Patty Hearst Defends Son-in-Law Chris Hardwick With Resurfaced Chloe Dykstra Video

Hearst posts old footage of Chloe Dykstra praising then-boyfriend Hardwick as “amazing, loving, sweet”

Patty Hearst, Chris Hardwick’s mother-in-law, posted an old video from Chloe Dyskstra on Wednesday intended to undercut Dykstra’s accusations that Hardwick abused her when they dated.

Hearst, who has spoken about her own “rape and torture” after she was abducted by a group of violent radicals in 1974, tweeted that comments Dykstra made in a March 28, 2013 video were “especially interesting,” adding, “social media is a gold mine!”

In the video, Dykstra calls Hardwick “my amazing, loving, sweet boyfriend,” and praises his behavior when she had to go to the emergency room.

“The minute he found out I was in the emergency room — I kept it from him so he could get through a show without worrying. And then he showed up five minutes after I told him and just held my hand and just stayed there as long as he could.”

“And then overnight, after the surgery, he slept at the foot of my bed,” she continued. “He had a cot at the foot of my bed, and stayed in the hospital, and had to get up at 7:30 and go straight to work from the hospital.”

Dykstra’s video then cuts to footage of her in a hospital bed.

“Without that guy, he saved my a–,” she says. “And Chris, if you’re watching this, I love you very much and you’re perfect.”

In a Medium post last week in which she accused Hardwick of abuse, she described an emergency room visit that seems to be the same one referenced in the video Hearst posted. Dykstra said she had an ectotopic pregnancy — a pregnancy with a type of complication in which the embryo attaches outside the uterus — and needed to “have surgery to have it removed or it could kill me at any time.”

She said her “fear of his anger at me for getting pregnant was literally greater than my fear of death.” But she added her appreciation for Hardwick sleeping at the foot of her bed: “It made me believe that deep down inside of him maybe there was a man who loved me,” she wrote.

But she also said he also made a troubling comment to her doctor, in front of her mother, after the doctor told them Dykstra would be fine. “That’s great. When do you think I can have sex with her again?” she quoted Hardwick as saying.

“It was his first question. My mother never forgot,” Dykstra wrote.

Dykstra didn’t mention this statement in the 2013 YouTube video.

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After the Medium post, Hardwick’s name was scrubbed from website for Nerdist, a media empire he co-founded and sold to Legendary Entertainment in 2012. AMC pulled “Talking with Chris Hardwick” from its schedule, and Hardwick also withdrew as moderator on AMC and BBC America’s planned Comic-Con 2018 panels.

Hardwick married model Lydia Hearst, Patty Heart’s daughter, in August 2016.

In January, Patty Hearst cited her abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Front in 1974, when she was 19, to kill a planned film adaptation of “American Heiress,” Jeffrey Toobin’s book about her abduction. She said the book “romanticizes my rape and torture.”

Two months after the SLA took her prisoner, Hearst helped the group rob a bank. She was captured by the FBI in September 1975, and convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years in prison, despite her attorneys’ defense that she had been brainwashed by the group while held prisoner. Her case later came to be associated with Stockholm syndrome, the phenomenon in which captives come to sympathize with their captors.

President Jimmy Carter commuted her prison term in 1979, and President Clinton granted her a pardon on January 20, 2001, the last day he was in office.

Watch Dykstra’s video above.

And here is Hearst’s tweet, which also contains the YouTube episode:

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