Experts in the relatively new field of how to survive a violent crime—something that ordinary Americans are more and more interested in learning—are unanimous in their opinion of how to handle one particular scenario. They grimly admit that although there are times when a victim may have to succumb to a culprit’s demands in order to survive the attack (for example, enduring a rape), or when one might bide one’s time—drawing the culprit into conversation, waiting for the right moment to make a move—there is one criminal act that you should never willingly allow, one act that you should resist as intensely as if you had already made the decision to die then and there: never, under any circumstances, allow the person to move you from one location to another. He will surely take you to some place more secluded, more advantageous to him, and he will almost certainly do terrible things to you and kill you there.

Patty Hearst didn’t know that fact when her peaceful night of studying—she and Steven had eaten the off-campus-housing dinner of champions (sandwiches and Campbell’s soup), they had just finished watching Mission: Impossible and The Magician, she was in her bathrobe—exploded into violence. She did not know that she would be beaten, bound and gagged, and thrown into the trunk of a car, and that from there she would be transferred to a closet, in which she would be raped repeatedly and told that she might soon be executed, and that for the first few days she would not even be allowed to use a toilet. As Graebner reports, for the first seconds of her captivity, she thought she was being buried alive, as Barbara Jane Mackle, the victim of a spectacularly hideous kidnapping, had been five years earlier.

The first sexual assault happened when her hands were briefly freed inside the closet. Cinque responded to this by grabbing her crotch and squeezing her breasts, an act that Graebner characterizes as “fondling” and that a (male) expert witness for the prosecution said was not “sexual assault” but rather an example of Cinque “venting his anger.” Can any man understand what it is like for a woman to be sexually brutalized? Patty Hearst was a young woman who had cut short a dream vacation to Europe not only because she missed her boyfriend, but because the behavior of Mediterranean men frightened her: “Rome is really beautiful, but I’m afraid to go out of the hotel alone—men don’t just whistle here, they run at you and try to grab you!” She was a woman so moored in the proprieties of her Catholic mother that when she entered an ongoing sexual relationship, she legitimized it (in her own heart, if not her mother’s) by placing it within a domestic context, and by sealing its niceness with the promise of a wedding.

And there she was, in the dark, with the first groping eventually leading to the first rape—“he did his thing and left”—an event made doubly wretched by the fact that she knew the rest of the gang was on the other side of the closet door, listening. Other rapes followed. The SLA was probably the first band of revolutionaries to marry a commitment to radical feminism with the use of systematic rape as a means of recruitment. Terrified in the closet, harangued night and day as part of her “reeducation,” dreading the next assault, she discovered that privileges—using the toilet, a chance to brush her teeth with the communal toothbrush—could be earned not by enduring another beating but merely by telling her captors that she agreed with them, that she could see their point of view. Who could hold it against her?