According to her friend, the scholar and theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, she parted ways with the hospital in 1965 when she insisted on better training for the African personnel, including decision-making power.

They burned draft files with homemade napalm in the Knights of Columbus parking lot in Catonsville, Maryland.

She scuffled over a telephone with one of the clerks, Phyllis Morsberger, assuring her repeatedly "We won't hurt you" before relinquishing it, and walking away saying "It's all yours" (Peters 102-103).

After friends appealed unsuccessfully to President Jimmy Carter to pardon her as he had Patty Hearst, she surrendered in Baltimore in June 1979, after which she served a year in the women's prison in Alderson, West Virginia.

Afterward she returned to nursing, first at the People's Free Medical Clinic, eventually working in Queen Anne's Hospital.

She was also affiliated with secular radical antiwar groups, at was at the edges of SDS, RYMII and others though ultimately not aligning with them and instead embracing feminism over all else.

Carl Schoettler of The Baltimore Sun reported that "Willa Bickham and Brendan Walsh, the couple who have devoted their lives to serving soup and love at their Viva House table, did keep in touch with Ms. Moylan during the years of her underground exile and afterward."