On February 4, 1974, the SLA kidnapped nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley apartment, demanding as "ransom" a food giveaway to California's poor — the People In Need program her family funded with millions as chaotic crowds mobbed distribution points. The abduction made the tiny group the most famous underground organization on earth.
Two months later Hearst declared on tape that she had joined her captors as "Tania," and on April 15, 1974, cameras filmed her carrying a carbine in the SLA's robbery of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco, in which two bystanders were shot. Whether she was a convert or a coerced, brutalized captive — she later described confinement in a closet, rape, and relentless indoctrination — became the central question of her trial and of the group's strange legend.