By Hoai-Tran Bui/Jan. 12, 2018 10:30 am EST
The studio cancelled the biopic after Hearst attacked Jeffrey Toobin’s book American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, which would have served as the basis for the biopic, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The book details Hearst’s 1974 kidnapping and eventual conviction for a bank robbery that she reportedly participated in alongside her kidnappers.
Following Hearst’s criticism of the book and Fox’s project, the studio said in a statement that it was cancelling the biopic helmed by Logan director James Mangold:
The untitled film was set to star Elle Fanning and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.
Hearst is the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the publishing mogul who built one of the largest newspaper and media chains in the U.S., Hearst Communications. At 19, Hearst was kidnapped by the urban guerilla group the Symbionese Liberation Army. But the international sympathy that she gained quickly changed to confusion when a few months later, Hearst was seen wielding a machine gun while helping her captors rob a bank in San Francisco. She was arrested and convicted of armed robbery, but throughout the trial, Hearst maintained that she had been threatened with death and brainwashed. Hearst’s sensationalist trial has captured the minds of Americans for the past 40 years, with Hearst becoming an unofficial poster child for Stockholm Syndrome.
