Odd this day
F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, in The Last Tycoon, that there are no second acts in American Lives. If ever anyone proved that wrong, though, Patricia Hearst did — and, indeed, continues to.
Obviously, you know the most prominent bit of her story: on this day in 1974, she was kidnapped by the United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army. They told themselves they were a Leninist ‘vanguard’ who were going to foment revolution in the most capitalist nation on Earth, but were in fact just violent criminals.
‘Patty’, as she was dubbed by the media, despite preferring her full name, famously became a member of the SLA, an armed robber, and a bomb-maker. Luckily for her, her IEDs did not succeed in killing anyone, and she wasn’t with six other members of the SLA when they were killed in a police shootout. Rather remarkably — if not surprisingly; this was America, after all — the raid was televised live, allowing Patricia to watch it happening.
Captured in September 1975, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison in March 1976 — and released in February 1979 when President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. She got a full pardon from Bill Clinton in 2001.
By then, though, her second act was well underway. She had already been a guest caller on Frasier, and in five John Waters movies. Admittedly, this happened in the days after John Waters movies featured things like drag queens eating dog faeces, but it’s still an interesting choice.
Perhaps strangest of all — because of its ordinariness — is that she then enjoyed what we might argue was a third act: she became a dog breeder. Rocket, her Shih Tzu, won the ‘Toy’ category at the 2015 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show (or ‘the American version of Crufts’ as it’s known in the UK), and her French bulldog Tuggy took ‘Best of Breed’ two years later.
However, her most significant contribution to world culture might be that she’s the world’s most famous ‘sufferer’ of Stockholm syndrome — and one of the people who have disproved its existence.
The condition got its name the year before Hearst’s kidnapping, when a Swedish bank was robbed, and the employees who’d been held hostage later refused to testify against the raider. Criminologist Nils Bejerot coined the term Norrmalmstorgssyndromet (after the address of the bank), and alliteration gave it its international name.
But Kristin Enmark, one of the hostages, criticised the police, the Prime Minister, and… er, Bejerot. He was supposed to have been acting as a negotiator, but apparently his aggression put the hostages’ lives in danger. So he was not what you might call an impartial observer.
Several scientists since have said — in admittedly more academic language — that the whole thing’s balls. One academic paper from 2016 called it
rhetorical power play, an effort to discredit counter claims … to neutralize the arguments of those with opposing points of view.
One from 2008, with the telling title, ‘Stockholm syndrome’: psychiatric diagnosis or urban myth?, found “little evidence that it describes a specific psychiatric syndrome”. And, perhaps most damningly of all, at a conference in 2015, Canadian doctor Allan Wade said it was
invented to discredit women victims of violence.
Essentially, no one can agree on a definition of the condition, or provide proper evidence that it’s real.
Hearst’s prosecutors argued that her ‘relationship’ with her captors was consensual, which doesn’t entirely chime with the fact that she was kept in a closet for several weeks, and testified that she’d been given the choice to stay with the organisation or die. She was still telling documentary makers this in 2009, but we — or, at least, the media — still keep using the phrase.
And, to return to the wording I opened with, in case you’re wondering why F Scott Fitzgerald would write what was (even before Hearst’s… interesting life) such a clearly disprovable sentence, the answer is that he quite possibly didn’t.
By quite a few accounts, he nicked chunks of his work from his wife, and had her put in an asylum.
Which was nice of him.
