Sara Jane Moore, 1975 Ford assassination attempt, dies at 95

Sara Jane Moore, who shot at President Gerald Ford in 1975, has died at age 95. She died Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, according to Demetria Kalodimos, a longtime acquaintance who said she was informed by the executor of Moore’s estate. Kalodimos is an executive producer at the Nashville Banner, which was first to report the death.

Moore’s life intersected with California’s counterculture of the mid-1970s and the FBI. On Sept. 22, 1975, as Ford waved to a crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, she fired a .38-caliber pistol. The shot was deflected when Oliver Sipple, a former Marine, knocked the gun from her hand, and the bullet struck a building. Seventeen days earlier, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme had aimed at Ford in Sacramento, but a Secret Service agent stopped her before she could fire. Ford, who had been living with the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, survived both attacks; he died in 2006.

Moore was sentenced to life in prison and was held at federal facilities in Dublin, California, for more than three decades before being paroled on Dec. 31, 2007. Federal officials gave no details on the decision to release her, and Ford had died about a year earlier. After release, Moore largely stayed out of the public eye.

In interviews conducted in later years, she expressed remorse, saying she had been drawn into radical politics in California and that she had been listening only to what she believed. “I had put blinders on, I really had, and I was listening to only ... what I thought I believed,” she told San Francisco television station KGO in 2009. “We thought that doing that would actually trigger a new revolution.”

Born Sara Jane Kahn on Feb. 15, 1930, in Charleston, West Virginia, Moore’s background was described as confusing by contemporaries and even her own defense attorney during her trial. Her life included multiple marriages, name changes and involvement with both leftist political groups and the FBI. Popular commentaries cited a lack of clear explanation for her actions; retired federal public defender James F. Hewitt once said, “There was just bizarre stuff, and she would never tell anyone anything about her background.”

Moore began working for People in Need, a San Francisco food program established by Randolph Hearst, in 1974 and soon became involved with leftists, ex-convicts and other counterculture figures. She later said she briefly served as an FBI informant, though the agency ended its relationship with her about four months before the shooting.

The 1975 incidents unfolded against the background of a restless era in California politics; Ford’s presidency followed Nixon’s resignation, and both attacks on Ford drew national attention. Ford died in 2006, about a year before Moore’s release, and his family did not publicly comment on her death.

Moore was jailed in a West Virginia women's prison in 1977. She escaped two years later but was captured within hours and later transferred to a prison in Pleasanton, California, before being moved to Dublin. In 2000, she sued the warden of her federal prison to prevent him from taking keys given to inmates to lock themselves in as a security measure.

In a Nashville Banner interview following the July 2024 assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, Moore said part of what motivated her was the belief that Ford was not elected but appointed. “He wasn’t elected to anything. He was appointed.”