Monday, May 8th 2023
Twenty years on: The Zoey Bartlet kidnapping
Washington, D.C. — Twenty years ago today, Americans were awoken to shocking news: the president's daughter had been kidnapped and he had invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to hand power over to the Speaker of the House.
Although she was taken late on the night of May 7, 2003, the news that Zoey Bartlet, the youngest daughter of then-president Josiah Bartlet, had been abducted and her Secret Service bodyguard was murdered broke early on the morning of May 8th. The ensuing manhunt lasted a little more than 48 hours, involving thousands of federal, state and local law enforcement officers and deputized National Guard units from Maryland, Virginia before Bartlet was rescued after a shoot-out involving her kidnappers, members of the Islamic Bahji who had attempted to leverage her safety for the withdrawal of Bahji prisoners in Pakistan.
In the interim, Josiah Bartlet became the first president to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment's provision to temporarily transmit the powers of the presidency to the next individual in line. With the kidnapping coming less than a week after the vice presidency was vacated by John Hoynes after he admitted to having an extramarital affair with a D.C. socialite, that person was a Republican, Speaker of the House Glen Allen Walken.
Walken described having "'felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me' just like it had to President Truman upon learning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death." upon learning of Zoey Bartlet's kidnapping and her father's intent to temporarily relinquish his office and make Walken the acting president. But by all accounts, Walken rose to the occasion: in his first public appearance as acting commander-in-chief, he reassured the nation that the government was continuing to function while also communicating his own stewardship over the presidency until the man voters had re-elected in a landslide six months earlier could return to the office.
The crisis rocked the nation, presaging over a decade of terror and increased American military intervention abroad, from Walken's attacks on Bahji camps in Qumar during the crisis all the way to the ongoing military operations in Qumar today. For two days, Americans were glued to their television as the kidnapping evolved into a geopolitical crisis not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis forty years before.
With the passage of two decades, filmmakers and documentarians have begun to feel free to create media based on the kidnapping: a four-part series docudrama on the crisis, Fifty-One Hours, will air on HBO, while a joint NBC/PBS documentary, Zoey, will air on Thursday night on both networks. While Fifty-One Hours, with Joey King starring as Zoey Bartlet and Brendan Fraser as Walken, will be a dramatic retelling of events, Zoey features interviews from both investigators, historians and several of the surviving participants, including former presidents Walken and Matthew Santos (at the time, a sophomore congressman from Texas) and Zoey Bartlet Young (as she is known now) herself.
Bartlet Young previously gave few interviews about the kidnapping, and has said that she suffered the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for years after, being especially reticent to speak about being drugged by her then-boyfriend Jean Paul, Vicomte de Condé (who himself would die of a drug overdose in 2019) and the death of Secret Service agent Molly O'Connor, who died attempting to prevent her kidnapping. She married Charlie Young, her father's former White House bodyman (and current US Trade Representative), in 2009, and the couple welcomed a daughter, Josie in 2020 while Bartlet Young was working at several Washington-based non-profits. Her daughter's birth, she says, made her feel ready to talk about those three days in May 2003 again.
"It's important," Bartlet Young said, when interviewed for Zoey, "That she and every other American girl learn from what happened to me," she says, about being drugged with GHB, a commonly-known "date rape drug", which investigators found was a "crucial element" of the kidnapping's success. ("Had Zoey Bartlet been fully conscious, aware of her surroundings, and not been incapacitated by being unwillingly given GHB," an investigative report by the Secret Service written in 2004 relayed "...it is unlikely that the kidnapping of May 7, 2003 would have proceeded as smoothly as it did, and possibly been thwarted by an activation of Ms. Bartlet's 'panic button' that was never utilized due to her incapacitation.") The late Condé, in statements to federal investigators after being granted immunity, reportedly attempted to dose her with ecstasy, but was given GHB by his drug dealer, Mohamed Amimour, an accomplice of the three kidnappers who is set to be released from federal prison next year and deported to his homeland of Algeria, having served two decades after being convicted of multiple crimes related to the kidnapping.
"Be careful and be safe," she says. "The consequences if you aren't could be massive."
