Here is your solitary, wild, honest and true Lone American Hero, my friends. Cast aside your Maine Hermits, your Thoreau acolytes, your friend who spends half the year in a cabin that used to belong to his grandfather, and cluster round Judi Feingold, who was betrayed by unworthy men (and another unworthy woman).
It was clear to Judi Feingold what she should do after she and seven other people broke into an FBI office near Philadelphia in 1971, removed every file and then anonymously distributed them to two members of Congress and three journalists:
Get out of town.
She took drastic steps. Remaining in Philadelphia seemed dangerous, so she left town and headed west, moved into the underground and lived under an assumed name, moving from place to place west of the Rockies for years, owning only a sleeping bag and what she could carry in her knapsack.
There were eight people involved in the Media Burglary; after they successfully escaped with the evidence, they formed a pact:
The last time the burglars were together, shortly after the burglary, they had made two promises to each other: that they would take the secret of the burglary to their graves and that they would not associate with each other. They feared that if they continued to associate, the arrest of one might lead to the arrest of others. The seven who continued living as they had before the burglary were silent about what they had done, but they made no attempt to hide or escape.
Throughout the decades since the Media burglary, Feingold kept the pledge the burglars made to each other never to reveal they were the Media burglars. She always assumed no one in the group would break that promise. She never uttered a word about the burglary to anyone.
Just like all the other ones, right? They all…they all kept the promise that they made to Judi, right? They didn’t leave the youngest member of the break-in (SHE WAS NINETEEN) hanging out to dry just to prioritize their own safety and convenience, RIGHT?
That’s why she was shocked—angered, even sickened at first—in January when she discovered, by chance, that the other members of the group recently had publicly told the story of how and why they decided in 1971 to risk their freedom for many years to break into an FBI office in search of evidence of whether the FBI was engaged in efforts to suppress dissent.
Until discovering, in news articles about my book, that seven of the eight Media burglars went public, she thought perhaps other Media burglars might also have decided to go underground. Instead, they had lived in plain sight.
“Oh, God, Judi, you took that seriously? Oh my God…I’m so sorry! How was…how was living life on the run for forty-three years? I’m a tenured professor now and have profited enormously from selling our story. You remember that story! The one we swore we’d never tell? That one.”
(It is ENORMOUSLY worth reading the entire piece; Judi actually ended up having an amazing life as a lesbian landscape architect and hospice nurse and is made entirely of compassion and quiet inner strength and in their defense, the other burglars also sort of totally contributed to the dismantling of a horrifyingly corrupt surveillance network [we have a new one now, but that doesn’t mean what they did didn’t matter!] and also I can’t keep a secret either, I can’t pretend I would have been Judi in this situation.)
Feingold’s first home in the underground was on a goat farm north of Taos. Like several other places she would stay, this farm was owned by a woman and was part of an informal network of rural properties in the West known as “women’s land”—places where lesbians built alternative communities that were intentionally free of patriarchy.
Feingold thought it was the ideal place for her at that time. As she points out, she could have hidden anywhere, but she welcomed the chance to live underground in the country instead of in a city. She loved the outdoors and the physical work required in such places. Growing up in New York City, she had yearned to live in those wide-open spaces she saw as a child on countless television Westerns. Now she had that life. She dug irrigation ditches and learned how to make goat cheese and gather eggs. She remembers living happily in those old cowboy landscapes that recently had been reclaimed by women.
Teach me how to live, Judi. Teach me how to milk goats and keep secrets and thrive.
She thinks she talked to Bouzoun for a couple hours, somewhat incoherently. She kept repeating herself. Finally, she said goodbye. She did so without stating what she and the others had done. She did not do so despite the fact that she now knew that anyone in the world could learn the burglars’ secret on the Internet.
You don’t know what integrity is and I hate you and I hate myself. Only a woman can keep a secret. She’ll bury the secret in her own heart, and she’ll bury herself in the desert, and you will betray her a thousand times before she betrays you.
Tags: judi feingold, media burglary, news, secrets, the nation
[T]his farm was owned by a woman and was part of an informal network of rural properties in the West known as “women’s land”—places where lesbians built alternative communities that were intentionally free of patriarchy.
Amazing.
Right? DO WANT.
are we sure this woman didn’t accidentally go hide out in a Tom Robbins novel?
like, the platonic lesbian cowboy ideal of a Tom Robbins novel, not a real Tom Robbins novel that leaves you feeling kind of gross and vaguely betrayed by men.
No one has ever explained why I despise Robbins but keep reading his damn books anyway as well as this.
Ugh. Yes. Cannot read Tom Robbins. Everyone’s like “oh you’d lovvve Tom Robbins, read this” and shoves books at me. I can’t make it past page 10 or 20. I feel the same weird aversion to Bjork. People used to be shocked I didn’t lovvvve Bjork. What is this Tom Robbins Bjork cabal? Do I give off some weird cultural cues indicating membership? Hopefully that’s not a thing anymore. It was an unpleasant thing. Tom Robbins can suck it, with his wacky, unhinged, masculinely sexual, male gaze women.
Lesbian goat farms are all over New Mexico.
Are these, like, intentional communities of lesbian goats?
I sincerely hope this network (or one like it) still exists because if so next vacation PLANNED.
I can’t swear to it but if it does http://coonridge.com/ these guys are probably on the phone tree
have been to one such place. but i want you to think long and hard about a communal existence with a bunch of super opinionated people and the inability to just ‘welp, i can just BUILD AN ENTIRELY NEW FARM ELSEWHERE IT’S FINE’.
They’re still around and thriving. Oregon Women’s Land is in southern Oregon and has been a lesbian retreat since the 1970s.
Oh snap! I read Betty Medsger’s book a couple months ago, it’s fascinating. The statute of limitations expired, Judi! You can come back!
Anyone interested in this story should check out the upcoming documentary “1971”: http://www.1971film.com/
I saw this movie this summer! It was at a film festival, with the director and 2 of the burglars (Johanna Hamilton, Bonnie & John Raines) there for Q&A. The movie was a pretty engaging cross between a heist and a documentary – recommended!
“Women’s land” is in the West? It sounds like every Seven Sisters alumni co-op you find from Scranton to Madawaska.
“Ultimately, both of her parents received hospice treatment, an exposure that led to Feingold’s recent decision at sixty-three to study to be certified as a nurse’s assistant who will provide comfort care to hospice patients. As a volunteer now, she helps care for a ninety-six-year-old woman in hospice care near the small Arizona town where she lives.”
her partners in crime were NOT WORTHY OF HER
“They say you have true grit.” We may have some Mattie Rosses around, but not too many Rooster Cogburns.
She chose all the best places to go too – Taos, Yellowstone, Lopez Island, The Cascades…! What a life. She’s a rock.
I have cultivated several distinct and separate groups of friends specifically so that whenever a friend from one group tells me a secret, I can immediately go tell everyone in another group without fear of repercussion.
A best friend you only speak to on the phone and basically knows NO-ONE you talk about is also excellent.
Or good online friends in another country. Preferably, another hemisphere.
I have cultivated several distinct and separate groups of friends specifically so that whenever a friend from one group tells me a secret, I can immediately go tell everyone in another group without fear of repercussion.
This picture is everything.
the t-shirt with nude women dancing under the moon: TOO PERFECT. #womynsland
Thank you for noticing. <3
This picture is everything.
<img src=http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/user/19/judifeingoldparents.jpg>
I guess if we get tired of taking to the sea we can now … take to the desert!
“Two people cannot keep a secret unless one of them is dead” Sicilian saying taught to me by my Grandmother, who also knew a few secrets
Omerta!
The Pretty Little Liars theme song taught me the same!
At nineteen, it would have been no more than three days before I drunkenly complimented someone by saying they reminded me of my beautiful friend Rebecca who broke into the fbi building with me.
I got my Nation subscription to dis a mansplainer I know. As soon as I read this piece there, I somehow knew Mallory would cover it.
As a relative newbie to The Toast, I can only hope that there will be many more stories under the tag of Perfidy and Wretched Villainy.
This woman is my everything.
Thank you for noticing. <3
I was a caretaker for a lesbian goat farm for a while. I spent most of my free time swanning around determining how to make their lives my future life (the lesbians, not the goats).