1 case tagged “counterculture”
Convicted: Valerie Jean Solanas
On the afternoon of June 3, 1968, Valerie Jean Solanas rode an elevator to Andy Warhol's Manhattan studio, pulled two firearms from a paper bag, and opened fire. She shot Warhol three times, hit art critic Mario Amaya in the hip, and attempted to execute Warhol's manager before her gun jammed. Then she walked out, hailed a cab, and waited. That evening, she surrendered to a Times Square patrolman, handed him both weapons, and offered nine words of explanation: 'He had too much control over my life.' Warhol survived, barely, after five hours of surgery during which he was briefly declared dead. He never fully recovered. Solanas, a woman with an IQ of 131 who authored one of the most provocative feminist texts of the twentieth century and held a psychology degree with honors, spent the rest of her life cycling through psychiatric wards and welfare hotels. She died alone in a San Francisco flophouse in 1988, her body undiscovered for days. What drove her to The Factory that afternoon, and what her life reveals about genius, mental illness, and the violence that festers at society's margins, remains as unsettling now as it was then.
