanted to start a war too," she said, recalling how Manson had his followers scrawl words in blood at one of their crime scenes that he hoped would trigger a race war. The son of the woman murdered during the robbery said that he thought Hearst was "a victim of the SLA as much as our family was."
Hearst, who spent 21 months in prison until pardoned by former President Clinton, told King that she had been brainwashed by the SLA, a claim that her prosecutor at the time, Jim Browning, doesn't buy. "She has never admitted any culpability whatsoever, and that makes me uncomfortable," he says. "The question was, was she forced or not? The jury decided she was not."
(John Koopman, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/23/02, Internet)
Larry King Interviews Patty Hearst on Mind Control
Patty Hearst told Larry King what it was like for her mind to be a "prisoner," as he characterized her condition. "Most of the time I was with them, my mind was going through doing exactly what I was supposed to do."
KING: What you were told?
HEARST: Yes. I mean — even if I weren't told, I had been educated very well in what to do. I had been, you know, held in the closet for two months and, you know, abused in all manner of ways. I was very good at doing what I was told. And as far as thinking...
KING: Was that Stockholm Syndrome part of the thinking or not?
HEARST: I'm sure it was. Of course it was. I mean, they call it Stockholm Syndrome and post traumatic stress disorder. And, you know, I had no free will. I had virtually no free will until I was separated from them for about two weeks. And then it suddenly, you know, slowly began to dawn that they just weren't there any more. I could actually think my own thoughts. It
was considered wrong for me to think about my family. And when Cinque was around, he didn't want me thinking about rescue because he thought that brain waves could be read or that, you know, they'd get a psychic in to find me. And I was even afraid of that."
CALLER: Hey, Ms. Hearst, I would like to know, have you ever felt guilty being a part of the SLA and how do you handle the fact that so many others think you are just as guilty?
HEARST: You know, when I first was arrested and first going through the therapy with the psychiatrist because I did feel really horrible. And I --- it was the kind of guilt that was --- a lot of it stemmed from feeling so horrible that my mind could be controlled by anybody, that I was so fragile that this could happen to me.
And because really we all think we're pretty strong and that nobody can make us do something if we don't want to do it. That's true until somebody locks you up in a closet and tortures you and finally makes you so weak that you completely break and will do anything they say. And there was the feeling of guilt and self-loathing and despair and pain that was just
overwhelming.
KING: A brainwashed person doesn't know from time element when they're being brainwashed, do they? They don't wake up one day and say, I have been brainwashed?
HEARST: No. No, they don't. They -- I know for me, I thought that I was kind of fooling them for a while, and the point when I knew that I was completely gone, I'm quite convinced, was at the Mel Sporting Goods Store when I reflectively [sic] did exactly what I had been trained to do that day instead of what any sensible person would have done or person still in control
of their senses and their responses, which would be the minute the Harrises had left the van to have just run off and called the police.
At that point, you know, looking back, I can say that I was gone. I was so far gone I had no clue how bad it was. (CNN Larry King Live, 1/22/02, Internet)
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