HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The button has been pushed. Excellent.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess then the show must go on. Now I would like to start today, first of all, by thanking Marcus for the work that you've done already. All right?
MARCUS PARKS
The work that I've done already?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've just done so much work on this.
ED LARSON
He's talking like he doesn't appreciate what you did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I did.
MARCUS PARKS
And it's not just me, Carolina put in a ton of work on this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, too much.
MARCUS PARKS
Shaw, put in a ton of work on this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of work.
MARCUS PARKS
Joel put in a lot of work on this. This is a big team effort.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But now I kind of feel like because-
ED LARSON
I'm starting to feel guilty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't. Don't feel guilty. He does this to himself. But if you look at him right now, and Eddie said this to him is that like with all the work and with all the reading and the gravitas and the glasses-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he's wearing, he is dressed like a liberal-
ED LARSON
Militant. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
College teacher in the 1960s.
ED LARSON
No, you look like you're trying to talk me into like getting arrested.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that's what I feel like.
MARCUS PARKS
The fascist insect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because of this story, yeah, yeah, you look like a guy, like I feel like a trembling 15 year old heiress who's like can you change me?
MARCUS PARKS
I am far more fashionable than the Symbionese Liberation Army. Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hi, I'm Fatty Hearst. Yeah, it's funny name. It's my funny burlesque name, Fatty Hearst.
MARCUS PARKS
Henry Zebrowski, Fatty Hearst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Now it's Patty Burst. Bigger than the last.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, see!
ED LARSON
Not as big as the next!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's so many ways to make fun of the name even though she's a victim.
MARCUS PARKS
Patty Burst is Ed Larson.
ED LARSON
Ooh! So much sizzler!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hear that groan? That's the belt.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course our subject today is Patty Hearst, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the subsequent odyssey that she went through afterwards.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is a classic example of a name I've heard and a type of story I've heard and the various scant details that I have known over all the years. And you always kind of think like oh I know the Patty Hearst case, Stockholm Syndrome, she goes in, she robs a bank, she's a rich lady but she hangs out with these crazy revolutionaries. And you never think about it but the story itself is amazing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's huge.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I never really knew much about this. This has been very exciting and especially because I've always like hated William Randolph Hearst just naturally, just because I have to and the Hearst family because of Deadwood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Because of Deadwood.
ED LARSON
And so what I knew about Patty Hearst is like before this I'm like oh she's just some criminal like the rest of them. And then you start learning about this shit and all of a sudden you're like oh we've been fed bullshit for all these years.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's the power of books. And that's why I read the bible to the homeless people around my house every day to teach them about how Noah fucked his family.
ED LARSON
Who walks, who walks.
MARCUS PARKS
Now out of all the true crime stories of the 20th century, it's generally accepted that the top three, or at least the top three by name recognition, are OJ Simpson, the Lindbergh baby-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
And today's subject, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
ED LARSON
Man, that fucking baby was a criminal, dude. That baby, he brought out the automatic weapons and started shooting up that mall. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That freaked me out. Because the whole time I thought the baby was the victim, right?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I was going through all this shit, I was like motherfucker, that baby is a serial killer.
ED LARSON
Fucking nuts, man. Fucking bandolero.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fucking debunk festival going on here.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh bandoleros are gonna play an important part in this story later on. Believe you me. Well 50 years ago on February 4th, 1974, the extraordinarily wealthy granddaughter of media mogul William Randolph Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by a far left wing militant cult who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. The fucking eight-headed snake.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah, man. The Sybian army, man. They worked with Howard Stern.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Back in the day, man. Yeah, I believe, wasn't Jesse Jane in this? Or isn't Jenna Jameson a member of the Sybian Liberation Army?
ED LARSON
Do your own research, I always say.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how when the Sybian Liberation Army is coming though, you hear that (rumbling).
ED LARSON
(rumbling) These horses don't move!
MARCUS PARKS
What's most remembered about Patty Hearst however is that she helped her captors rob a bank less than two months after her capture, right after the SLA released a photograph of Patty dressed as a revolutionary holding an automatic weapon in front of the SLA flag, looking real fucking cool, real fucking scary to the squares at the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And also kind of attractive.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah! Now since the SLA's beliefs were strictly political, Patty Hearst was vilified the right for her participation in some of the SLA's crimes which included multiple cold-blooded murders. That being said, those on the left also have their opinions on Patty mostly because she was born into an extremely privileged and sheltered life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Privileged and shelter doesn't even really even come close to what she was.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's like The Last Unicorn.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Like I was privileged and sheltered, she was fucking away to a castle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She had a nice time.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The Hearst family is still to this day the 14th richest in America and Patty's grandfather William Randolph Hearst was one of the most visible and well-known symbols of the American ruling class oligarchy of his time. He's sort of like how we view Jeff Bezos today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually think that Jeff Bezos is nicer than William Randolph Hearst.
ED LARSON
I don't know. I'd like to put him in the ground myself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We'll figure it out.
MARCUS PARKS
Now taking those facts into account, it may be tempting to look at Patty Hearst in a less than sympathetic light. After all when Patty Hearst was kidnapped, she was indeed slumming it in a bad neighborhood in Berkeley, California. She was the very definition of the girl Pulp sang about in the song Common People. But when you reduce this story to its most basic form, Patty Hearst was a young 19 year old woman who survived by her own wits and strength a brutal kidnapping, months of torture, and multiple sexual assaults perpetrated by men who also saw Patty Hearst as almost a different species because of her background. Now with the Patty Hearst story it's important to know the historical context.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know. Oh we know we gotta know the context.
MARCUS PARKS
It always is. That's why I love these series. Historical contexts are my two favorite words in the English language.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Besides I'm cumming? This story, it's interesting because it is important to set the context because it's nice for us because it's modern history.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's something I can try to understand. Except it's another time, another time. And I'm coming, listening. Guys, communists, I hear you. All right? I'm trying to read it. I tried to read the theory. All right? I don't understand a word of it. And so this is as far as I went. I did as much as I could though this time.
ED LARSON
Yeah. As far as communism goes, it looks good on paper but it's obviously failed every single time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that's a long story in the whole thing.
MARCUS PARKS
But yeah, just 50,000 bearded men just sit out loud but true communism has never actually been tried.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. That is the idea and that's why we'll get there.
ED LARSON
Next time I need a nap, one of them can talk.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this happened in the mid 1970s which was a time of extreme inequality and social unrest when crime was at levels we can barely imagine today and a fair amount of those crimes were politically motivated. There were bombings by leftist radicals. That's the crazy thing about the 70s is that there was so much crime in that decade that there were bombings like throughout and nobody talks about them anymore.
ED LARSON
Man, everyone always talks about how this is the craziest, worst time ever. It's like in the 60s they used to like kill presidents.
MARCUS PARKS
You mean like today is the craziest, worst time ever?
ED LARSON
Yeah, it's not!
MARCUS PARKS
No!
ED LARSON
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. The 70s made the 60s kind of look cute.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because what happened after what was like... Because at least the 60s had this sort of like ideology attached to it in a way.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where it had this sort of like rising youth movement. Where the 70s was all about the absolute abject failure of that movement and what kind of led to.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And how that changed America to where we're at today.
ED LARSON
Yeah, the hippie peace and love turned into cumming into beer cans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, there ain't nothing wrong with cumming into a beer can as long as that beer can is my wife.
MARCUS PARKS
But you also had racially motivated murders, both white and Black. You had the KKK, you had the Zebra murders, and at the highest levels of power you had the Watergate scandal. Everybody's a fucking criminal. In the middle of all this was Patty Hearst, who became a symbol of economic inequality while also further establishing the belief in the right that America was being murdered by its young people. Now Patty was indeed brainwashed but not with the SLA's political ideology like many people assumed. Instead Patty was brainwashed into believing that because it appeared as if she'd fully joined the SLA, she would be gunned down on site by the FBI if she would ever leave. If you're asking why she didn't escape on her own when she had hundreds of chances, it's really as simple as that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At some point during this, her saga with the SLA, she made several moves in order to ingratiate herself to her captors in order to not number one be killed from the inside but then in those moves made herself optically a fucking villain. She made herself a criminal. And at that point if they're not negotiating and you got your family and you don't know that your family is constantly working in the background trying to find a way to find you, you believe in your mind you are fucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You are on camera with an assault rifle during a bank robbery, you know you're fucked. And guess who's not too fucking good with trigger discipline either? The FBI.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like they're gonna fucking kill you.
ED LARSON
Yeah, she's basically an undercover agent for her own survival.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. That's actually a really fucking good way of putting it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And indeed after almost two years on the run from the FBI, that's years, not months-
ED LARSON
Oof.
MARCUS PARKS
Patty was arrested and tired for the crimes in which she participated. And to be fair, there was plenty of evidence to support the opinion that she'd fully bought into the SLA's political philosophy and their terroristic tactics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It goes real deep. She goes deep. Honestly she Joaquin Phoenixed it.
ED LARSON
In it to win it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. She Joaquin Phoenixed it and then unfortunately instead of making The Master, she made-
ED LARSON
Joker.
MARCUS PARKS
But what nobody knew then and what a lot of people still don't know now is that from nearly the beginning of her ordeal, Patty Hearst never once bought into what the SLA was selling and had one goal during her entire ordeal. Patty Hearst was only concerned with survival and the journey she took with the SLA as a result is one of the most bizarre, fascinating, and incredible stories I've ever heard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Besides 'Lord of the Rings'. And I still feel like 'Lord of the Rings' is better.
MARCUS PARKS
It is. No, 'Lord of the Rings' is better. Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is better.
MARCUS PARKS
It is. As far as epic journeys go, yes, 'Lord of the Rings' is better.
ED LARSON
And this is 'The Silmarillion' for Patty Hearst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in case you hadn't noticed, this is gonna be a pro Patty podcast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure, sure, sure. Anybody who wants objectivity, good luck.
MARCUS PARKS
It doesn't exist in the Patty Hearst story. It just doesn't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is also one of these stories where there are so many perspectives coming in on this that we are going to try to balance it.
MARCUS PARKS
We're gonna try to be as fair as we possibly can.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But also anybody who tells you that they're objective is lying to you, they're fucking lying to you. This is very subjective. If you watch the CNN quote unquote "top documentary of all time", you want to talk about fucking subjective?
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get to that here in a second. I mean our main source of this series is Patty Hearst's out of print autobiography "Every Secret Thing" in which every moment of her time with the SLA is documented in detail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's extremely readable and it's very entertaining.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Why is it out of print?
MARCUS PARKS
Some books just go out of print.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very long.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, it's really long. And it is detailed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's exhausting.
MARCUS PARKS
Extremely detailed. Yeah, I mean you're following her throughout this entire journey. It is an exhausting read.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And obviously we're covering this from, in this part, in this episode, from her point of view. So this is all from her head. She had a whole version of this story which is technically she did the Last Podcast version of the story.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like in my mind she's playing them how I would play the characters in my head throughout the novel which is hilarious.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not a novel, it's nonfiction.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's nonfiction. But they don't get scary until you look from the outside.
MARCUS PARKS
Well for a supplemental source used for historical context, events Patty wasn't privy to, and to get a different point of view to be as fair as possible, we used the decidedly anti Patty Hearst book "American Heiress" written by infamous public masturbator Jeffrey Toobin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If I ever see Jeffrey Toobin, I'll be able to thank him.
ED LARSON
Certainly not shake his hand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, never. Ugh. I'll be like where's your fly? Let's see those hands! But what he did brought one of the only light moments I had during that dark, dark time, during that COVID time, what he did saved me.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So I wanna thank you, Toobin, for being a public masturbator because if it wasn't for your limp gray penis, nothing, I don't know if I ever would have smiled in 2020. I just still thank you for that.
ED LARSON
I just love that his last name's Toobin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is the act of pulling your dick out on a Zoom.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's my tube, I'm doing it. Toobin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It'll never get old. And I'll never take a word seriously you have to say ever again, Jeffrey Toobin. You're fucking done, dude. And your documentary series is a piece of shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. For some reason Toobin absolutely despises Patty Hearst. I think it's possible, I think it's because she declined to work with him on his book. Because she's tried to put it behind her, she wrote "Every Secret Thing" and she's like that's it, I'm done.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm moving on. I'm gonna go be in Serial Mom and get killed by Kathleen Turner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hi, listen Patty, I know I might be Jeffrey Toobin and yeah, I might be cruising for a bruising but I prefer to get a bit of a boobing. Yeah!
ED LARSON
His follow up email to her was just 'send nudes'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Send nudes, please. All right, all right, sorry. Sorry. I actually totally get it, no worries. Send nudes, please.
MARCUS PARKS
Toobin also executive produced and featured himself as a talking head in an absolutely awful CNN series on the Patty Hearst story which gives an offensive amount of time to a former member of the SLA who straight up says that Patty Hearst was asking for one of her sexual assaults. And then he completely ignores the other assault that occurred soon after. This dude drives the fucking narrative. This is Bill Harris, this guy, it's fucking despicable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's fucking... This CNN series is despicable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do want to finish it just to see maybe if he ends it with something but just the first three episodes are miserable.
MARCUS PARKS
It doesn't matter.
ED LARSON
I think Toobin finishes it himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(moaning) She's guilty.
MARCUS PARKS
It doesn't matter if he turns it around because there's still three entire episodes where Bill Harris, one of Patty Hearst's kidnappers and torturers, drives the narrative. And paints Patty Hearst-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's remotely entertaining any version of thought from the SLA which we'll get to next episode. But I guess they wanted they decided they needed to take the SLA seriously to make it scary or something. I don't know what the fuck they thought they...
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know. I think they just thought we have a member of the SLA who's willing to talk and that's gonna get ratings. I think that's the only thing they thought.
ED LARSON
I find that it's just nice to hate CNN again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
It is nice. But with all that in mind, let's dive into the odyssey of Patricia Campbell Hearst. Now to really understand what the kidnapping of Patty Hearst meant, we've got to understand the place that the Hearst family occupied in the American consciousness in the 20th century. Patty's grandfather William Randolph Hearst was the face of media in America. He was a celebrity in his own right and was so well known that Orson Welles famously used Hearst as the inspiration for his movie Citizen Kane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And everybody knows Citizen Kane because of The Simpsons. It's just one of those.
MARCUS PARKS
The Bobo episode?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it's that episode and then every time you've heard like 'rosebud', that's a fucking Citizen Kane thing. Love Citizen Kane.
MARCUS PARKS
Love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Surprisingly modern film for the time period that it was made.
ED LARSON
It's an unbelievable film.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But also isn't it weird that William Randolph Hearst first kind of looks like Herman Munster? He's got a big head.
MARCUS PARKS
But such was the power of William Randolph Hearst that when he just heard about Citizen Kane, he threatened to expose the private lives of multiple people in the film industry in his newspapers if the movie was released. And he came damn close to buying all prints of Citizen Kane and the negative in order to destroy the movie before anyone saw it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Before people call that fascist or bad, just remember like that's the closest feeling that William Randolph Hearst has to vulnerability. Which is that, just being like they can't know I love to sled. They can't know I have a girlfriend! Because then you look at the movie, it's like technically yeah, he's sad and old and mean and he was ruthless. But also at the same time if you're William Randolph Hearst, if I'm watching Citizen Kane, I'd be like man, that guy's got it all figured out.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Like how bad was he really?
MARCUS PARKS
The ultimate message of Citizen Kane is that-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all worthless.
MARCUS PARKS
Success is worthless.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. But still at the same time, he doesn't feel that, right, he doesn't know that. So he's watching the whole time being like goddamn, I'm a good actor. Like he doesn't even know it's not him.
ED LARSON
Do you think he even watched it?
MARCUS PARKS
I imagine he did at some point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, man. Every one of these people hate... It's about him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he has to watch it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as a result of Hearst's bluster, many theaters refused to show Kane out of fear that Hearst would sue them for libel. And Hearst banned all of his newspapers from even mentioning the movie in a positive or negative light. Hearst had such influence that in an attempt to get the boss to notice him, an employee at a small local paper owned by Hearst, he attempted to frame Orson Welles as a pedophile by hiding a 14 year old girl in his hotel room closet along with two photographers. Welles only avoided the scandal because a policeman warned him to not go back to the hotel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh, nasty stuff. And honestly, Kelsie, who's here helping us today, I just want to say this is a part of, to be honest, the kind of commitment we're looking for here at LPN. Which is you gotta, I actually want a list of other top podcasters and how we are going to sabotage them so that we can move towards the top. Of what? I don't even fucking know. Another Webby? I don't know. I actually don't know what this leads to. I don't know where the end of this is.
MARCUS PARKS
We just gotta get a couple of photographers that snap a picture and go wow, what a scoop!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What a scoop!
MARCUS PARKS
And then fucking run out the door. But in the end, partly because people didn't understand the movie, admittedly, but mostly because Hearst decided to kill it, Citizen Kane bombed and only became known as a classic decades later. Now the Hearsts were that particular stripe of American royalty in the sense that there was no blue blood in their family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Woo! Yeah! Didn't deserve it.
MARCUS PARKS
William Randolph Hearst's father was a 49er from Missouri who struck it rich in the silver mining business in California. Afterward he became a senator despite the fact that he could barely read.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, man, you don't gotta read to pass laws.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Now that just makes you president.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie! Come on, Eddie.
MARCUS PARKS
But once William Randolph Hearst came of age, he used his father's silver money to force his way into the media. As the line in Citizen Kane goes, "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what you said.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's why you did it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's why I bought stock in the Reykjavik Grapevine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I did that, for a week I walked around going 'I think it would be fun to run a newspaper'! Even though I don't run it in any way whatsoever.
ED LARSON
Well you take it down, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude. What we gotta do as we go to Reykjavik, we have to make sure that your newspaper starts decrying us as like we are this rampant-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This rage of like teenage chaos is gonna arrive.
ED LARSON
Gods are coming to town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Be careful. Oh, Last Podcast mania may shut Reykjavik down.
ED LARSON
There's a picture of me just like hide your pigs!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hide your pigs.
MARCUS PARKS
They ain't got no pigs, they got sheep.
ED LARSON
Oh well fuck them.
MARCUS PARKS
And it ain't my newspaper, it's Reykjavik's newspaper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly if there was this picture of Eddie that said hide your sheep, that means he's coming there to fuck them.
ED LARSON
It's a bad idea.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as Citizen Kane portrays, William Randolph Hearst soon found success by selling sensationalism. And while he did have some principles, loose principles, his first goal was always to sell as many newspapers as possible. Case in point was when he began publishing op-eds from some of the most evil people of the 20th century because it was good for business. Hearst actually commissioned Benito Mussolini-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
To write regular columns for his papers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're in unprecedented times. It's unprecedented times.
MARCUS PARKS
It delighted him that the most famous Italian in the world had a byline in his papers and Italian Americans bought papers as a result.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was the most famous Italian?
ED LARSON
More than Chef Boyardee?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Name one Italian more famous than Benito Mussolini in 1936.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Leonardo da Vinci!
ED LARSON
He was dead.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean alive. Living.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Famous living Italian. Maybe Rudolph Valentino.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Romeo Spaghetti. You ever met him? You ever saw him? Romeo Spaghetti? He fucked underage girls through a pile of pasta. Again, time does not show a lot of favor to Romeo Spaghetti.
MARCUS PARKS
Mussolini however never actually wrote any of the columns himself. His mistress ghost wrote most of them. And even then, it was usually difficult to decipher what Mussolini was even trying to say.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He wasn't a famous orator, was he? Mussolini.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was he a funny guy?
MARCUS PARKS
I have pictures of him being super funny in my head, like standing on a balcony and yelling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he looked like he was pouting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he was a populist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Mussolini however paled in comparison to the man Hearst gave an American voice to in 1930. That year in the Sunday March of Events section, Hearst published an op-ed called "Adolf Hitler's Own Story: He tells what's the matter with Germany and how he proposes to remedy it".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like you, Adolf, you're a straight shooter. You've got a good haircut. I love the mustache!
ED LARSON
Now who's that?
MARCUS PARKS
Well for a time, Hitler was Hearst's favorite commentator because Hitler could produce big headlines and his copy was sharp and decisive.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love the use of exclamations points!
MARCUS PARKS
And it also sold papers to a lot of German immigrants. The only problem was that Hitler was shit for making deadlines. But still willing to give the Nazis a shot, Hearst replaced Hitler with Herman Göring.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well.
MARCUS PARKS
The second highest ranking Nazi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the guy. That's the guy that you would bring in, right. Because he's the guy that wrote for the Nazis.
MARCUS PARKS
Hearst... Well no, Göring, he wasn't the propaganda minister, that was-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Goebbels?
MARCUS PARKS
Goebbels, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. So what did Göring do?
MARCUS PARKS
He was second in command. He ran the Luftwaffe and he was just Hitler's like guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow, cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He did a lot of really awful shit too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I bet. Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He was sentenced to hanging in the Nuremberg trials.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I don't think he was the fun one. But I'm just saying they had writers.
ED LARSON
They should have a bull kill him because of his last name. Goring.
MARCUS PARKS
Goring.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's not spelled the same way.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Killed himself with a cyanide capsule the day he was supposed to be hanged.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's kinda fun.
ED LARSON
Ugh. Pussy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. Hearst even went to Germany to meet with Hitler after some of Hearst's Jewish friends, particularly film executive Louis B. Mayer, they expressed some concerns.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We feel like there might be... We just got a feeling. We feel like your buddy's out of pocket.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But all Hitler said about his treatment of the Jews, all he said to Hearst was basically:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Don't worry, it'll all be over soon enough.
ED LARSON
Oh okay, good. Yeah. So you got it covered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you know Hitler loved that look, that sheepish like...
ED LARSON
You don't see the look over telegram.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Hearst chose to take this statement in a manner that I'd call willfully positive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah, well good. Ah, exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
And he continued tacitly supporting the Nazi regime because Hitler's columns sold papers. Hearst would finally be forced to speak out against Hitler after the events of Kristallnacht in 1938 but even then his criticism was lukewarm at best.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Mostly about how it was a waste of glass and windows. And how sad it would be for the coming winter months.
MARCUS PARKS
That's all to say of course that William Randolph Hearst was not necessarily a beloved figure in the minds of the American people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
And the Hearst name became associated with both ruling class arrogance and over the top opulence, as was portrayed in Citizen Kane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well his fucking house was a famous... San Simeon would become this otherworldly castle-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In the middle of the California countryside. It is gorgeous. But you also wonder why they thought you were some kind of alien, right, from the outside.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you're literally living like an old school European like royal family inside of the United States of America.
ED LARSON
That's interesting because weren't they building Hitler a castle in California?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's another crew. That was Lindbergh's baby.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was running that whole thing.
ED LARSON
Oh okay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I didn't find out actually also until I started reading into the Lindbergh baby thing, the baby was the Nazi.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh so the baby was the one who convinced the father to be the Nazi?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm pretty certain that Lindbergh's baby did, I believe, the contract negotiation between Hitler and William Randolph Hearst for the amount of words deliverable.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And set the deadlines and did a lot of the templating.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which I thought was very strange.
MARCUS PARKS
Getting his hands dirty.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Just little goo-goo ga-ga and then he would do something about how like... And then he said Jew-Jew no-no.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It was like weird, Jew-Jew no-no.
ED LARSON
They loved working with the baby because he looked like a talking bratwurst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Giving him little licks. I'm just making sure you're a person!
MARCUS PARKS
Now when William Randolph Hearst reached the end of his life in 1951, he found that he had not raised worthy heirs. Many of his sons were alcoholics, none did well in school, and most were living lives of leisure as playboys and layabouts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
This of course included Patty Hearst's father Randy. Now Randy had also taken up the newspaper business as a career but he was boss more in name than in practice because he'd just pop into the paper every once in a while to see how everything was going and say bye bye.
ED LARSON
Has there ever been a responsible Randy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. No, I don't think so.
MARCUS PARKS
What's the name, the dude, the pitcher, the big tall pitcher?
ED LARSON
Randy Johnson.
MARCUS PARKS
Randy Johnson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Randy Johnson. Responsible.
ED LARSON
The bird killer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He showed up at every game he was supposed to, he showed up at practice. He killed those birds just like he promised his father he would.
MARCUS PARKS
And were you ever disappointed by a Randy Newman song?
ED LARSON
No, I love Randy Newman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
And Randy Bachman. Okay, we're okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Okay, that's it. Randy Bachman saves me, I don't like Randy Newman.
ED LARSON
You don't like Randy Newman?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nah, he's smug.
ED LARSON
We can fight about this later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think he's smug.
ED LARSON
He's got every right to be smug.
MARCUS PARKS
But Randy Hearst was a family man. He married his wife Catherine at the age of 19, he had five kids, and he actually raised them himself. His favorite was the middle child, Patty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aw yeah. Patty was a lot of fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, everyone loved Patty. Now Patty was raised in a mansion in the old money area of San Francisco where they had a live-in maid and a governess. She described her childhood in her book as happy and affluent but sheltered which is a bit of an understatement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She had no idea that there was a world outside.
MARCUS PARKS
No. This is a woman who grew up with an actual castle as her summer home, the famous San Simeon property which was once the home of the world's largest private zoo and is now an actual tourist attraction owned by the state of California.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's amazing.
MARCUS PARKS
You can still see like zebras in the California countryside that escaped from the zoo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Have you ever been?
ED LARSON
No, I haven't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When you drive, it's these switchback roads up to it and the way it was made to look super honestly like it's far off, it looks farther in the distance than it is. Because you're driving these kind of like switchback things up. And it's like a fairy tale. You slowly watch this castle like crest over as wild zebras feed on the grass all around it. And apparently the goal for a long time was that no one know exactly where the castle itself was. So he would have people... Like when you went to go visit the Hearst mansion, the Hearst castle, what he would do is you'd get a letter that's saying, you wouldn't know but you'd get a letter that says from William Randolph Hearst and being like you're coming over to the house. And so you'd be like all right. And so a guy would show up and pick you up at the house or you'd meet somewhere down below in the bottom of the property and he'd have somebody else come and take you so that no one would actually know how to properly get up to the castle itself.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Now why did they give it to California? Did they sell it to California?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They gave it together, they gave the land because it sat on something over like 275 acres. Like it was this huge stretch of land that slowly but surely sold off chunks to the state government.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And this castle was all like... He'd throw these massive Hollywood parties there because he was-
ED LARSON
Yeah, I know about that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah because he was friends with every nasty boy in Hollywood, like Charlie Chaplin.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he had fingers in every single pie.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Tongues in many soups.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tongues in many soups. Because he liked getting inside information on people. That's how he controlled people. And what he would do is he had this big long table and then you'd sit at the center, he'd be at the center. And how you knew how he liked you is that you'd be close to the center at the table. But then slowly but surely the more you get invited, the closer you get to the outside of the table until eventually you're not invited anymore. And so that's like how you knew how you didn't want to talk to.
ED LARSON
Did you guys ever see Mank?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. He has a whole thing in Mank.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it's fucking awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when they got older, Patty and her sisters all went to Catholic school. But while Patty was rebellious enough to tell a nun to go to hell, she was not by any stretch an out of control, spoiled, rich brat. In fact she bucked her socialite mother's expectations of being just another rich wife and even considered changing her name because of the connotations it held.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wouldn't even say she was that like special of a rebellious kid in that way you were saying.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She really was just kind of... In LA you meet some of these people.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean yeah, she was of course very rich but she was also just a very normal girl.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Very normal young woman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you went to any affluent city in the United States of America and went to any one of these fancy neighborhoods where like people went to sort of like cosplay being like regular, you know what I mean? You earn a lot of money and they're going to go out to like some area like in Brooklyn. If we got rid of all the people for faking, that they weren't from money, the place would be empty.
ED LARSON
Also like someone's gotta pick up the tab.
MARCUS PARKS
With that being said, Patty Hearst had grown up so incredibly wealthy that she really didn't have a great idea of what it was like outside of her bubble, nor did she really know how to just be a regular person out in the world. Like she didn't know how to call up the electric company, set up bills.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Patty needed a bridge. And that came in the form of a teacher named Steven Weed whom Patty started dating when she was 17 and he was 23.
ED LARSON
Aw but was cool, his last name's Weed!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Unfortunately-
ED LARSON
Look how young my girlfriend is, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude! Fucking you know what's crazy, man, is sometimes when I'm kissing her I imagine if she was a little egg. Like how small can you fucking be, dude?
ED LARSON
Anyway, back to class. Today we're learning about weed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Steven Weed is creepy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Steven Weed was a math professor who ran a music workshop at Crystal Springs School which was basically a finishing school to prepare young girls for a life of opulence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I go there a lot of times and they be like all right, welcome to alabaster skin class 101. First of all, here's a bucket of mayonnaise. Rub it on yourself you worthless pigs! None of you are soft enough! That's what you gotta do, man. You gotta get these debutantes into shape. Let's see the nipples! Let's go! We're learning how to make spring rolls! All right, now we're doing my taxes!
MARCUS PARKS
Steve met Patty as a guitar tutor. And even though the age difference is fucking very creepy and definitely inappropriate, they started dating and got more serious after Patty's first year in college. As could be expected from a guy in his 20s who dates girls still in high school, Steve soon became difficult, arrogant, and condescending.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're always like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's always like man, he's so cool. And then all of a sudden he's like you start doing stuff where you think it's cool to act like a wife at home and she's starting to do that, sort of like mothering him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he's really excited about that. And then he really reverts to a childlike state even though he's much older than her.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. But even so, even though they were having problems, they still decided to get a place together in Berkeley, California after Steve won a fellowship at UC.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At the bong sciences department.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Berkeley at the time was a place that was dealing with the aftermath of the 60s, not unlike how nearby Haight-Ashbury had in just a few short years devolved from a hippie paradise into a place where heroin addiction, pimps, and con men like Charles Manson thrived. Patty however was thrilled to be living somewhat independently. And even though she had her doubts about Steve, she liked the idea of being married.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Playing adult. She wanted to, she saw it like we hear people talk about it all the time. Natalie talks about how when she dated a man that was 20 years older than her and she felt super mature because he fed the line of how mature and ready you are and how amazing and special you are.
MARCUS PARKS
So when Steven asked for her hand in marriage, she said yes at the age of 19 which is the same age her father was when he got married. The engagement was announced in a Hearst newspaper on December 19th, 1973. But unbeknownst to anyone, that announcement would change the course of history for it was quickly noticed by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh man, we need a Jimi Hendrix guitar sound. We need some kind of like ( guitar riff).
MARCUS PARKS
These fucking assholes and idiots don't deserve Hendrix.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because right now we're from the outside. The way I'm viewing the series is like we're on the outside now. So to this point the SLA, like they're gonna look pretty scary, pretty intense.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now we're gonna get into the full story of the SLA in episode two. But the broad strokes are that the SLA was a small militant Black revolutionary group that basically operated as a cult. As Henry told me earlier, think Charles Manson but with left wing politics instead of pure nonsense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And it comes from the same spot, it comes from someone that was also institutionalized by the United States government.
MARCUS PARKS
The only hitch about the SLA being a Black revolutionary group however-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is a big hitch though.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would say honestly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Was that out of the 10 members, only one of them, the leader, was actually Black.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The other nine, lily white.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they just became more white. You know what I mean? As the time went. It kind of reminds me about how when we did West Side Story at my high school and they decided that everybody with... Because we had no Hispanic students, that anybody with dark hair-
ED LARSON
In Queens?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, this is in Florida.
ED LARSON
In Tampa you didn't have any Hispanic students?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not in the theater department. And so I obviously wa son the white team because I'm translucent.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then everybody else, it was all the Italians.
ED LARSON
You were a Jet but you were a jumbo jet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I was Snowboy.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah. That's great, good for you.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the white people in the SLA wanted to be Black so badly that one guy, Bill Harris aka Teko, this is the guy that was in the fucking CNN series. He was known to sometimes pound the floor with his fist yelling quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god how I wish I were Black! Oh god how I wish I were Black, I wish it were me. Can I be Black? Can I close my eyes and open up these white lids and see a Black skin underneath please? I get it. I do this sometimes in casting offices.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean basically it's a cult full of Rachel Dolezal's with guns.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It is wild, man. Because they... Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the SLA were never really an organization known for their brilliant plans and schemes. But they figured that they could kidnap someone important and trade them for the release of two members of their group that they felt had been wrongly imprisoned.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we'll get into next week why they thought that would be a viable plan.
MARCUS PARKS
Now they had a long list of names but they eventually settled on Patty Hearst after seeing the engagement announcement. This was not just because of what the Hearst family name met in American society, that was important, but it was also because Patty's living situation in a bad neighborhood in Berkeley made the kidnapping extraordinarily easy. And so on the night of February 4th, 1974, Patty Hearst and Steven Weed settled in for the evening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, let's fucking count our nugs before we go to sleep, Patty. Because if not, you know the nug fairy comes and fucking chiefs have your shit, man. So when the nug fairy comes, you gotta say I got exactly 34 nugs in here. I'm counting, bitch. All right.
ED LARSON
Could somebody tie my shoes?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh shit. Because every time I go to fucking tie it, man, all I see is noodles, man. This is freaking me out, dude. I'm stupid.
MARCUS PARKS
Steve was planning on a nice evening of TV. He had a double feature. First he was gonna watch Mission: Impossible and then he was gonna watch a TV show called The Magician. Patty meanwhile was studying at the table wearing her in for the night outfit, a bathrobe and underwear. Little did she know that these would be her only clothes in the weeks to come. At 9 pm that night the doorbell rang on Patty and Steve's second floor apartment. Steve opened the door to find a young agitated white woman. This was SLA member Angela Atwood, aka Gelina. She told Steve that she'd backed into a car downstairs and she needed to use Steve's phone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(knocking) (door creaks) Hi, is this Mr. Weed? I saw it here on your doorbell here. I had the most horrible set of circumstances.
ED LARSON
I want to stop you right there. It's Professor Weed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh. I didn't know I was talking to a professor, I should have seen and noticed by your weed-like smell in your small glasses.
ED LARSON
Immediately forgiven.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Well you have to know I'm in a bit of an emergency situation.
MARCUS PARKS
Gelina was a former actor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're all... Guess what I've learned about all of them? All theater majors.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Did you know this? We're waiting until next week. The entire crew, the whole three of them that joined up with the first three, they're all theater.
MARCUS PARKS
Before Steve even had a chance to answer Gelina, the door flung open and he was soon faced with two armed men, one Black and one white. After them came Gelina, who backed Patty into the kitchen stove and pointed an automatic pistol in her face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You better watch yourself, little girl, before I turn you into human glue.
ED LARSON
Is an automatic pistol a thing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I've never... Oh like RoboCop.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like RoboCop.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know, I'm probably gonna get some... Maybe it's a semiautomatic pistol.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a gun.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a gun. It's a gun.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a really dangerous fucking gun.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a gun that Gelina shouldn't have had.
ED LARSON
For sure, for sure. I'm sorry I got caught up on the wrong detail.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's fine. You probably saved us like 20 emails from a bunch of fucking gun nerds. Well Gelina then clamped her hand over Patty's mouth and told her to be quiet and nobody will get hurt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm in the movies! It's like I'm a little revolutionary.
MARCUS PARKS
Meanwhile Steven Weed had been pushed to the floor and was being kicked repeatedly by the white guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nah man, my fucking show just started! Oh man.
ED LARSON
And this would be the last good thing they would ever do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, listen, dude. The fucking magician was about to pull all the fucking rags out of his sleeve!
MARCUS PARKS
The guy kicking him was the aforementioned Teko. Steve actually thought at first that Teko was Black because Teko talked in an affected Black voice, as did many members of the SLA.
ED LARSON
Henry, what'd it sound like?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually was gonna wait for next episode because there's a couple... It is really funny because they talk about it with each one. It's like that's what's fucking hard is that like... I don't even wanna get, I have a breakdown for this.
MARCUS PARKS
But once both Steve and Patty were down on the ground, the actual Black guy started asking them 'where's the safe?' over and over again because he was under the impression that every rich person in the world had a safe in their home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's a safe in every single fucking hotel room. There's a safe lots of places.
MARCUS PARKS
The man yelling about the safe was career criminal Donald Defreeze, aka Cinque Mtume aka Cin. Cin was the leader of the SLA and the only Black guy in this Black revolutionary militant group.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You listen to me, you ever loving fellas. All right? There doesn't need to be one more Black fellow in this group, all right? Because you got the number one guy. Cinque. And don't you worry about it, all right? I'm the Blackest man you've ever met.
ED LARSON
That's how you stay in charge. It's job security.
MARCUS PARKS
We're gonna get into that in the next episode. You're exactly right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
It's so fucking stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the problem, man. I don't even wanna get into it! Right now we have to remember, Marcus, the SLA's scary right now. It's scary right now.
MARCUS PARKS
They can never at any point be scary to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know but we have to pretend like they're scary right now because we're gonna find out that they're stupid soon.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the thing is that they are scary, they are very, very scary to Patty Hearst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And will remain terrifying to Patty Hearst throughout.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Til the end, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Patty and Steve didn't have a safe but Cin's insistence that there was a safe made it seem like this was probably a robbery and would be over soon enough. But then Patty's hands were tied behind her back, a knotted rag was stuffed in her mouth, and a blindfold was wrapped around her eyes and tied behind her head. But Steve, even after being hit over the head with a bottle of wine and kicked and hit in the face repeatedly-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're supposed to drink that!
ED LARSON
Is that my bong?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fucking don't hurt my bong.
MARCUS PARKS
He managed to get his hands free before rushing out to the patio to get help.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Help!
MARCUS PARKS
That's when he noticed no one was running after him. That's because the SLA were too busy dragging Patty the other way, out the front door. She'd spit out the gag and was screaming for help because she was now fully aware of what was actually going down. Her neighbors came outside to see what was going on, so one of the kidnappers let out a burst of gunfire from their automatic weapon in response.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not subtle.
MARCUS PARKS
No. By this time, Steven Weed had made it to a neighbor's apartment and was pounding on the door begging for help.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Any nugs to help me get inspired to go to the police? Please! Emergency nugs needed!
ED LARSON
I need to fucking chill to the max, man! This is so much pressure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fucking I can't handle this, dude. My fucking rich ass girlfriend's got a fucking kidnapping problem, man.
MARCUS PARKS
But Patty had already been tossed in the trunk of the car, the lid was closed, and just before the car sped off with Patty inside, one of the kidnappers let loose with one last burst of gunfire for good measure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now they'll know we have bullets. She also said that she was having dreams about getting kidnapped. I find that really, I feel like it was just in the air-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because there was a case-
ED LARSON
Getty too. Was that around this time?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the Getty kidnapping was the year before.
ED LARSON
Ah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
So it's blatantly inspired.
MARCUS PARKS
Well we're gonna get into the Getty kidnapping next week.
ED LARSON
Okay, cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's a lot of inspirations. But she was having prophetic dreams. But I think she was saying that she had this feeling that something was gonna happen. But I realize now, you know what it was? And she said so much kind of after the fact was that because she was actively being tailed and they were watching where she was going. And sometimes, and this is great for my friends with OCD out there, is that sometimes when you're super paranoid thinking that somebody's following you, they are. It's actually completely a total real scenario. And they are coming to kill you.
ED LARSON
That's why I walk in zig zags.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always. I taught you that. Serpentine. Walk like a cat, jump like a dog.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after a short drive, Patty was transferred to the backseat of another car and she sat in abject terror listening to her kidnappers congratulate each other on how smoothly their operation had gone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You were so scary. You were so good. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, I did do good, right? Yeah.
ED LARSON
You got all your lines right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I rehearsed. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They also had all the windows rolled down, ready to quote "shoot it out with the pigs" if they needed to. Because all of these people are all ready to die at any second. They're begging for it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh this is the story of a group of people heading towards total annihilation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. But after anywhere between an hour and three hours, Patty was really fuzzy on the time, she found herself being led up a flight of stairs and down a series of hallways. Now at first Patty was terrified that she'd meet the same fate as kidnapping victim Barbara Jane Mackle. Mackle was a 20 year old college student who'd been kidnapped in 1968 and was buried alive in a coffin on an isolated hillside in Georgia for 83 hours before her father paid a ransom of half a million dollars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
No. But while Patty didn't go in a coffin, her reality wasn't far off. She was soon thrown into a walk in closet 6 ft long and 2 ft wide, modified so it could only be opened from the outside. It was filthy and stank from the old carpet and padding that had been used to soundproof the space, giving it the feel of a cell at an insane asylum. Soon after she was thrown inside, the door flew open and a member of the SLA placed a small radio inside with the volume turned all the way up so Patty couldn't hear what her kidnappers were saying and so she would be disoriented even further.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At the very beginning, we said this, they're very frightening. You have these people who mean a lot of business so that she's now watched her husband get the shit beat out of him-
MARCUS PARKS
Fiance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fiance. Fiance is a piece of shit, it's a dumb name. It's a stupid role.
ED LARSON
Mrs. Weed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Mrs. Weed. Man, fucking-
ED LARSON
That's actually kind of great.
MARCUS PARKS
Patty Weed?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude! Fuck yes, man.
ED LARSON
Yeah, that's a Peanuts character, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude, high as hell, learning no lessons, man. But she's traumatized. And then the way it begins, it was extremely like they seem like they're very capable.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like they have a full on, like there's an agenda here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. A few hours later the leader of the SLA opened the door and told Patty that his name was Cinque Mtume and he was the fifth prophet and the general field marshal of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Now as soon as Patty heard the name Symbionese Liberation Army, she knew she was in trouble. While she did admit to being blind to most inequalities in American society at this time, she still read the news and she remembered the headlines the SLA had already made. The reason why two of their members were in jail was because just four months earlier the SLA had executed the superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District in the school's parking lot, a guy named Marcus Foster.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it was not a good move.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a bad move.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a bad move because as we come from the other direction next week you'll see why they made this move. But they really shit the bed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the thing is if you're gonna be a revolutionary group, a bit of advice. Those first couple like roundabouts, those first couple engagements-
MARCUS PARKS
Like your first headline?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. Super crucial-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To how everybody's gonna view you for the rest of the time. And you really got to start off on the right foot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well the murder had received widespread condemnation and bafflement from other Black revolutionary groups. Because Marcus Foster was not only Black but a symbol of success in the community because he was the first Black superintendent of a large American city school district. The SLA had murdered him because they didn't agree with some policies he was merely entertaining, not even implementing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And a lot of it was conspiracy theory.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like what he was-
MARCUS PARKS
And paranoia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And paranoia. Like it was basically about creating an ID system for children in the elementary school system. And then he extrapolated it, Cinque extrapolated to this concept that they were going to be bringing police officers in to monitor the everyday activity of children. Because he kind of thought it was this slippery slope of oh they're gonna start tracking the kids, kind of like in a mark of the beast style/police state. The kids are gonna come and the cops are gonna be teaching the kids classes and stuff. And then he doesn't know the cops are lazy, they're not gonna do that. They're not gonna teach classes. If I was a cop and then I was forced to watch and like be in charge of an elementary school class, we're gonna watch Dumb and Dumber. You know what I mean? Like all right, it looks like old Officer Zebrowski is gonna put on one of his favorite documentaries. Yeah, watch Charles and Larry Christmas.
ED LARSON
You know how mad they must have been when he wasn't killed by the KKK?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you're like what the fuck?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Soon after, two members of the SLA were arrested for the crime. Russell Little, aka Osi, and Joseph Remiro, aka Bo. But even though Patty knew exactly who she was dealing with, she thought it would be best if she feigned ignorance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Perfect.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. This of course bruised Cin's ego and he proudly and angrily gave Patty the SLA's entire resume, including the murder of Marcus Foster. They're still very proud of this. He still thinks that he's done a wonderful thing for killing this superintendent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because where we're at right now in the SLA's life, we're into the Charles Manson section of we are gonna have to ramp up the rhetoric in order for me to keep the cult.
MARCUS PARKS
Cin then told Patty that she was a prisoner of war because she was the daughter of Randolph A. Hearst, a corporate enemy of the people. But since she was a prisoner of war, she was gonna be treated according to Geneva Convention guidelines.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She wasn't.
MARCUS PARKS
Cin asked her if she had any religious medals on her person, explaining that under the Geneva Convention, she could hold on to any religious medals but had to forego every other item to the SLA.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I worship this gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Thank you, St. Barnabas' gun, for the protection that you give me each night. And (kiss) thank you the bullets of the Virgin Mary.
ED LARSON
(singing) Oh holy knife!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Blap-blap! Blap-blap! Blap-blap!
MARCUS PARKS
But since Patty was wearing only her bathrobe and underwear, she thought for the first of many times that the person talking to her might be insane. Now this was about half true because it's hard to tell how much Cin actually believed in what he was about to tell Patty. Although it's most likely he was just trying to make himself sound more impressive than he actually was. See during the kidnapping, Patty had been hit in the face with the butt of a rifle and had been cut, scraped, and bruised by the rough treatment she'd received between her apartment and the SLA's closet. For those wounds, Cin promised that an SLA doctor would soon arrive. But their medical team was at that moment very busy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got a lot going on, a lot of different stuff there, madam. All right? So what you gotta know is we got armed fronts, we're fighting in Alaska right now. Did you know that the snowmen were conservative? And then we got a lot of stuff going on a lot of places. Toledo, Milwaukee, a lot of places. We got Seattle. Some people need Band-Aids in Seattle. So we had to send them out super last minute for some crucial, crucial Band-Aids. I gotta go.
MARCUS PARKS
Cin claimed that other SLA combat teams had captured five other prisoners that night across the state of California. The SLA, he said, was a huge army that had intelligence and medical units in addition to their ground troops and that it was all financially backed by supporters of the revolution.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you can bet your buttons on that, little miss. All right? Because no hardcore fellas such as myself who just got out of the pen aren't gonna mess around with no half measures, you little woman. All right? So you better cross your Ts and dot them Is when it comes down to it because if not Miss Buster Brown, I'm gonna come over there and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, oh you better watch it. I gotta go, I gotta go make sure I'm sending the SLA doctors to Baton Rouge! Yeah, it's getting out of control. Yeah, I gotta get out of here.
MARCUS PARKS
He then added that the SLA was linked internationally to the countries of Ireland-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
The Philippines and Puerto Rico.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The whole country.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Which are all known for how many Black people they have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. The Blacks of Ireland, you wouldn't even believe the type of crazy loco fellas we got in Ireland right now. What these guys are doing, they are keeping it real, my friend.
MARCUS PARKS
And even though Puerto Rico is not, as we all know, a country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
ED LARSON
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Finally Cin-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a vibe.
ED LARSON
Not since 1897.
MARCUS PARKS
Finally Cin told her that if she behaved herself, she wouldn't be mistreated. But if she dared make a sound or even touch the closet door, she'd be strung up from the ceiling like a dead pig. She was then left there in the dark, blindfolded with her hands tied.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't you mess with me, all right. Because I'm a cranky Mfer. All right? Have a good night.
MARCUS PARKS
Love you. Now the next day Cin was furious that the papers hadn't printed anything about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. In his view this was not a kidnapping at all but an arrest. So he decided to send a so-called arrest warrant to the media. Issued by the court of people, the statement said that any attempt to rescue Patty would result in her execution. And this and any further communications had to be published in full in all newspapers and any failure to do so would endanger the safety of the prisoner. The statement ended with the now infamous sign off:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!"
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See you gotta say it in a militant... You're allowed to with the glasses.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure. Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Woo!
ED LARSON
Yeah, I felt that a lot better.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right. Hey, you mind your Ps and Qs, all right. Because we're calling for the death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people and that's gotta stop!
ED LARSON
And our first person to do it is Sergeant Orkin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will not let that stand.
MARCUS PARKS
Now almost immediately Cin began drilling the thought into Patty's head that if the FBI were to show up at the SLA safehouse, the SLA would kill her first, then shoot their way out or die trying. Because all of them would rather die than go to prison. But when he wasn't telling her all the ways she could be killed, Cin lectured Patty in a phony formal tone of voice as if he were a judge or a general. His words of course barely made any sense or at least they didn't make sense to someone from Patty's background.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or to a lot of people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I can already tell what he's doing, which is he's saying a lot of very intense left wing words. None of them mean anything the way that they say it. The word always means something else from the way they use it. And it's confusing. And then it feels in many ways as if the information is being held from me. And I do wish... Because I'm not a dumb man.
ED LARSON
Well what you just said is systemic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm not a dumb man. I try to read and I feel like I'm gullible enough to be gotten.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I go in there 110%.
MARCUS PARKS
You always do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I leave me behind when I go into the work. And I still don't really understand what dialectical materialism is. But I know that it's a thing. But I know he said a lot of words that he did at first to sort of, I do believe it's a tactic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I believe that it's a tactic to be like look how official we are, we have all of these crazy terms and all of this terminology and these meanings why.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the validations.
MARCUS PARKS
But Cin wasn't the only featured speaker. Every member of the SLA took every opportunity to lecture Patty, sometimes opening the door to ask her if she wanted to go to the bathroom, then immediately launching into a diatribe about Marxism before she even had a chance to answer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this happens everywhere you are trying to go to the bathroom with a communist. But no, but it is interesting. I find it interesting but it's like let me shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Finally though, Cin told Patty the reason why she'd been kidnapped or at least the loose reason why.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Loose principles.
MARCUS PARKS
Two of their comrades have been held in a pig's prison, Cin said, and the SLA was gonna trade her for them. But in the meantime the SLA was gonna treat Patty exactly how their comrades were being treated in San Quentin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And we're not gonna be playing no hopscotch! And we ain't gonna be playing no jump rope, little miss. All right? So you better get your head on straight and you better be thinking about communism by the time I get back. All right?
ED LARSON
And tomorrow we got Johnny Cash booked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's so mad about it, he doesn't want to play. He doesn't want to play, he hates it, all right. Goodnight, I love you.
MARCUS PARKS
Now over the next few days, Patty settled into what she hoped would be a short if torturous ordeal. She learned how to eat blindfolded and sat through-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's important to remember, she was blindfolded. That's the one thing I don't know if we've said.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that she was permanently blindfolded.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she kept it on. And they also, this is part of also the reasons why she was like they might be fucking stupid because he kept saying stuff like she had to keep it on in the closet no matter what.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so she was taking it off every once in a while, they would let her take it off to bathe where they would wear a mask sometimes and she'd be able to take it off. But then she was noticing it was like blinding her because essentially she was days at a time with no light.
ED LARSON
Also it has to like give you like weird sores.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does. Rashes. It does.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. She learned how to eat blindfolded and she sat through so-called interrogations conducted by Cin, who wanted to know as many details about her father and his financials as Patty could tell him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How many slides does he have? All right. How many llamas? How many carousels? I wanna know. That sounds amazing.
ED LARSON
Working llamas or little pets?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's incredible. I wish I had access to that many llamas. You know what I'd do with that many llamas? I'd run a llama communist university. All right? You should be so lucky.
MARCUS PARKS
The answer is 4, 15, and 3.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all I needed to know.
MARCUS PARKS
See Cin was under the impression that Randy Hearst was a member of the committee of 40 which Cin believed was a super secret, high-level group of businessmen and corporate executives who were also CIA agents. And it was this committee who told the president what to do at all times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just know that as soon as you hear the term 'committee of 40', you don't have to listen to a single thing that he says ever again.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like one of those things. You're like oh you're wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Little did Cin know that Randy Hearst barely even showed up to the job he had most of the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude, that's what rich people do.
MARCUS PARKS
And after days of interrogation, Patty just told Cin that her father made, I don't fucking know, a million dollars a year.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And since that was a nice round number, Cin was like cool, million dollars a year. Sounds right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Must be.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A million dollars, huh? Yeah. I bet that's chump change for your daddy. Well how about... Well I make $5 billion. Is that what I was supposed to say? Is that how I was supposed to react?
MARCUS PARKS
Now it didn't take long for Patty to learn each SLA member by voice. Because again, as we said, she was almost never allowed to take off her blindfold in those early weeks. While Cin was always recognizable as the meanest male voice, Patty also heard a sharp, cold female voice that sounded, as she said it, like a schoolmarm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they all had fake voices. I'm not doing the real Cin voice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The real Cin voice is that he was an African American but he also pretended to have sort of like an Indian Island accent as well. He faked that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he was from Cleveland.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
ED LARSON
What does an Indian Island sound like it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It um... Hmm...
MARCUS PARKS
Well the school mom voice was often paired with a jumpy, nervous male voice who repeatedly tried unsuccessfully to sound like a Black guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you fools. Yeah, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself, all right.
ED LARSON
I like sneakers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I certainly like sneakers.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the nervous fella was the aforementioned Teko, while the school marm was his wife Emily, aka Yolanda. Patty then learned the names of the rest of the SLA members or at least their aliases. Those aliases, no shit, they were the white SLA members' reborn Swahili African names adopted for the revolution.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god I wish I was Black! Oh god I wish I could be Black! Oh please!
MARCUS PARKS
Shut up. If you fucking, if I give you a Black name, will you shut the fuck up?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I guess that's okay. What kind of Black name?
MARCUS PARKS
It's fucking Swahili, I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool!
ED LARSON
Do you know anyone else named Swahili?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow! What part of Black is that?
MARCUS PARKS
Well apart from Yolanda's hard tone and Teko's nervous faux Black accent, there was also the friendly sing-songy theatrical voice of the aforementioned Gelina, who often giggled and had studied to become an actor before joining the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you have a hard time memorizing these communist terms, you would have an even harder time doing Sondheim a cappella.
MARCUS PARKS
Because of her theater background, she'd make over the top ridiculous disguises for the SLA to wear any time they left the safehouse using her professional makeup kit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look, now I'm an old woman with a little bit of gray hair. Now I'm an old man with long droopy balls attached to my labia. Ooh, now I'm a dog, ruff ruff, bark bark. One could be anything-
ED LARSON
Still got the balls though. a rough rough bar bar. One can be at the balls though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One can be anything if you're in the theater.
MARCUS PARKS
Well she'd previously been in a relationship with one of the SLA's arrested comrades but now Gelina spent most of her nights sleeping with Cin. Patty also got to know the voice of Patricia Soltysik, who had legally changed her name to Mizmoon, that's M-I-Z-M-O-O-N.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
White people.
MARCUS PARKS
Before adopting the so-called Swahili name of Zoya. Zoya was an ardent bisexual second wave feminist who preached that women could be just as strong, macho, and violent as men were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was the real frightening one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. As the lectures continued day and night, Patty also met Fahizah, the SLA's second in command, the one who worshiped Cin like a god. But unlike Teko, Fahizah actually sounded Black. So Patty was surprised to later find out that Fahizah was actually a white woman from Orange County named Nancy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was surprised that they were all white. It's just the truth. She was just like wow! She was really surprised when she got a good look at everybody.
MARCUS PARKS
Patty also came to know Willie Wolfe, aka Kahjoh, who most-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not Cujo!
MARCUS PARKS
Not Cujo. Who mostly talked about Vacaville prison. That was where both Ed Kemper and Charles Manson would eventually be held. Since Vacaville is where the state since prisoners with psychiatric issues, Patty assumed Kahjoh was himself mentally disturbed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No? You would be surprised how mentally well I could be.
MARCUS PARKS
In reality, Kahjoh was just a big fat idiot who often ate so much he gave himself a tummy ache.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no!
ED LARSON
So far he's the only appealing character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just wish, can't somebody stop me? Because it's gonna get to the point where I'm gonna be too big for the revolution.
ED LARSON
I mean I literally did this yesterday.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm too big for it. You know how many tunnels we gotta go through with the little bamboo sticks we gotta wiggle?
MARCUS PARKS
They'd actually have meetings where they're like Kahjoh is eating too much!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know how to stop, I'm nervous. It's hard out here, it's a lot. We're in a war.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Patty later described him as an overgrown, awkward high school senior with short hair dyed a hideous red that didn't match his facial features at all. But since Kahjoh was big, he actually towered over Cin. And even though Kahjoh was soft spoken and unimpressive in every way, Cin would still arch his back and try to appear taller when standing next to him. And then-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always go shorter.
MARCUS PARKS
Always go shorter, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it shows you're more powerful.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And then there was poor Camilla, the saddest member of the group that no one particularly liked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nah.
ED LARSON
Was she the maid?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They might have liked her if she did shit.
MARCUS PARKS
What was her name? Gabi. Yeah, she went by Gabi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Gabi.
MARCUS PARKS
She was heavy set, physically weak, and totally uncoordinated. She was also Zoya's ex- girlfriend and had a fantasy of one day organizing an army of homosexuals to violently rise up against the establishment. Now Patty soon figured out that the reason why all seven SLA members constantly lectured her was because no one else was listening to them. And in Patty's words, she was literally a captive audience.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It got to the point where they were so excited just to talk to her because she was somebody new that they started opening up the closet just to be like you need some air? Just so you know, so Marx actually blah, blah, blah. And they would start talking more and more into their leftist theology shit.
MARCUS PARKS
But they'd open it just a crack.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like they wouldn't open it up all the way.
ED LARSON
You know there were times when she just pretended to be asleep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course! But she actually did an extremely good job, which is, remember this, and this is a good lesson for our audience to hear. If you're dealing with an aggressive idiot, always say yes. Nod and move close to push away.
MARCUS PARKS
Well but in listening to them talk, Patty soon figured out that the only way out was through. She decided to humor them, listening to everything they said and doing whatever they asked. And she hoped that somehow sometime she would be rescued before they decided to kill her. Now the exchange of Patty for their comrades in San Quentin soon became a secondary goal for the SLA. They decided that as a show of good faith they would have Randy Hearst feed the poor, just generally feed the poor. And if Cin found Hearst's action satisfactory, the SLA would make an actual ransom demand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he wanted to see if he good for it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But unfortunately he had a tacit misunderstanding of how money works in the country.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. Now once they discussed what this gesture of good faith would be ad nauseam as the SLA did with every single subject, they decided that the Hearst corporation should give $70 worth of food to every poor person in the state of California. To sell the idea, Cin had Patty make her first of many recorded messages, urging her family to fully cooperate with the SLA. Joining Patty in the closet with a tape recorder, extensive notes, and a flashlight, was Cin, who untied Patty's hands and handed her the microphone. Cin then told Patty what to say, then had her repeat it back to him in her own words while he recorded her voice. Then after each point, he'd switch off the tape recorder so he could prepare her for the next point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He also would make her repeat things, he would say do it again, take it back. Like so she was heavily directed within her recording.
MARCUS PARKS
What you're about to hear is some of the first words the world heard from Patty Hearst post kidnapping in which you could clearly hear the stops and starts.
LPOTL
(audio of Patty Hearst) I'm with a combat unit that's armed with automatic weapons. And there's also a medical team here and...
ED LARSON
Generous.
LPOTL
(audio of Patty Hearst) There is no way that I will be released until they let me go. So it wouldn't do any good for somebody to come in here and try to get me out by force. These people aren't just a bunch of nuts and they've been really honest with me. But they're perfectly willing to die for what they're doing. And I want to get out of here but the only way I'm going to is if we do it their way and I just hope that you'll do what they say, Dad, just do it quickly. I've been stopping and starting this tape myself so that I can collect my thoughts. That's, that's why there's so many stops in it. I'm not, I'm not being forced to say any of this.
MARCUS PARKS
Defensive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Defensive.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because he was also re-listening as he was going, he was like ah, that doesn't sound right, we have to do it like this. Oh no, no, no, they're gonna think that you were the one, that we're forcing you to do this. So we have to make it so it sounds so, so voluntary. And they kind of begin this back and forth relationship. I actually feel like in that way, that's what he's starting to do where he needs her to participate fully.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because at this point in time, this is way in the beginning, they cannot afford to shoot her yet.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
How involved are the cops at this point?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean the FBI, we're gonna get into that. That's how we're gonna start episode two.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But the FBI gets involved like immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
This is a massive operation. Now Patty collapsed and started sobbing immediately after recording that message, which ended up, it's 12 minutes long altogether. We just listened to a minute of it. And that's when Cin crawled over and pinched her nipple and pinched her between her legs, heavily implying that if she didn't continue to cooperate, sexual violence would soon follow. Now the tape was sent out along with the demand to feed the poor of California. But the authorities soon deduced that the SLA's ultimate goal was the exchange of their two comrades in San Quentin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they came out and just said it in the newspaper. Like they're obviously going to use Patty Hearst as a way to negotiate for the release of these two other people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Cin is immediately like what the fuck? DO we have-
ED LARSON
Who's talking?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who's talking? We got a mole!
MARCUS PARKS
And once deduced, then Governor of California Ronald Reagan responded with his now famous quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Well you tell them they can forget it."
ED LARSON
Oh I thought his quote was where are my pants?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Funny stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
real funny stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's an old... All right, just for those of you that don't know, that aren't 40+, Ronald Reagan was a controversial president back in the day. People seemed to enjoy that he had Alzheimer's for the entire time of his presidency.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the last two years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's enough.
ED LARSON
Yeah. But he wouldn't read any of his reports, he had to make videos of it and show it to him on television every day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was an actor.
MARCUS PARKS
Randy Hearst meanwhile immediately announced on TV that Cin's plan would cost no less than $400 million, which in today's currency is $2.5 billion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he was like... Because they just made this number up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. $70 actually comes from the Cinque's actual inspiration who was a very, very interesting person that is... He was an activist and a revolutionary named George Jackson who was a prisoner that wrote about finding like Marxism left wing ideology in the prison community. And he was arrested for stealing quote unquote "$70 worth of food" and then he was held in jail indefinitely. George Jackson is a very compelling, interesting, like actual activist slash revolutionary.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he sort of kind of stole from that. But Cinque never did the math.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Being like so there's 100 million people, like how many people in California?
MARCUS PARKS
Well he just said all the poor people in California.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So Randy Hearts literally did the math on television. He's like that's like a billion dollars.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Because California by itself would be like the fifth biggest country in the world.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they could do it. They just weren't gonna.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think they, no, they couldn't have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean if all these guys, everybody-
MARCUS PARKS
Like that's $400 million, that's too much money. They didn't have that much money.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If all of them pooled all their fucking money, all of them-
MARCUS PARKS
That's exactly what Cinque said. He's like they could call their friends, like the Shah of Iran.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They didn't do it though. In the end they didn't do it.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not how it works.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can shit in one hand, you can call the Shah of Iran in the other and see which gets filled first.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Randy couldn't pay that because the fact was Randy actually had access to a relatively small amount of cash. See the Hearst family's money was not liquid. They didn't have a Scrooge McDuck safe where Randy swam in gold coins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They should have though because that's cool.
MARCUS PARKS
That's fun.
ED LARSON
But if you jumped in a pile of gold coins you would kill yourself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you'd just slam!
MARCUS PARKS
You would die immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you'd just be dead. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he'd have brain damage.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Scrooge McDuck would literally be Harrison Ford from Regarding Henry.
MARCUS PARKS
In fact, Randy actually had very little control over even the Hearst corporation because when William Randolph Hearst died, he gave Randy and his brothers only five seats on the board out of 13 so they couldn't ruin daddy's company.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost like there was only one smart one. It's almost like one super evil guy you realize like oh, you guys are gonna fuck it all up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta bring in evil from outside.
MARCUS PARKS
Cin of course had no idea how true wealth worked, where most of the money is tied up in stocks, real estate, and various other hidey-holes. This is all so the super rich can avoid paying taxes like the rest of the country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also saw a fun little video that does remind me, it's like once money became not real, it made it much harder for... Like back in the day when they wanted to take the Tsar of Russia's money, they just went and took it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they took all his jewels and gold.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they took the stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where like there's no stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For this money.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like this is a fantasy world. America, baby.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it's literally fake, it's just numbers on a piece of paper.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a million dollar loan that a rich person takes out that they don't have to pay taxes on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's awesome. Good for them. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well eventually Randy negotiated a food distribution program that would cost $2 million, estimating that the program could feed 100,000 people a month for a whole year. In addition, Randy hired an attorney to represent the two SLA members who were in San Quentin for the murder of Superintendent Marcus Foster. But none of this was satisfactory for Cin.
ED LARSON
Seems like a lot of good work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did quite a bit of stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's possibly one of the largest, I think it is the largest food distribution program that has ever occurred in America. And that's including the Great Depression, like all the New Deal shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And none of this was satisfactory for Cin. And Patty could sense that Cin really had no idea what he was doing. The SLA had begun with the idea of exchanging Patty for their comrades but now all of a sudden they're coordinating food distribution programs that cost millions of dollars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he had no idea what even the concept of millions of dollars was and how to move that around and what to do with it. And so the dog caught the car.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Like most cult leaders, Cin was making it up as he went along. It also didn't help that the SLA was being criticized by radical organizations, Black and white, for linking left wing politics to the kidnapping of a teenager. Not to mention the murder of Marcus Foster which everyone's still very pissed off about. As the days turned into weeks, Patty began to realize that the SLA were truly pathetic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Starting to switch.
MARCUS PARKS
From her closet she could hear their daily training, which was calisthenics in the morning and so-called military maneuvers in the afternoon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is in an apartment. Remember that this is like literally there are other apartments in here and the SLA is one of them.
ED LARSON
They're doing up downs and shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Hut-hut-hut-hut-hut.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hut-hut-hut-hut-hut. That is not an exaggeration.
MARCUS PARKS
No, that's exactly what they're doing. And these maneuvers, which all had to happen within the confines of a small apartment, involved the seven members of the SLA scurrying about the room, diving to the floor-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pew-pew!
MARCUS PARKS
And actually going pew-pew-pew-pew!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Gotcha! Gotcha, pig!
MARCUS PARKS
Bang-bang-bang!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pew-pew-pew! Take that, pig! You see the thing is I would be like but then someone has to roleplay as the pigs, right. And go like (snorting). Yeah, I'm the cops. And they're like gotcha, pig! And then Gelina is alike what if I play Queen Elizabeth? And they're all like wait a second, Gelina, all right. This isn't Acting 101 anymore.
ED LARSON
Well we need to kill that pig too!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! Let's get her!
MARCUS PARKS
In other words, Patty Hearst began to realize they were delusional. These delusions of course were only fed by the media because while the story had not yet reached its height, this still wasn't the biggest story yet, it was still massive news.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Sniffing their own farts as much as they could, SLA members would spend their days listening to the radio or watching TV, flipping through the channels continuously until they found someone talking about them or the kidnapping.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then they talk a bunch of shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right. Like yeah, they actually got that wrong! They don't know what they're talking about, man! Meanwhile it's just all... They're doing it for attention.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But after getting to know the SLA, Patty realized that they were only gonna keep moving the goalposts and any fantasy she might have had about being rescued, set free, or even killed were a waste of energy. And so Patty decided she would not think about the future at all, instead she would concentrate on staying alive one day at a time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we can all learn from that.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right. Now even though Patty's mind was strong, her physical state was starting to deteriorate because she'd been kept blindfolded for weeks on end in a 6' x 2' closet without exercise. The SLA of course would never admit that this was indeed torture and it's fucking sickening that the CNN series never even approaches this subject while talking extensively to Teko, who pretty much drives the narrative of that entire series. It is seriously so fucking bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is. It's kind of like wildly irresponsible now after reading all of the other stuff that I've read. Because I just actually was so confused by their tone.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's literally like they're mad at Patty Hearst.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. But once Patty's health began to seriously deteriorate, the SLA at first just made fun of her for being a bourgeois weakling, or 'bougie' in today's parlance. But pretty soon they realized that if Patty didn't get some exercise, she might die. So several times a day they began guiding her around the room outside the closet. When she got a little stronger they had her do jumping jacks and knee bends, all while blindfolded. But after just a few days they either lost interest or just plain forgot to do it and Patty remained in the closet. Now Patty knew she had to get out of there somehow. She just had to, not even get away from the clutches of the SLA, she just had to get out of the closet.
ED LARSON
She was gonna die.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well you know what it is too? It wears on you. This is what they talk about, this is why torture is illegal. At this point she'll do anything to get out of the first level of her situation. Like there's no even thought about escape because it's just how in the living fuck do I just get out of this closet?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because eventually I think in the back of your head you know this is not a permanent situation.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the longer I'm in this small room, the longer it's more difficult for me to leave this room, the more I become a liability to the people outside of this room, the more and more they gotta shuffle me around and no one's responding or the things are not working out, like the more and more my position becomes more fragile in this place.
ED LARSON
Yeah. And once you're thought of as just something in the closet, you're not thought of as a human anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
And they already started off not thinking of her as human.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But the thing was that the SLA was just as paranoid as you'd expect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
So getting out of the closet was gonna be difficult. They spoke in whispers because Cin was convinced the FBI had super listening devices. And when the SLA had meetings, they always turned the TV around because they believe the FBI could spy into their house through the TV screens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know Milton Berle's looking! I know he is!
MARCUS PARKS
I mean nowadays both of these things are very possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, they're hearing you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, no. The government can listen to you through your TV controller.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very, very easy. Yeah. They can see you from space.
ED LARSON
Just ask Jeffrey Toobin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. But he did it himself! He did it to his own self!
MARCUS PARKS
But back then of course this was moronic, when TVs were made of gigantic tubes and glass and wood. But to further demonstrate the paranoia, the SLA started getting worried a few weeks in that their neighbors were gonna catch on that they were a dangerous group of revolutionaries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Guys, we gotta do something. I mean we gotta make do like a bake sale.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We gotta do the garage sale or something. We gotta put on a play.
ED LARSON
Yes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the best. Cinque, with us all together, I think we have just the perfect amount to do Merrily We Roll Along.
ED LARSON
Now also I was thinking maybe we should do our somersaults a little quieter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A little quieter. Because honestly they are keeping me awake now.
MARCUS PARKS
And Henry, you may jest, but they put on a play.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes they did.
ED LARSON
Did they really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
They held a make believe party with loud-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Act like we're having fun! Because they didn't believe in drinking.
MARCUS PARKS
No, they didn't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No smoking, no drugs.
MARCUS PARKS
Well...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well...
MARCUS PARKS
Nobody believed in drinking except CInque.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, it's so funny how Cinque, it works out for him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, isn't that crazy? Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know why.
MARCUS PARKS
And how he never had to do the calisthenics or anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Weird. Yeah, yeah, he was born good. But yeah, they're like all right, now wave your arms more! Yeah, like you're really dancing!
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, now you dance with him! Cool. Now make it funky now. Make it funky now. Make it funky now. Take it back! Take it back!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they had loud music.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get up off of that thing!
MARCUS PARKS
Dancing!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean literally, get up off that thing, that table is fragile. Let's go. All right, drink the brown tea.
ED LARSON
Fatty, you're eating too much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I thought we were fake partying.
MARCUS PARKS
They even had ice clinking around in drinking glasses. Like they got ice and went clink-clink- clink.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Clink like you're yelling! Clink like you're laughing!
MARCUS PARKS
See the cover story was that the SLA, the house they were renting, the apartment they were renting, the cover story that they were telling people is that this is being rented by two stewardesses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
So the SLA had to make sure to spill the party into the backyard where Kahjoh playing a pilot-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you know how it is. You know how it is flying in the sky with the clouds and all. The clouds are a lot more solid than you'd think they'd be.
MARCUS PARKS
He discussed all of his various travel exploits in a loud voice while everyone else responded with their own tales of world travel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
O'Hare is certainly confusing! Oh yes, Logan International, also a miasma of lanes! Oh there's so many... Oh man, birds, huh? What fucking pieces of shit they are!
MARCUS PARKS
But little by little, Cin opened the SLA circle to Patty and it was actually his paranoia that started it. See Cin believed that if the FBI ever found them, they'd be forced to shoot their way out. And Cin decided that it would be best if Patty learned how to shoot her way out too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well you're hanging out long enough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. For three days straight, Patty practiced handling a sawed off shotgun, breaking it apart, putting it back together, and getting comfortable holding it, mostly with the blindfold on. For Patty though, guns weren't that foreign because she'd often gone hunting with her dad when she was a kid. But pretty soon Patty figured out that the more interest she took in what the SLA members were saying, the longer she was allowed to stay outside the closet. She was constantly thinking of questions to ask them and no matter how silly or stupid those questions were, Cin and all the others would always answer in excruciating detail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a good lesson to learn. People like talking about themselves.
ED LARSON
Ask questions.
MARCUS PARKS
Patty also took up smoking to ingratiate herself even further because every SLA member was a chainsmoker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they couldn't smoke weed and you couldn't drink booze, according to Cinque.
MARCUS PARKS
One day though, Cin told everyone else to leave the room so he could talk to Patty alone. He told her that he'd have to ask the Symbionese Liberation Army war council first but he was thinking of letting her join.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just also so you remember throughout this whole thing, Cinque is telling her that there's millions of units, that there's a whole army, that we were on the verge of some massive flip, like we were gonna do all of this shit. And so she's listening and talking about this. It sounds completely outlandish but she doesn't know.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like she has no idea whether or not there actually is a sea of terrorists or not. But it sounds really legit at the very time. But I think there's a little bit of like you guys let me in real fast.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in Cin's words, Patty was like the pet chicken people have on the farm. When it comes time to kill it for Sunday dinner, no one really wants to do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He said this to her.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. So like in other revolutionary movements when an enemy soldier is captured, Patty was given a choice. Fight for us or die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like a lot of farmers don't give a shit.
ED LARSON
Yeah, they just kill the chickens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like that's the whole point of being a farmer is that you're raising it to kill it.
ED LARSON
Yeah. You're done with the eggs, now I kill you an eat you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What would happen to you? This is the Dust Bowl and you had one chicken left and then you're gonna go feed the family and then you as the father tell your hungry children like unfortunately me and Dizzy are best friends now. Like no! You're gonna eat the chicken.
MARCUS PARKS
But before Patty was let into the SLA officially, she had to endure a horrible ordeal twice over. One night Gelina whispered in Patty's ear that Kahjoh wanted to quote "get it on" with her because everyone was feeling much more comradely towards her since she first arrived. That was their word, comradely. See Gelina explained that as a part of Patty's education, she needed to learn what it's like to live in an underground cell in every way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a whole lifestyle, girlfriend.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. For the SLA, free sex was a principle of the cell because underground revolutionaries, they couldn't very well go out into the street and pick someone up in the usual way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's not because we're not charming. It's not because we're not incredible, amazing, romantic revolutionaries. That's for certain. And attractive and ready to fuck. Certainly not that at all. No, no, no, no. Everybody wants us. It's so hard to choose a date.
MARCUS PARKS
So everyone in the cell had to take care of the needs of everyone else. And while no one was forced to have sex, or so Gelina said, it was very comradely to always say yes if asked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost sort of like it's like forced by the group.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Immediately after Gelina explained this, Kahjoh entered the closet, raped Patty, and left. Three days later, Cin did the same thing. Now while Patty was just trying to survive the fucking closet, much less everything that came after, her father was looking for help to organize Cin's unrealistic demand that the Hearst family personally feed every poor person in California.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have very little nice to say about any other member of the Hearst family. They all don't need to be around. But he did try his best.
MARCUS PARKS
Randy tried really fucking hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He tried.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did try to find her. Very, very badly. But that's what we kind of said, this story would be
very different if this was the story of a young woman that was kidnapped for a month and then a very powerful family sent in a band of mercenaries to kill them all one by one, right. Like this would be a very different story. He did try to work his way around this and weirdly in a way he learned a lot about people. Like Randy Hearst had to talk to poor people for the first time in his life and it really sounds like it was kind of an educational experience for him.
ED LARSON
Now the SLA, I'm sorry if this is a little off topic, did they have jobs? Where did they get money?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(laughing) My friend.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll talk about it later.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now since this was San Francisco in 1974 and the operation involved the underprivileged class, who else should pop up their head offering help but the Reverend Jim Jones?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Six years before Guyana.
ED LARSON
Would you like a drink?
MARCUS PARKS
His offer was politely declined. But incredibly, this will not be the last we'll hear from Jim Jones in this series.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude, everybody's hanging out in this time period.
ED LARSON
It's wild.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're all there, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like L. Ron Hubbard's in town.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's literally in San Luis Obispo.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he's like right down the street.
MARCUS PARKS
Now even though Randy soon found people that seemed like they knew what they were doing, the program which was actually attempted was nevertheless a disaster on most fronts. Millions of dollars worth of food was distributed at points in San Francisco, Richmond, East Palo Alto, and Oakland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It actually happened.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And on the day of distribution, thousands of people lined up for food. But while it went okay at best in the first three cities, riots broke out in Oakland, 21 people ended up in the hospital, and one woman lost an eye. She ended up suing both the Hearst family and the City of Oakland for a million dollars.
ED LARSON
Good for her.
MARCUS PARKS
Soon after, Hearst publicly communicated to the SLA that he could not contribute any more money to the food distribution program. So in response, the SLA left a package behind a toilet in a popular San Francisco restaurant. Inside the package was another tape, this one recorded by Gelina and Patty. Now Gelina was not one of the SLA members who spoke with the faux Black accent but she did speak with one on this tape, possibly because Cin was starting to feel insecure that there were no Black people in his Black liberation movement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you think that he would just straight up say like you need to sound blacker?
MARCUS PARKS
I think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
I think on this one. Because I mean why else-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one has ever asked that of me.
MARCUS PARKS
Because why else would Gelina use it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To feel cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that they all are also like, that's-
ED LARSON
Or disguise her voice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but they're posers. These guys are-
ED LARSON
They are posers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Legitimately.
MARCUS PARKS
These people are the definition of posers.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They are... You know what a good word for them is? Dips.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dips.
ED LARSON
That is a good word.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These guys, they're not good at any of this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I feel like a lot of it was just to kind of make Cinque smile.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But after Gelina said her piece demanding that the SLA be allowed to communicate with their comrades in prison live on national television, she handed the microphone to Patty, whose frequent conversations with SLA members had somewhat changed the tone of her voice. In this communiqué which was typed and written for her to read, Patty said that she no longer feared the SLA because they were not the ones who wanted her to die. She realized now, it was written, that it was actually the FBI who wanted to murder her. She also said that she had been issued a 12 gauge shotgun to protect herself, which did not sound good. Now Patty's tone and the content of the speech, this was the first time that public opinion started to turn against Patty Hearst. And it seemed like there were very few people willing to speculate that she might just be going along to get along.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think there's a couple factors here. I think one is she had learned to talk the talk of the SLA-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Within the SLA in order to, according to her, further ingratiate herself to the crew. Which makes total sense.
MARCUS PARKS
Just to stay out of the closet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then like legitimately these guys, unfortunately... It's why some of this, the political stuff is a little hard to understand is that it's a language, it's a language and there's a glossary of terms. And so she started inhabiting the terms. And so I think there's-
MARCUS PARKS
And the pattern too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the pattern. And so I think that the second option is also like they're looking at her being like oh how would she even get to know all of this if she didn't want to be a part of it? Like there's no way this little girl would be clever enough to fake this. She has to be an utter revolutionary now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even though it's been a couple of weeks.
ED LARSON
It's a couple of weeks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
That's what I was about to ask.
MARCUS PARKS
Or she has to be brainwashed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well brainwashed is the big term.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's the big term here. Yeah. But no one's entertaining like maybe she's clever enough to fake it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe she's lying.
ED LARSON
Also she was kidnapped.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Even if she did go to the other side, you still have to save her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna come against this time and time again but it's got to do with her last name.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. And this was after all 1974, and the elder generation after the tumult of the 60s had come to see the youth of America as dangerous and unpredictable. To the establishment, it wasn't unthinkable that a young woman, even a Hearst-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Almost especially a Hearst.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. Could very easily be turned into a violent Marxist in just a month. But as Patty put it, she was ready to do or say anything the SLA asked, however they wanted it said. Because her life was firmly in their hands. And yeah, it was a month at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a month.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it was a month.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Still.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now on March 21st, Patty was told that their safehouse was getting hot. So the SLA moved Patty to a new location in a plastic garbage can with two holes cut in the top that they tossed in the trunk of the car.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they put her in a garbage can, that's how they brought her back and forth.
ED LARSON
Oh my god. You know they were just getting evicted.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, listen. No, sorry. We heard you having that fake party last night, we're actually... We just hate you. Whole building hates you, everybody else just hates you. Have a real party, okay?
MARCUS PARKS
As they left, Zoya told Patty that if she let out a single sound, she was gonna fill the garbage can full of holes with her machine gun. So Patty did as she was told, spending 45 minutes silently banging around in the trunk of an SLA car. Once they got to the new safehouse, Gelina, usually the friendly one, made fun of Patty for how docile she'd been, saying that they could have taken her out into the woods to shoot her and Patty wouldn't have known the difference.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you're like yeah. Exactly. It's kind of an issue here. Well because it's funny because someone like her, this shows the sort of like double layer of I am a revolutionary and I'm an actual child that just barely got out of college. And this is a fun adventure for me. Like I believe that people like Gelina-
MARCUS PARKS
You're talking about Gelina?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Gelina looks at this as like she'd think that we would take her out to a field and shoot her in the head. Meanwhile like you have a submachine gun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you put her in a garbage bag and you've been telling her you were gonna shoot her in the head. She's also been raped twice and now we're all gonna act like Patty, you're crazy. Patty, so dramatic.
MARCUS PARKS
Well much to Patty's horror, when she was brought inside the new safehouse she found that her new closet was a pantry. It was only about 2 ft deep. The door however didn't close, which meant Patty could see what was happening outside at night. That's when she discovered that she was guarded at all times by two heavily armed SLA members. In that moment she realized that a simple escape in the middle of the night was nothing but another fantasy she had to disabuse. Now after a few days in the new safehouse, Cin approached Patty again about joining the SLA. And without hesitation, Patty told him that she wanted to join and fight for the people, knowing now that joining was the only way to survive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But in order for her to join, all of the SLA had to unanimously agree.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they have the sit downs like they do in Drag Race All Stars? They do that.
MARCUS PARKS
That's exactly what it was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now tell me like why do you think you deserve to be the new SLA all star?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just feel that I messed up one time.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I just feel that this competition is about consistency.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And if we're going by the rules-
MARCUS PARKS
According to the rules, Gelina's been in the bottom twice now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So I just feel like it would be fair to send Gelina home.
MARCUS PARKS
So for a full week Patty had to have heart to heart talks with every member of the cell where she regurgitated everything they taught her during her long re-education seminars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just understand that this is the acting job of her fucking life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You have to get that on some point during this process, like whether you believe or not that she was quote unquote capital B "Brainwashed", you have to believe that during this section she had to show that she truly believed. She had to. This is her knowing that if she doesn't convince them in this moment, she is very probably gonna get shot in the head.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because they did at one point say like you could maybe go home or you could stay and fight with us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was not an option.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Going home means dying, being killed.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Anybody that says, and I've seen several sources that try to say like they tried to let her go home in the beginning. They did not! That is absolute utter horseshit!
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They've already killed people. There is no reason why she shouldn't think that she's not gonna get killed by them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. While most members loved Patty's enthusiasm, Teko and especially Yolanda weren't convinced. Yolanda was grim-faced, withdrawn, and mean, a perfect match for Teko who was himself an arrogant twat. As a result, they both questioned Patty for hours in front of the whole group. Even Cin had a bit of a hard time believing that Patty was truly as gung ho about the cause as she seemed to be. And at one point he asked her if she was sure that she hadn't been brainwashed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you been brainwashed?
MARCUS PARKS
But Patty flipped the script and clinched it by asking Cin, "You don't believe the pigs in the press, do you?"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's just brilliant.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Genius.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very smart.
MARCUS PARKS
And so one day Patty was led to a meeting where she sensed a decision had been made. Cin told her that the sisters and brothers had voted for her to join this particular SLA combat team. Cin declared that she was now a guerilla fighter and soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow!
MARCUS PARKS
And that's when Patty took off her blindfold and got a good look at her revolutionaries for the first time since the night of her kidnapping.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She thought, remember, that most of these people were Black people a part of this Black liberation movement.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she thought that they would all be these sexy, dangerous-looking-
MARCUS PARKS
Commanding!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Commandos.
MARCUS PARKS
Big, strong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yes.
ED LARSON
I'd be so fucking mad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd just be like can I go? She pulled it off. Oh yeah and I love this-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. She later wrote that her first thought was oh god, what a bunch of ordinary, unattractive little people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. She's like oh no, it's the C-Team. Because then she realized like oh shit, you're a bunch of children.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But of course she didn't say this. Instead the first thing she said was like oh my god, you're all so attractive!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, right?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
She then had to identify each SLA member by their voice. And members were delighted when she was able to name all of them in turn-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's me. Who's he? Who's she? Which one's she? Let me do the impersonation. Hey, how you doing? Which one's she?
MARCUS PARKS
And they reacted as if they were celebrities being recognized by a fan.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's me! That is so me, that's so what I sound like, it sounds just like me.
ED LARSON
No awareness that that's how they were gonna get sent to prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Yeah, that's been logged.
MARCUS PARKS
Now just like everyone else in the SLA, Patty Hearst needed a new name. But she was not given a Swahili name, instead she was given the name of one of Che Guevara's guerilla fighters, which really burned Yolanda's ass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But nevertheless from that day forward Patty Hearst was known as Tania to the rest of the SLA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tania. Tania the fierce. Tania the unredeemable.
ED LARSON
Tania the tucker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Well Tania, you know that Tania is the name of Che Guevara's girlfriend?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's what she was named after.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's why Yolanda was mad. She was like I'm Che Guevara's girlfriend.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as the new recruit, Patty was given a tour of the safehouse and was assigned cleaning duty. See contrary to what you might think, each member of the SLA was expected to be clean and they were expected to appear impressive at all times. Cin didn't even approve of blue jeans because he said Black people don't wear jeans and such clothes didn't instill the respect the SLA needed from the people.
ED LARSON
Cin, we're not Black.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But maybe one day, maybe one day it'll all be different!
ED LARSON
You mean I'm gonna stay this color?
MARCUS PARKS
It was during cleaning though that Patty realized just how heavily armed the SLA was. The bedroom closet had machine guns, rifles, a shotgun, and weapons Patty didn't even recognize. They also had bombs, they had sticks of dynamite. And as far as Patty's first SLA weapon went, she was issued an M1 carbine. Once they said that she was in, she was fucking in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. It was a quick, quick initiation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
All right, you're our prisoner and here's your gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here's your gun. All right. Honestly I'm so glad we're over that prisoner bit, huh? Don't you love that gun?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Once she was in, once that day came when she said I'm joining you, she had spent 57 days in the closet. And she had about 540 days left to go with the SLA. Now that's around this time that Patty first saw Yolanda bouncing around the house in the blue bathrobe Patty had been wearing when she was kidnapped. Since the kidnapping, the female members of the SLA had sewn up the rips and tears and delighted in sharing it with one another. Patty also realized that the toothbrush she'd been using all this time was a communal toothbrush-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS
That every member of the SLA shared.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
ED LARSON
Even Kahjoh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, especially Kahjoh. I used it twice.
ED LARSON
On my ass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Got a lot of plaque in there apparently.
MARCUS PARKS
Having your own toothbrush, they said, was a bourgeois luxury, as was bathroom privacy. The SLA believed that no comrade should close the door while showering or going to the bathroom, no matter how nasty of a shit you were taking. They insisted that it was uptight for anyone to be embarrassed over normal bodily functions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's why I poop my pants. I just think it's fun as hell and it shows my authority.
ED LARSON
It's the only thing they had in common with Lyndon Johnson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. Pissing with the door open. If they knew, they might have understood him more.
MARCUS PARKS
Now one morning Patty noticed that Zoya and Cin were having a conversation that was far different from the regular revolutionary patter. Instead they were discussing the logistics of robbing a liquor store. When they noticed Patty's confusion, they very simply said look, we need the money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We need money.
ED LARSON
Gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
But after discussing it more, Cin declared that the SLA had no choice but to rob a bank which was met by audible gasps from the other members.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(gasp)
MARCUS PARKS
(gasp)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they're all like that's amazing! Because they thought... Because Cinque was so delusional he was just like fuck, fuck the goddamn liquor store. It's like no, we need to go up to the top where the pigs are. The bank.
MARCUS PARKS
But was he delusional? Because it fucking worked. And as Cin put it-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
People said I was wrong. People said that cum humor would never ever get you a wife. And guess what, man? I'm living proof.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as Cin put it, the cell needed thousands of dollars, not hundreds. But while the robbery was still in its planning stages, the SLA wanted to show off their newest recruit. Cin ordered Zoya to dress up Patty like a combat soldier for a picture to send to the press. After putting her in fatigues, they handed Patty a semiautomatic gun and had her pose in front of a homemade Symbionese Liberation Army flag.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the only thing that makes me mad because the flag's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The symbol is awesome. I love it. It's stupid but it's great.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's what, a Sybian on a white flag?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Sybian Liberation Army, it's a Sybian with two flaming wings and a woman hanging by her vagina at the very top.
MARCUS PARKS
Zoya then took a Polaroid and sent it to the press. And it's this photo with Patty holding the gun that lives in the minds of many when they think of Patty Hearst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the very front of the Toobin fucking express video thing that he did.
MARCUS PARKS
Along with the photo was a taped message from Patty in which she said that she was now Tania, urban guerilla.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tania!
MARCUS PARKS
And she ended the message with the words of the Cuban revolutionary from whom she took her name. She said, "Patria o muerte, vinceremos".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh, aye aye aye. And that means 'fatherland or death, we shall be victorious'.
MARCUS PARKS
And it makes absolutely no fucking sense in this context.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It makes no sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It makes no sense.
MARCUS PARKS
It makes sense in Cuba for like urban guerrillas fighting for their freedom. But it does not make any fucking sense here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost like they didn't have a tacit understanding of what they were talking about.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But Patty Hearst, she's got a sense of humor about this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like years later she had a conversation with John Waters in 2020 in Town & Country Magazine. And John Waters said that Patty Hearst once told him that that picture is gonna be the picture they use in her obituary when she dies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But Patty said the only good thing about it, at least I was thin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! That's funny as hell.
MARCUS PARKS
But either way it's with Patty's further involvement with the SLA and the bank robbery that made this the biggest crime story of the decade that we'll return next week with Patty Hearst part two.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn.
ED LARSON
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got a lot of shit here, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Full story. We're gonna get into the full story of the SLA, their full history. And shit, man, what comes after the bank robbery is fucking insane!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just as crazy. There's a whole third act to the story that that's what made this kind of longer-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was because there's a third act to this that I did not know even existed. And it's great. It's great. And if you don't like it, I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to fucking tell you, babe, but we're having fun. Come down to patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft, you can watch us flop around. And we can yell at your eyeballs.
ED LARSON
Yeah, Henry stands up occasionally.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's incredible what I do. You have no idea what happens here. TikTok @LPontheleft, you can go all the stupid socials.
MARCUS PARKS
And be sure to check us out at LPN TV, that's twitch.tv/lpntv for all of our streams. And you can check out our YouTube channel for all of the streams after they air. And you can also come see us on tour, go to lastpodcastontheleft.com and click SHOWS to see all of the live dates that we have coming up. We got Washington DC coming up real fucking soon.
ED LARSON
July 13th.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
July 13th. We also got shows coming up in Los Angeles and Brooklyn at the King's Theater. And of course we're also coming to London and Reykjavik as well as many dates in Australia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We cannot wait and we shall see you there! Hail sweet Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
ED LARSON
Hail Randy Newman.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fine.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it is fine. All right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's fine.
ED LARSON
He's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that he's fine.
ED LARSON
Yeah, he's fine? He's a composer!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just think again-
MARCUS PARKS
Gotta watch out, Henry. You'll get fucking dragged through the mud now for calling somebody fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm fine with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Because apparently it's not okay to say that a band is fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think Randy Newman is fine. But you know why?
ED LARSON
It's because you wanna fuck him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I wanna have sex with him.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah. It's because he's so fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like Billy Joel. All right?
ED LARSON
You can like both!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I won't. If you tell me that you like both-
ED LARSON
They're not in contest with each other!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're wrong! You're wrong!