11. On a later tape, Patty claimed that she had joined the SLA
The brainwashing techniques worked. On a later tape that was broadcasted across the country, Patty said, in a perfectly calm voice, that she had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army. She called her parents pigs and insisted that she would never again have anything to do with them. She adopted the nom de plume “Tania,” which she would go by for over a year. The SLA had given her the name, after Haydee Tamara Bunke Bider, who had fought in Bolivia alongside the freedom fighter Che Guevara. The psychological effects of kidnapping and torture had not been researched extensively, so there was little precedent to help people understand what was happening.
Hearst later gave testimony that she had been under coercion and acted in the means of self-preservation. She said, “DeFreeze told me that the war council had decided or was thinking about killing me or me staying with them and that I better start thinking about that as a possibility…I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs.” She had to give in to the propaganda that they were feeding her, or else she stood a genuine possibility of death. All along, Patty’s parents never gave up on the hope that they would find her and that she would remember who she was.
