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CNN Live Event/Special
Radical Story of Patty Hearst, the Conversation. Aired 9-10p ET
Aired February 25, 2018 - 21:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As soon as we turn on the TV, we see cops going around and we hear gunfire. Patricia wanted to retaliate immediately. She loves somebody that has just been murdered by the government.
PATRICIA HEARST, GRANDDAUGHTER OF AMERICAN PUBLISHING MAGNATE WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST: I was ripped off by the pigs when they murdered poor Joe. Still feel determined to fight.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At that point, it was against her will to go home.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We started having discussions about (inaudible) again.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That split second of an instant.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The mother of four was killed. It didn't change anything, it didn't alter my path. We had to carry on.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst was abducted by two men and a girl in a bizarre kidnapping.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No ransom note, no phone calls, no word. Nothing.
HEARST: The SLA is the people's army and we fight in their interests.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The FBI said the girl in the wig with the automatic rifle was Patricia Hearst. A rich college girl turned armed terrorist in a matter of weeks. Southern California's largest manhunt continues.
HEARST: For someone my age, I have been through an awful lot.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We don't know where she is.
HEARST: Mom, dad, I'm okay.
JEFFREY TOUBIN, AUTHOR: After the Crocker Bank robbery, the remaining members of the group leave Sacramento and go to San Francisco. Patty, she and Steve Soliah are a couple. I mean, they are living together as boyfriend and girlfriend and they start to live a fairly normal life.
BILL HARRIS, FORMER SLA MEMBER: Shortly after we moved back to San Francisco, I really didn't see Hearst. We operated still on a need to know basis. There was no need for us to know where Patty lived. Steven, her lover, was our link between the two places.
TOOBIN: After the group moved back to San Francisco, their political activism just took one form -- bombing.
BRYAN BURROUGH, AUTHOR: Bombing was an entirely different thing in the late '60s and in the early '70s than it is today.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Across the nation, between January of last year and April of this year, a total of 4,330 bombings have been reported.
TOOBIN: Patricia, Bill and Emily join in with Mike Gordon, Jim Kilgore, Steve Soliah, Kathy Soliah in starting to make bombs.
MIKE BORTIN, FORMER MEMBER SLA: One time, they were fooling around with these pipe bombs in the backyard and went in for lunch and lo and behold, there was a fire in the back and all of a sudden, the Fire Department comes barging in. They don't knock. They come barging in. There's a fire. It went right through the house. Didn't see Patty Hearst. Didn't see the guns. Didn't see anything. Just saw a fire in the backyard. That's how incompetent and comedy of errors this whole thing was.
TOOBIN: August 7th, 1975, Patty Hearst herself goes to the Taraval Station, a police station in San Francisco and with her own hands places a bomb under a police car. Now, fortunately, it was a dud, it never went off.
August 20th, 1975, they wanted to set two bombs off at the Marin County Courthouse.
ADAM HALL, EXPLOSIVES EXPERT: The intention was for the first device to go off underneath the law enforcement vehicle, which would likely create can some level of panic. The second device would then go off, which was placed right within the doorway. Anyone within close proximity of the device going off would likely be killed.
TOOBIN: Patty Hearst was involved in this plan. Fortunately, the bombs did go off but in the wrong order and no one was hurt. The most dangerous plan of all was in Los Angeles. It was clearly designed with only one objective, which was to kill cops.
MICHAEL LATIN, FORMER PROSECUTOR: There's a police car parked next to the window at the IHOP In Hollywood. Underneath that car was a pipe bomb that was designed to go off, but only go off when the officers were seated in the car and the car was moving.
The device that set it off was an ordinary household clothes pin. Into that clothes pin were screws that were drilled in and then the wires were drilled around the screws. In the middle of where the clothes pin would close, the SLA had put a wooden shim in that space to block the circuit.
Attached to that shim was magnet that was placed to the undercarriage of the car. Once that it shim was pulled out, the two screws would make contact with each other and that would allow the circuit to be complete and the bomb would go off. The officers pulled out at an angle that caused the trigger mechanism to tweak just enough so that the trigger points didn't match and by a miracle, the bomb didn't go off.
After the police discovered the first bomb, they called basically every officer that was on the street and had them go look under their cars.
AL PREDITION, LAPD SWAT, RETIRED: There was another bomb that was found at Hollenbeck Station, one of my former partners parked his car there and when he went back to his car, he actually found the bomb underneath his car.
HALL: These are pretty much the two most powerful pipe bombs that have ever been (found). Three-inch inner diameter by 12 inches in length. It's the largest pipe bomb I personally have ever seen.
These devices also contained three quarter inch concrete nails. The addition of shrapnel to an explosive device is for the sole purpose of injuring or killing.
TOOBIN: These bombs, had had they gone off might well have killed a dozen people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How do the bombings fit in here?
HARRIS: I didn't do any of it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You weren't involved in any of them?
HARRIS: Nope.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wanted to kill a coper?
HARRIS: Nope.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Making the bomb? Any of these?
HARRIS: Nope. Not that I recall. I don't recall ever making a bomb. I don't know how to make a bomb. I couldn't make a bomb to this very day. And I wouldn't trust myself making a bomb. No, I didn't make a bomb that was used against police cars in Emeryville. I didn't.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What about the mission? The Mission Police District?
HARRIS: I was not involved in that either.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And the LAPD, the two giant pipe bombs? One under Hollenbeck undercover cop car and one under the cop car from IHOP?
HARRIS: I don't have any knowledge of that that I would like to share with you, how about that?
LATIN: There's no question that the bombings were a direct response to the shootout in LA. That's why LAPD officers were targeted. The by-product of those bombs is that other people were going to be killed too. Completely innocent people.
ADAMS: What really separates the SLA from these other groups is violence against people. Whether underground, they also did bombings, but they were aimed at property, not at people. This group was not done. They had further intent to kill individuals and just create havoc.
JASON MOULTON, FBI AGENT, RETIRED: In early August of 1975, we had no clue where the fugitives were. The focus of my investigation was to find Kathleen Soliah. There was no arrest warrant for her. We were just trying to find another link to get us back to Wendy Yoshimura.
Wendy Yushimura had allegedly rented their house and inside their residence, inside the garage were paraphernalia that was linked to a bombing in Alameda County, and so she was being charged as an accomplice.
We had to look through files and see somebody who knew Kathleen Soliah, somehow was associated with her. I found a woman by the name of Patricia Jeanne McCarthy. She was a nurse. We actually had a place where she went to work and we had a place where she lived.
And so, we started a surveillance on Pat Jean McCarthy that led us to the apartment complex down in Pacifica. We interviewed the gentleman running the complex and said, "Yes, they are painters and they are working in this apartment today.
It was Jim Kilgore, Michael Borton, Steve Soliah and the two Soliah sisters were the ones that he knew and could identify. The people who were doing the painting went from Pacifica, then they ended up parked on Morris Street.
We don't want to screw this up. This is the first time we ever knew where the Soliahs were. We had a guy who worked at Pacific Gas & Electric who was a retired FBI guy. And so, I called him and I said, "Is there anything going on, on Morris Street?" He said at 625 Morris, we've got somebody stealing power.
The next morning, they followed them from 625 Morris to the vicinity of 292 Proceda.
At 10:00 that morning, I saw Steve Soliah, Kathleen Soliah and Josephine Soliah coming out of 288 Proceda. I expected them to come out. That's who we had been surveilling. Then I see what I think is Bill and Emily Harris walk down the same set of steps. They were literally 20 feet away from us.
I mean, we weren't even breathing inside that place because this is supposed to be an unoccupied camper.
HARRIS: I took a load of laundry down to the laundromat that was located around the corner from Proceda. I was this there doing laundry and I noticed a guy come in the laundromat dressed in a suit. This was a totally working-class neighborhood. A lot of Latinos. White guys in suits were generally cops.
He looked at me dead in the face and I am looking at him dead in the face and he turns immediately to his right and goes to a payphone that's on the wall near the front of the laundromat.
You know, I get a really, really bad feeling about what's happened. So I immediately went home and I told Emily that I thought I got made by a cop or a Fed. We were prepared to leave by the next day.
MOULTON: On the next day, Bill and Emily came out of their apartment and they just started jogging down Proceda.
HARRIS: We never saw them until they jumped out and arrested us. They did everything but put a bag over our heads. It was quick. It was like super fast. Very well done.
MOULTON: We had no idea who was inside that house, but we needed go in to ensure ourselves that Patty wasn't there because we have just arrested Bill and Emily who were charged with her kidnapping.
We get inside there. What we're confronted with are carbines, shotguns and bombs. We had no clue that any of that stuff was there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The house in which William and Emily Harris had lived briefly, police had removed quite an assortment of guns, ammunition, explosives and at least one pipe bomb assembled and ready to blow. The question police now ask as they study this evidence was William Harris involved in a series of terrorist bombings in San Francisco?
MOULTON: I asked the agent in charge, did anybody go up to the other address? And he said, "What other address?" So, I said, "Well, I'm going to go and Tom Paton says, "I'm going to go with you." All we know is that there was a power gas issue at 625 Morris Street.
As we are walking up, the garage door was up and there's a guy standing in the garage door. He's a plumber. We show him the pictures of Patty and Wendy and he says, "Well, I don't know if that's them or not," but he says, "There's two women upstairs who are giggling."
Tom Paton was the senior guy. He made the decision. He says, "I'm going to go to the backdoor," and then when he gets there, the door is open and it's a warm day. And Wendy is sitting at the table with Patty Hearst.
TOOBIN: Tom Paton says, "FBI." But what does Patty Hearst do? Does she run into their arms and say, "Thank you so much for saving me," no. She runs towards the bedroom where the guns are stored.
MOULTON: We've seen the firearms and bombs at the other location. Now, she's in there again where we can't observe her. He put the gun to Wendy's head and said, "I'm going to kill her if you don't come back."
TOOBIN: It's only because the agents and cops acted quickly in had that apartment that there was not a hail of gunfire too. MOULTON: She was placed in handcuffs and then she said, "Hey, I wet
my pants." Under supervision, she was able to change. We had two five-shot revolvers in their purses and then one carbine and a 12- gauge shotgun. So, we were clearly outgunned.
HARRIS: Evidently, Steven rolled up to Morris Street. He shows up right after they hit the house. He wanted to, you know, make sure Hearst was all right.
MOULTON: Steve Soliah is arrested by the agents who were inside the house, and from that moment, we could not find Jim Kilgore, Michael Bortin, Kathleen Soliah and Josephine Soliah. They were gone. They were underground.
HARRIS: When we were arrested, we were immediately transported to the San Mateo County Jail.
I had had to do something that was demonstrative. I was a captured urban guerilla, so I raised my hands into as powerful a pose as I could get and turned around and walked into jail. It was important to set the tone. And we all did that.
TOOBIN: A year and a half after her kidnapping, she's in the safe arms of the law. So, what does she do? Patty gives the revolutionary salute, even when she's in handcuffs. And when she's booked, she's asked her occupation and what does she say? Urban gorilla.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A principled question is whether the daughter of an American millionaire turned revolutionary, and if so, why?
CATHERINE HEARST, MOTHER OF PATRICIA HEARST: I'm terribly happy. More happy than predacious.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you have any notion what you'll say to her when you see her?
HEARST: I'll tell her I love her.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are there questions that you want to ask her?
HEARST: No questions in my mind.
CJ WESTRICK, US ATTORNEYS OFFICE: When Patty was arrested, her demeanor was very, very cocky I can. She was upset at the FBI.
HARRIS: She received a visit almost immediately with one of her best friends from the past, a woman name Trish Tobin.
HEARST: I just want to tell you like, my politics are real different from way back when,
TRISH TOBIN, FRIEND OF PATRICIA HEARST: Obviously, right.
HEARST: And so, this creates all kinds of problems for me in terms of a defense. AL JOHNSON, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: I mean, it's so crazy because Trish
Tobin is telling her that she, Trish Tobin is about to head off to Switzerland to go skiing for three weeks. I mean, so what you have in this compressed circumstance is the old life skiing in Switzerland for three weeks, and Patty is saying, "I've got a life now. I've got a new life."
F. LEE BAILEY, DEFENSE ATTORNEY FOR PATRICIA HEARST: When I took the Hearst case in September of '75, I pretty much understood from day one that she probably had gone over, so to speak, from constant brainwashing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Private defense lawyer is F. Lee Bailey is a superstar, a living Perry Mason.
WESTRICK: To have F. Lee Bailey join this case really gave it a lot of notoriety. He was extremely well known, and he brings that celebrity to the case.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you want to see Patricia Hearst?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A little, but I am primarily here to see Mr. Bailey.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Hearsts are really ramping up for this one and knew we were in for a fight. The US district attorney was James L. Browning, Jr. He is a bright guy, but in terms of just his manner in his department and his dress, you couldn't help but be struck by how square he was.
WESTRICK: F. Lee he brought in his number one side kick, Al Johnson.
Al Johnson played an amazing role in the case. He was the one that was very, very close to Patty. Very protective of her.
JOHNSON: I was shocked to see the extent of emotional disturbance that her captivity had caused. She was shriveled up in a chair sitting across the table from me. You would have to be an uninformed human being not to know of the trauma she had been through by just looking at her.
AUSTIN HEARST, COUSIN OF PATRICIA HEARST: You've met Bailey, what's he like?
HEARST: I only met him like twice.
HEARST: What's he like? Is he a nice guy?
HEARST: He's okay. He's real patronizing.
HEARST: Really? Well, he's not here all the whole time. The other guy Johnson is.
HEARST: And he is real nice.
HEARST: Is he? HEARST: Bailey, I just -- I don't know him, you know, like he just
kind of drifts in and you know, says blah, blah, blah and I just go, oh, okay.
TOOBIN: She writes letters to Steve Soliah, these dramatic love letters to her boyfriend saying, "I want to keep up the fight for the revolution." And she wants to overthrow the government in America, which she Spells A-M-E-R-I-K-K-K-A.
BAILEY: Al Johnson and I constantly reminded Patty that it she was to have no contact with any of her former colleagues from the SLA or elsewhere in that outlaw environment because they would do nothing but hurt her. It took her many months to gradually work her way back into society, where she wasn't afraid of the SLA.
HARRIS: She was deprogrammed and deradicalized, returned to the persona more similar to what she was when she was originally kidnapped. She was essentially brainwashed by her side team and her lawyers.
JOHNSON: It was never true that our objective was to reconvert her.
STEVEN WEED, FIANCEE OF PATRICIA HEARST: News came she had been caught. It was a huge relief and I did want to see her, but she didn't want to see me. And the attorneys didn't want her to see me. It was clear by that time she had reevaluated the past. I was something she really didn't want anything to do with by that time.
TOOBIN: In the days after, she was arrested, she was still a revolutionary. Giving the fist salute, calling herself an urban gorilla, but in short order, she returned to being the Patty Hearst of Hillsborough, California, the heiress herself.
HEARST: It's kind of fun because back then, there's nothing else to do but paint your nails. It's really exciting. I have been crocheting now. At least, my mother came in and she asked -- she had asked me about my hair, you know, like can I change it back? She asked if there was a beauty parlor.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think that Al Johnson did a fabulous job in the sense of bringing her back.
HEARST: I have a really nice brown pantsuit.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (Inaudible).
HEARST: Al got it. He has really good taste.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: By the time she walked into the courtroom, nail polish, nice pair of shoes, very well dressed, it was impressive.
JOHNSON: Well, certainly, in her defense, in Patricia Hearst's defense, the one thing we had to do was prepare her for testimony. Secondly, we had to produce expert testimony.
In order to show that she had no volition, in order words, that was she was brainwashed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: During the next few weeks, it promises to be the latest example of the powerful role psychiatry now plays in the law, so it may be called the trial of the century.
JOHNSON: Trial now for the Hibernia Bank robbery began in February of 1976 and the whole defense of that case was based upon a showing that her actions were based upon persuasive coercion.
BAILEY: We invoked that in the medieval days, if the princesses were kidnapped from the castle, she could not be held accountable for anything that happened until she was returned to safety.
TOOBIN: In the American Criminal Justice System, there is no such defense as brainwashing. The legal version of that defense is called coercive persuasion. In other words, I as a defendant was forced to commit these crimes and therefore, am not guilty.
That was the defense that Bailey and company put forward at Patty's trial.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We knew with a high degree of certainty that brainwashing or coercive persuasion was going to be the defense because it was the only other possible, possible explanation.
TOOBIN: The problem for Bailey and the defense was that they had very few options for what to argue. They couldn't argue she wasn't in the bank. They couldn't argue that this was a mistaken identity.
BAILEY: You're at a real disadvantage. There's been all this publicity about everything that Patty had done. You have a steep ramp to climb as a defense attorney to try to un-ring that bell.
TOOBIN: There was no legal defense available to her that I never would have robbed the bank if I hadn't been kidnapped in the first place. Everybody knew that was true. She was not going to be a bank bobber, but so what? She did rob the bank and she was on trial for it. And what led her to that moment was only relevant if she could prove that she did not really intend to rob the bank, but was in fact forced to rob it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We were committed to showing what her actions were in the next year and a half because the whole issue is what her intent was and her conduct for the next year and a half would be pretty reflective of what her intent was.
She had participated in bombings, bank robberies and we felt how could somebody have a gun in the back of your head for a year and a half.
BAILEY: David Bancroft, who was kind of the number three guy there with the big problem in many respects.
TOOBIN: Dave Bancroft of the US Attorney's Office was assigned to cross examine defense experts and put on the government's experts.
BAILEY: The defense put on three psychiatrists -- Jolly West, Robert Lifton, and Martin Orne.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The doctors took over all of these people who had a specialty in brainwashing. Lifton perhaps more than any of the others.
It was Dr. Lifton, his focus was research with respect to prisoners of war who come out after months and years of confinement and who expressed some sympathy with their captors.
But site me the case, where by virtue of what you call coercive persuasion, the subject went out and took up arms and committed an act of violence against their own kind. And they had to answer because it is the case. There are no such instances.
JOHNSON: Her capture and confinement, their brutalization was coupled with indoctrination. Clearly, they intended to convert her to their way of thinking. No question about that. She had no volition. The dominance of her captors allowed for only one excuse, that she was involuntarily accepting of the point of view of her captors.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The script for the defense had been written by Dr. Jolyon West. He would say things like, "Well, the reason she said that in jail, she was fearful of the presence of Emily Harris, who was right there in the same room.
When we pointed out to Dr. West that Emily Harris by the jail records was nowhere in that room, his answer was, "Well, I find that interesting too. That shows what a powerful presence she was. Patty thought she was there." No matter which way the evidence was going, he was going to go and find that she was being coercively persuaded.
This is not beyond understanding at all. Like many 19-year-olds, she's open to new and different experiences. The sense of adventure, wanting to do something significant, totally different, not skiing in Switzerland. This is not skiing in Switzerland.
BAILEY: The Stockholm Syndrome is probably the term most familiar to the public in connection with brainwashing cases.
JANJA LALICH, PROFESSOR IN THE SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHICO: There's this idea of Stockholm Syndrome, which came from a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. Over time, the people who were held hostage began to identify with their captor.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stockholm Syndrome takes you about one-eighth of the way. Stockholm Syndrome is, "I'm here, you got me. I'm a captive. I've got to make the best of this. But that's fundamentally different than saying, "You know what, I really dig what you're doing." By the way, it would have been a real achievement. It would be the first time ever to succeed and the SLA had no training in this. Never pretended to have any training in this.
BAILEY: Some have said that the SLA had no expertise in brainwashing and particularly Donald Defreeze, the leader, that is nonsense.
He had studied the North Korean methodology. He knew enough to abuse her to the point where she would do most anything she was told to do.
HARRIS: We weren't brainwashers. We weren't trained in the techniques similar to the ones used on me and my fellow marines in boot camp. That was brainwashing. That is breaking you down to nothing and then building you back up again. That never happened.
Bailey was a marine pilot and has always had a wild hair up his ass about some Manchurian candidate circumstance. And it's kind of his obsession. It's his (inaudible) white whale.
TOOBIN: The key strategic judgment that Bailey made was to put Patty Hearst on the stand.
BAILEY: By the time she took the witness stand, she was well out of her cocoon and wanted to name the people who had abused her so badly. Fifty-six days in the closet with other kinds of abuse that turned her into an urban gorilla. We needed her for that.
JOHNSON: She was brutalized, humiliated, raped. Coming out from behind the emotional upheaval, which had to take place in her mind is very, very difficult for her to do.
WESTRICK: I'm in the courtroom and she is saying that she was raped by Willy Wolfe first and then Cinque. And I'm trying to be an expressionless, but I'm sure I was taken aback by how blatant she was in her statements.
HARRIS: She came out directly and claimed to be raped. She used the "R" word. These were all absolutely false claims.
TOOBIN: It is simply important to point out that one of the very few areas where there is a complete disagreement about what happened is the issue of rape.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There were two possible subjects for any notion of rape. One was Defreeze and the other was Willy Wolfe known as "Cujo." She did have sexual relations with Willy Wolfe, but that was significantly consensual.
WESTRICK: According to Patty, on an SLA tape, they had a love for each other that they have never had for anybody else.
HEARST: Cujo is the gentlest, most beautiful man I have ever known. We loved each other so much. Neither Cujo or I had ever loved an individual the way we loved each other.
WESTRICK: But then Patty, in her testimony when she was on the stand said that he raped her. That she hated him.
TOOBIN: Patty's version of what happened is very straightforward. It's that at one point Willy Wolfe simply walked into the closet and raped her and at another point Defreeze did the same thing.
BAILEY: I do not believe she had consensual sex with Willy Wolfe because I think was ordered to do so. The fact that she did not physically resist him under her circumstances is not a case I would want to take before a jury and say it was consensual.
LALICH: She was in a situation of undue influence at that point. Kept in a closet and blindfolded. That, in my mind, is sheer rape. The fact that she may have later engaged in a relationship with him is a completely different matter.
TOOBIN: The surviving members of the SLA say she was in love with Willy Wolfe. And then, they point to her actions later in the story as confirming their belief that she did in fact fall in love with Willy Wolfe.
MICKI SCULI: I don't think she was raped when she was kidnapped. Most of the people in the group were women and they were feminists. They were strong women. And I can't imagine that that would have been allowed.
EMILY HARRIS, FORMER SLA MEMBER: The idea that these women would allow Patricia Hearst, no matter what her situation, to be raped by men in the group is really ludicrous. It offends me.
CAROL POGASH, JOURNALIST: I probably tend to believe Patty more than I would on Emily Harris. If Patty says she was raped, I think there's a good chance she was raped. I get that these women were feminists, but it just seems to me, feminists don't kidnap a young woman who is 19.
LALICH: People rationalize behaviors based on their overarching ideology. They would have rationalized in their minds that this was not rape because when they had sex with other men, they didn't see it as rape. They saw it as one of the tenets of their organization of getting rid of monogamy. But they weren't putting themselves in the shoes of Patty Hearst, who was being held captive in a closet.
LARRY KING, FORMER CNN ANCHOR: How about sex? Now, we know that they raped you.
HEARST: By the time they have gotten around to this, I had been in the closet for several weeks or a month and that was kind of the least of what I was afraid they were going to do to me at that point. And I just -- I almost didn't care. It was one more humiliation. I was taken into the bathroom by them, watched every second. You couldn't do anything alone.
So, this was kind of one other thing that, you know, I hoped might even you know, prolong my life. It was almost nothing at that point.
JOHNSON: The captors, the kidnappers of Patricia Hearst were violent, violent people. To accuse them of rape would incongruity with other things they had done of a terrible nature.
HARRIS: No one raped Patricia Hearst, ever. If somebody had sexually assaulted Hearst, someone among us would have probably shot them.
TOOBIN: Bill and Emily Harris were willing to admit everything that they did with regard to Patty Hearst. That they kidnapped her, that Patty was unwilling at first. HARRIS: As soon as she claimed the rape, we were no longer supporting
her defense. She crossed the line.
TOOBIN: In light of her claim on the witness stand that she was sexually assaulted, that established the breach between the two of them.
HARRIS: We wouldn't have gotten involved if she hadn't claimed that she was raped. There's no way that we were going to accept that as a strategy, so we had to counter it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Among with her (inaudible) accusations yesterday were Emily and William Harris.
HARRIS: We had been monsterized plenty, but now we're rapists on top of that, and it's not true. Well, we set the record straight there.
TOOBIN: Bill and Emily gave an interview to a magazine called "New Times" and they were confronted by the journalist with the question of, "How do you know Patty wasn't raped by Willie Wolfe?" And Emily says to the reporter, "Well, she loved Willie Wolfe, in fact she carried with her, for a year afterwards this little charm that Willie gave her."
WESTRICK: Jim was really good at reading everything he could about the case. So, he's reading this article by Emily and Bill Harris. And Eemily stated that Willie Wolfe had given Patty a token of his love. It's called an Olmec monkey. We heard about this Olmec monkey on the SLA tape.
HEARST: (The police) probably have the little Olmec monkey that Cujo wore around his neck. He gave me the little stone face one night.
WESTRICK: When she was arrested, the Olmec monkey that Willie Wolfe gave her was in her purse. We did not realize the significance of this. It looked like a stone or a rock. We didn't know it was the "Olmec Monkey." I was in the courtroom. Jim passes this article by Emily and Bill Harris to me and says, "What..." you know, with a note, "What do you think?" And I just wrote back to him, "No woman would carry a token of her rapist." He went, "Yes, that's right. What woman would carry a memento of a rapist?"
BAILEY: So, we got the case agent. Said, "Hey, listen, I want you to go downstairs to the evidence room. We're looking for this necklace."
He came upstairs and said, "We got it."
WESTRICK: And then we contacted the LA Police Department and found that Willie Wolfe did have it and it was found under his body when he died.
HARRIS: This gift meant something to her because it really meant something to Willie. It's the only thing she had left of him.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How else would anybody interpret this? As a happenstance? As just, you know, "I forgot about it? It was in my purse for a year and a half?" Not reasonable.
WESTRICK: This evidence came in. It was one of the last exhibits to come into the jury.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was a significant point in the trial.
TOOBIN: Bailey had put Patty on the stand so that the jurors could hear in her own words the terror of the kidnapping. That was the upside for the defense of putting her on the stand. But there was a very substantial downside too.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the course of that examination, Patty ended up testifying to certain circumstances that took place in the next year and a half. And we felt, I now was sitting at the prosecution table, "Holy Corrolli, he has opened the door."
JOHNSON: The judge kind of ruled without question that there would be no questions during the trial for the Hibernia Bank robbery about the robbery at Carmichael.
TOOBIN: Bailey and Johnson have said for years that the reason they put Patty Hearst on the stand is that they had a ruling from the just that the cross-examination would be limited just to the bank robbery and the kidnapping. That is not true.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The judge never ruled that we were not entitled to ask these questions about what happened after the bank robbery. There was never any earlier ruling upon which the defense relied and indeed, having testified in your own behalf, you can no longer invoke the Fifth Amendment on cross-examination.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If a defendant voluntarily takes the stand, she cannot pick and choose the questions that she wants to answer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now comes the time for Patty to answer to our questions about certain things that happened during that year and a half.
TOOBIN: Bailey is confronted with the possibility of his client answering questions under oath about the death of Myrna Opsahl. If she has to answer those questions, she's essentially confessing to her involvement in a crime that could expose her to the death penalty.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Lee, particularly -- Bailey become quite blustery.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Defense lawyer Lee Bailey angrily objected asking that the trial be stopped. Judge Olive Carter, red-faced pointing, "Nobody made her take the witness stand. You opened this up." And then he warned Ms. Hearst of future punishment for contempt unless she responded.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jim decided he should be the one to cross-examine Patty Hearst. When I instructed her to take the Fifth Amendment and Judge Carter ordered her to answer, her goose was cooked.
TOOBIN: The jury watches Patty Hearst take the Fifth. Juries don't like that.
WESTRICK It's always damaging when you have a witness on the stand and they take the Fifth Amendment because the inference is, they have something to hide.
BAILEY: The jury was shown the whole scenario for 42 sequential times.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The prosecutor, "Do you see this notebook?" Ms. Hearst, "I refuse to answer." The prosecutor, "You won't even tell us whether you see the documents in front of you?" Ms. Hearst, "I refuse to answer."
BAILEY: That ruling destroyed the entire defense. It gave a wonderful springboard to say in essence to the jury, she's always been a defiant child and look here, and it killed us.
People wanted Patty to do jail time. She was more unpopular than the Boston strangler.
HARRIS: Her class privilege was what going to protect her. We had one more issue of which we can be prosecuted. It was a nightmare that we had to revisit.
HEARST: It was so cold, it didn't matter what they did to anybody, they were always right.
HARRIS: The family by this time didn't want to any time.
KING: No one is above the law, no matter how rich and powerful.