Wealth & Money Quote by Patty Hearst

There is a particular kind of defiance in Hearst’s “I went ahead and printed it,” the sort that sounds casual until you remember what she’s gambling with. The line is doing two things at once: insisting on authorship of her own story, and advertising the stakes of that authorship. “No use immunity” isn’t a decorative legalism; it’s a pointed reminder that her life wasn’t just tabloid spectacle, it was evidence. She’s telling you: I didn’t speak from safety.

The intent reads like preemptive credibility. Hearst knows how easily her narrative can be dismissed as PR, or folded into the mythology around her kidnapping and the Symbionese Liberation Army. By foregrounding the absence of immunity, she positions the book as confession-without-a-deal, a risk that implies sincerity. It’s a rhetorical move that borrows from courtroom logic: if I didn’t have to say this, why would I?

The subtext is more bruising. Hearst is also confessing to the machinery of narrative that surrounded her: even “before that” she was already trying to get ahead of the story, to fix it in print before prosecutors, journalists, and the public finished writing it for her. In celebrity culture, memoir is often control disguised as candor. Here, control comes with an admission of powerlessness: she can publish, but she can’t immunize herself from the consequences of being believed. That tension is the sentence’s quiet punch.