Olson Backers Relieved, Vexed by About-Faces

November has been a difficult month for the tight-knit group of Sara Jane Olson’s close supporters here in the city where she lived for two decades as a woman with a secret past.

On Oct. 31, Olson took her supporters by surprise by pleading guilty to charges arising from the attempted bombing 25 years earlier of two Los Angeles police cruisers. Since then, she has publicly questioned her guilt, then reiterated her plea in court and, finally, changed her mind and asked a judge to allow her to go to trial after all.

Now, with Olson facing a Dec. 3 hearing on her request to withdraw her plea, her closest supporters are relieved--and pleased--but also worried.

They are pleased because many of them remain convinced that Olson had done nothing criminal in those long-ago, heady days of protest marches and anti-government demonstrations.

The worry comes from the fear that her very public indecision has become a spectacle in which Olson risks becoming a figure of ridicule--a fate that, for a person seriously committed to radical politics, might be worse than a stint in prison.

“I’m kind of throwing my hands up and saying, ‘What’s going on?’ ” said Wendy Knox, a prominent director of a local experimental theater and a longtime friend of Olson’s. “What’s going on now is just lunatic.”

Those who have been in communication with Olson say the decision to plead guilty and then to try to reverse the plea was an emotionally wrenching and ultimately lonely process in which Olson has had to balance her principles against the possibility of a shorter sentence. Olson was unavailable for comment, a spokesman said.

“From my conversations with her she had every intention of going to trial,” said Michelle Gross, a local community activist who recently worked with Olson on a rally here against the Ku Klux Klan.

“I was sad she felt she had to plead guilty to something she did not do. But she’s got to do what’s right for her and her family, as well as what’s right for the movement, and she’s tried to make that balance work out the whole way through.”

Olson has consulted with her three daughters, her parents, her lawyers, a few close friends in Los Angeles and her husband, emergency room doctor Fred Peterson, her friends say. But she alone has had to sort out what to do.

Olson Couldn’t Sleep After Pleading Guilty

After entering the guilty plea, Olson was racked with doubt and couldn’t sleep, said Andy Dawkins, a Twin Cities attorney and longtime family friend, who spoke to Peterson by telephone afterward.

“After she can’t sleep for a week, her family says, ‘If you can’t live with yourself, then you’ve got to see what you can do about proving it to a jury,’ and that’s where we sit,” Dawkins said.

Barbara Nimis, the family attorney and a friend who has worked with Olson on various causes for more than a decade, recounted similar conversations.

“She told me she couldn’t keep up the lie and say she was guilty, when she wasn’t,” she said.

In a note posted on her defense committee’s Web site, Olson’s brother-in-law raises another argument cited by Olson’s supporters: alleging that the prosecutors misled her about the severity of the sentence she’d face if she were to plead guilty.

“What’s going on is a very scary thing,” said Mary Sutton, who heads Olson’s defense fund committee. “And there are no answers.”

Defense attorneys believe Olson will have to serve only a bit over five years, but they acknowledge that the state’s Board of Prison Terms could hold a hearing and extend that time to as much as life in prison if it deems her to be a danger to society.

At the time of her guilty plea, Judge Larry Paul Fidler warned Olson of that possibility. Now, Sutton said, Olson is fearful that prosecutors will push for such a hearing. Prosecutors have indicated that they have not ruled out that possibility.

“There is a big hole that leaves this plea wide open,” Sutton said.

The twists and turns of the private dilemma have had very public consequences for Olson and her cause. Many observers have interpreted her indecision as contempt for the workings of the legal process. Her critics have taken the on again-off again trial as proof that she still refuses to accept responsibility for misguided acts of her youth.

The day that news of Olson’s latest change of heart reached her adopted home here, she was lambasted by a talk radio host as a “menopausal sociopath” and a “fruitcake” and compared to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for refusing to admit her wrongs.

2 Newspaper Pieces Lampooned Suspect

Olson’s supporters might have ignored those comments, which came from a conservative personality who aims to spark outrage. But the next day, the Star Tribune, the mainstream newspaper in characteristically polite Minneapolis, ran not one, but two pieces lampooning Olson.

One column suggested that Osama bin Laden might escape justice by doing what the former Kathleen Soliah did 25 years ago: flee to the Midwest and change his name to the more commonplace Olson. The other ridiculed Olson’s left-leaning politics by saying she had reasserted her guilt, but only in an “ironic, postmodern sense that sees ‘guilt’ as a socially constructed premise employed by the ruling class” to dominate the powerless.

Olson has had detractors locally ever since she was arrested, but the latest onslaught seems to have unnerved some of her supporters.

“There wasn’t the same kind of venom for Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber,” Mary Ellen Kaluza, a part-time loan officer who is the treasurer of Olson’s defense fund, said over a cup of tea at the Mayday Cafe here.

Prosecutors say they have evidence linking Olson to two attempted bombings of police cars in 1975 that they allege were planned by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The prosecutors allege the bombings were planned as retaliation for the deaths of six SLA members killed in a 1974 shootout with Los Angeles police. The evidence, prosecutors say, includes Olson’s handwriting on an order for bomb fuses days before the attempted attacks.

Olson has claimed the evidence was concocted and says she was never a member of the SLA, a shadowy group that in the early 1970s kidnapped media heiress Patty Hearst and murdered Marcus Foster, the superintendent of the Oakland public schools. Olson, however, was friends with Angela Atwood, one of those killed in the 1974 shootout.

Olson’s supporters consistently have argued that she is unfairly being set up as a symbol of the sometimes violent protests of the ‘60s and ‘70s. But in the last few weeks, such political issues have been shoved offstage entirely by the rollicking legal theater caused by Olson’s indecision.

That alone is a defeat for Olson and her supporters, said Peter Rachleff, a Macalester College history professor who is an outspoken supporter of Olson. The ridicule, Rachleff said, is aimed at neutralizing Olson’s political allies who are involved in a variety of social justice issues concerning peace, poverty, women’s rights and racism.

Active in Political Causes on the Left

Throughout her years in St. Paul, Olson was active in political causes on the left--raising money and organizing events protesting apartheid and in support of Nicaraguan rebels. Most recently, she helped with an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in August that organizers said attracted 4,000 people.

“Constructing her as a caricature is a way to erase what a lot of people have been doing here who have been good citizens while doing it,” said Rachleff.

Pam Nice, who directed Olson in a play about South Africa during the days in which Olson was a Midwestern doctor’s wife active in community theater, voices the fear of many of Olson’s backers. “This whole thing has become such a circus,” Nice said. “It’s going to be like O.J., magnified.”

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Times staff writer Anna Gorman in Los Angeles contributed to this report.