Patty Hearst Defies Gag Order in ‘70s Bomb Case
What gag order?
Despite a blanket order for everyone in the Sara Jane Olson bomb plot case to keep mum, star prosecution witness Patty Hearst Shaw has spoken out about the upcoming trial in the June edition of Talk magazine.
“I’m at the end of my rope. . . . I keep trying to forget these people. And they keep dragging me back into it!” Talk quoted publishing heiress Hearst as saying. Hearst, a.k.a. Tania, was the captive-turned-comrade of a small but violent band of 1970s radicals, the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Hearst is a reluctant witness in the Olson case, raising doubts about her own credibility as a convicted SLA bank robber. She said she’s talking publicly because she’s “fed up to the eyeballs.”
Hearst didn’t have far to go to find a friendly forum: Talk is jointly owned by Miramax Film Corp. and Hearst Communications Inc., the family business.
It is not clear when Hearst sat for the interview, which covers a wide range of SLA subjects. But the writer makes it clear that she is talking despite the gag order.
Hearst may find that such talk isn’t cheap. Olson’s new defense attorney, J. Tony Serra, said he intends to file legal motions as early as this week, asking Superior Court Judge James M. Ideman to hold Hearst and Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in contempt of court.
Garcetti recently disclosed in a letter to the judge that he might have violated the gag order “inadvertently” during a recent interview on National Public Radio.
During the radio interview, Garcetti said: “This is, we believe, a person who attempted to kill police officers. . . . Do we excuse her because she lives 20 or 25 great years and now we should just say, OK, we should just forgive you?. . . . There has to be a just punishment.”
Hearst also had plenty to say about Olson, a lanky, red-haired woman she recalled by a former name, Kathy Soliah. She implicated Olson in a Sacramento-area bank robbery and murder, as well as in a laundry list of uncharged petty thefts and shoplifting incidents.
Olson’s defense was livid.
“If there’s a gag order, it ought to be real and not just shut up the defense. It ought to shut up everybody,” griped former Olson attorney Stuart Hanlon.
Hearst’s chief complaint concerned how the trial would invade her privacy and dredge up a host of bad memories.
“It’s really not Kathy Soliah’s trial,” Hearst told the magazine. “It has turned into my trial. And I’m not going to play dead anymore.”
Hearst, who portrayed Olson/Soliah sympathetically in her 1982 book “Every Secret Thing,” said she now has mixed feelings about the defendant and the upcoming trial, set to begin in January.
Both Hearst and Olson are married, active in charities and raising teenagers--Hearst in suburban Connecticut, Olson in St. Paul, Minn. But there’s one major difference: While Hearst spent two years in jail in the 1970s, Olson spent nearly 25 years running from a grand jury’s indictment accusing her of conspiring to plant pipe bombs under Los Angeles police cars.
Hearst said now it’s Olson’s turn to pay the piper.
“She was just getting a good dollop of it!” Hearst told writer Anthony Haden-Guest. “There are consequences to these actions! It’s no fun, is it? Thanks a lot! You should have called the police right away. But now I wish they’d never found her!”
Like Garcetti, Hearst acknowledged that Olson seems to benefit from public sympathy.
“A lot of people immediately started feeling very sorry for Soliah because she had been living such a quiet life,” Hearst said. “I heard about her reading to the blind and all, and I thought, ‘Well she’s probably a lot nicer than I am.’ Who knows?”
The difficulty in keeping a lid on the spin for a trial replete with radical history and colorful characters was predicted by one of Olson’s former defense attorneys, who objected to Ideman’s initial gag order.
“You can’t stop the talk,” said attorney Susan Jordan. And, just weeks after Jordan departed from the case, newsstands across the country are proving her right as a war of the words escalates in the court of public opinion.
Said Hanlon, who continues to assist Serra behind the scenes: “It’s pretty outrageous that we have to honor this gag order and can’t go speak at universities and law schools, and Gil Garcetti can give a national press conference and then say, ‘Whoops, I forgot.’ And Patty Hearst can just say, ‘I’m fed up and I don’t care about the gag order and let me run my story in one of the papers my family owns.’ ”
Prosecutors Michael Latin and Eleanor Hunter have not talked about the case outside the courtroom.
In the Talk interview, Hearst disputed the deathbed statement of Jack Scott, a radical writer and sports activist who helped hide Hearst and SLA leaders William and Emily Harris during the summer of 1974. Scott died in January of throat cancer.
Before his voice failed him, Scott told the FBI and Olson’s defense that Hearst staged her own kidnapping to break off an unhappy engagement and kept a hit list, including the name of activist actress Jane Fonda.
Hearst called Scott’s statements “a publicity stunt.”
“He wanted to help Soliah. . . . This was Jack Scott’s last clenched fist.”
She is equally unsympathetic toward Olson and the rest of the SLA survivors.
“I have had to live my entire life in the public eye and under public scrutiny because of her actions, and the actions of the Harrises, and the rest of the SLA and I just didn’t feel sorry for her.”
The bombs planted under LAPD squad cars the night of Aug. 20-21, 1975, never went off. Still, Garcetti said during the NPR interview that his office and the LAPD take this “tough” case very seriously.
And yet another prosecution witness recently went public. Former police officer James J. Bryan, whose squad car allegedly was a bomb target, filed a civil assault suit against Olson in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Bryan’s suit, by attorney Bradley Gage, claims the former officer spotted Olson by his vehicle on Aug. 20--the night of the bombing attempt. “She gave the plaintiff a look of absolute contempt and hatred,” the suit said.