Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Fact to Fiction

Fifty years ago, 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a ragtag group self-styled revolutionaries calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

At the time, I did not imagine that this event would ever affect me or have any impact on my life or career, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Nineteen months after her kidnapping, in September 1975, Hearst and the two surviving fugitives of the SLA were found and arrested by the FBI, after the greatest man/woman hunt in U.S. history.

A few days after their apprehension, Howard Kohn and I broke “The Inside Story” of the case in Rolling Stone, which instantly became what would be the biggest moment in our early careers as journalists.

We were both 28 at the time.

On Sunday, a friend and I braved the elements to attend an event in Berkeley celebrating the release of a new novel about the case by Roger Rapoport, who coincidentally is a former colleague of both Kohn’s and mine from our college days at The Michigan Daily.

Searching for Patty Hearst” reimagines the case 50 years later, through a mixture of fiction and fact.

Maybe that’s a good approach. All of the time Kohn and I were reporting the Hearst story, we kept telling ourselves “this stuff is so strange it’s almost as if someone made it up.”


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