I abuse drugs, not women.
—Rick James, 1993
Rick’s life was a struggle between his good impulses and his horrendous ones. His larcenous impulses dominated the 1960s and ’70s. His creative impulses triumphed during the ’80s. During the ’90s, however, he surrendered to crack and the devil.
In 1989 Rick learned his mother was dying of cancer and reacted to the news by abandoning any semblance of control over his drug use. At this stage of what became a long, gruesome journey, he was still a famous rock star, still attracted endless female attention, and still had lots of money. He used the money and fame to ensure an endless supply of dope for himself and anyone who wanted to smoke it with him. As Vibe magazine reported, he “became a recluse, seldom emerging from a trash-strewn bedroom filled with smoke from around-the-clock freebasing.” Although by this time he lived in a rented Hollywood Hills home previously owned by Mickey Rooney that featured an enormous rose garden, he told the Vibe interviewer he never saw the roses until police dragged him out of the house months after he’d moved in.
Death was his goal. He told one interviewer he surrounded himself with “the lowest, most depraved people” he could find, including people he knew were out to get him. “I didn’t give a fuck,” he said. Pretty soon, he found himself sitting all day and all night naked in a room with Tanya—and a revolving cast of other women—smoking crack.
He smoked it continuously, comparing the experience to “looking Satan in the face,” or sometimes to “sucking on the devil’s dick.” The last time he saw his mother before she went into a coma was when she visited him at his house and told him he was either going to go to jail or die right there.
Worse was yet to come. Among those who joined Rick and Tanya in smoking dope in July 1991 was Frances Alley, age twenty-four. After she joined them at Rick’s house, the couple offered to put her up for a few days. Soon afterward, both Rick and Tanya were arrested. What happened between their offer of lodging and their arrest was revealed in pieces at their arraignment, their preliminary hearing, their trial, and in interviews Rick gave later.
Alley was a blonde white woman with a southern accent who called herself Courtney. Author Mike Sager, in his book Scary Monsters and Super Freaks, wrote that Alley had recently dropped out of a drug rehab program near her home outside Atlanta, had arrived in Los Angeles from Georgia only a few weeks before the incident, and had worked for one of those weeks in an L.A. massage parlor.
According to Alley’s lawyer, she had moved to L.A. to pursue a movie career. But the Buffalo News soon revealed she was wanted in Augusta, Georgia, for failing to appear on a charge that she had tried to buy crack at a Holiday Inn there. She also had been found in contempt of court in Richmond County, Georgia, for violating probation on two other charges: battery, for allegedly beating another woman, and falsely claiming in 1989 that she was a kidnap victim. Rick’s lawyer said that before Alley met Rick she’d “been scrounging the streets for drugs.”
Rick told Sager he liked Alley because he’d never met a woman who could smoke as much crack as he could. Alley said she’d had sex with Rick at his house on two occasions, and then joined Rick, Tanya, and several others in using cocaine almost nonstop for a week.
Things began to turn bad on July 16, 1991, Alley said. She had been asleep for more than twenty-four hours when Rick called her into his bedroom, she said, and accused her of stealing an eight ball of coke: 3.5 grams, worth about $200 then.
The idea that someone would steal something from him while a guest in his house was something Rick could not stomach. Rick wrote in The Confessions of Rick James that once, when he thought a male guest in his house had stolen some drugs from him, he put a long, sharp knife against the man’s neck. “I put it so hard against his neck I could see blood,” he wrote. “I told him if he ever laid his hands on my drugs, I’d cut his fucking heart out, and I meant it. Seeing his fear gave me a sense of power I had not experienced before.” Now, according to Alley, Rick told her to strip, ordered her to sit on a chair, and had Tanya tie her to it with two neckties, one from Dior, the other from Barneys. Using the neckties, Tanya lashed Alley’s arms behind her back and tied her legs to the legs of the chair. Then, Alley said, Rick slapped her across the face with the butt of a small gun. (Rick’s only previously known attack on a woman occurred in 1986 after he’d accused that woman, Gina Perry, of stealing another small object from him, a diamond ring, in his own house.)
Dousing Alley with rubbing alcohol on her waist, stomach, and legs, Rick continued to smoke a coke pipe, and after each hit, Alley said, he placed the hot pipe on her legs or stomach, leaving small circular burns. She said Rick then ordered Tanya to use a Bic cigarette lighter to heat up a butcher knife, and ran the knife along Alley’s legs, knees, abdomen, and stomach, causing about twenty severe burns.
Alley testified that although Rick “burned [her] right there in [her] abdomen right above the pubic line,” he didn’t burn her vagina. She added, however, that “he told me I better hurry up and tell him the truth or I was not going to use my vagina again.”
While Rick was torturing her, Tanya stroked and held her hand. Later, Alley said, Rick forced her to have oral sex with Tanya while Rick also had sex with Tanya. “It was like a ‘Super Freak’ sandwich with Tanya in the middle,” Alley said, a reference to the line in “Super Freak” in which Rick sang, “Three’s not a crowd to her.”
Alley also said that after the three-way sex, Tanya urinated on her, greatly irritating her burns. A person involved in the case who asked not to be identified said this was meant to be a “golden shower,” that is, a means of sexual gratification through urination for either Rick or Tanya or both. It also could have been merely a way to humiliate Alley.
On the witness stand, Alley raised the legs of her pants to show the judge her partly healed scars. Prosecutors displayed photos of her that were taken at the hospital that showed large burns over much of her lower body. Alley told the court that while she was being tortured, she was thinking, “What have I done to deserve to die this way?” She also said she was hoping her family would be able to find her body.
Alley said Rick’s torture was intended to teach her a lesson: that she was not to steal from him again, especially in his own house. After torturing her for forty-five minutes, however, he finally untied her, saying no one could have endured that much torture and still lie about not stealing his cocaine.
Rick and Tanya scoffed and laughed as Alley testified, likely because, as Alley told the court, after the torture was over the three of them took more cocaine and “partied into the next day.” She didn’t seek medical treatment until she noticed the burns on her legs and abdomen were blistering and swelling. After getting help at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A., where hospital workers—not Alley—notified the police, she then returned to Rick’s house twice over the next four days. “I was afraid to go back and afraid not to go back,” she said.
Tanya’s attorney, Leonard Levine, pointed out that Alley had told the L.A. police she had returned to Rick’s house because she needed somewhere to stay. Levine noted that this was not how someone who had allegedly escaped from a hellhole of drugs, sexual assault, and violence usually acted. He called Alley a drug addict who was seeking publicity and money via a civil suit against Rick.
He buttressed his argument with the fact that one day after the end of the preliminary hearing on the criminal case against Rick and Tanya, Alley filed a $15 million lawsuit against Rick for emotional and physical damage. That suit, however, was eventually dismissed because Alley drifted away and failed to keep in touch with another of her attorneys, Joseph Shemaria. A second suit was filed in Alley’s name in July 1992, but Alley said she did not know it had been filed. It was apparently never adjudicated.
One of Rick’s attorneys, Robert Sheahen, says Alley’s behavior was due to what he called a “celebrity Velcro” complex. “She had no life at all,” he said. “She’d rather go back to being burned with Rick James’s crack pipe than go back to nothing.” Rick apologized to Alley when she came back, blamed his behavior on cocaine, and gave her a check for $320.
Rick’s brother LeRoi Johnson says he didn’t believe any of Alley’s allegations against Rick and said they need to be understood in the context of a typical rich crackhead’s environment. When you’re as rich as Rick, Johnson says, “all you have to do is keep ordering, keep ordering, keep ordering” instead of having to sober up and go outside. With this environment in mind, Johnson says he believed Alley and another of Rick’s later alleged victims had burned themselves. “They were so high they were burning each other as they passed the pipe around, trying to catch little fragments of ash coming out of the pipe and burning each other in the process,” Johnson says.
On August 2, 1991, L.A. Police officers arrested Rick, then forty-three, and Tanya, twenty-one, at Rick’s home. Rick and Tanya were charged with assault with a deadly weapon, torture, aggravated mayhem, false imprisonment, and forcible oral copulation. Rick was also charged with making terrorist threats and furnishing cocaine. They denied everything.
The charges shocked the general public and certainly alarmed Rick, who saw himself facing a potential life sentence. He called Eddie Murphy on Murphy’s private telephone line to ask him for help, but Murphy wouldn’t even take the call.
The charges were less shocking, however, to those who had listened closely to Rick’s music. As one writer said, much of it broadcast “a streetwise sexual bravura,” mixing drugs, sex, and violence. Very aware of this, Rick hemmed and hawed when asked how the accusations would affect his career. “I don’t know. I’ve always been seen as a bad boy,” he told USA Today. But as the Los Angeles Times noted later, the crimes Rick was accused of “outdid the debauchery of his songs.”
In addition to revealing lurid details about sex and drug use among rich crackheads, the first stage of the trial became a debate about Rick’s actual wealth. Rick was held on $1 million bail (and Tanya on $500,000), and when Sheahen protested, the judge said he thought $1 million was low for someone that rich. Sheahen then told the judge that Rick’s house couldn’t be used as a basis for bail, because Rick didn’t own it and was renting it for $6,000 a month (a tremendous amount at the time, and not a small amount these days). He went on to say Rick actually had very little money because he was a big spender who lived off his advances.
At least one person thought Rick was rich enough to be worth stealing from, however. Jeffrey Matusak, thirty, who had been hired to help move Rick’s furniture and possessions out of his rented house while Rick was in jail, was charged with stealing $25,000 worth of jewels and Rolex watches from the singer. He was jailed and, later that fall after pleading guilty to grand theft, sentenced to nine months imprisonment.
Rick, who was held in jail throughout the long bail dispute, hated being there, and couldn’t help showing it. At one point, after Myron L. Jenkins, a deputy district attorney, had unsuccessfully sought to have Rick and Tanya held without bail, Rick glared at him as he walked out of the courtroom and told him, meaningfully and audibly, “Take care, Myron.” After several hearings, however, Sheahen managed to convince the judge to lower Rick’s bail from $1 million to $500,000, and Tanya’s from $500,000 to $200,000, allowing the couple their freedom after weeks in the slammer.
That was the good news. The bad news was that the judge, while noting the inconsistencies in Alley’s testimony, said that testimony from Rick’s maid, Dinorah Zumbado, that she saw Tanya crying and observed a knife being heated convinced him a trial was necessary. An arraignment was scheduled for September 25 for Rick and Tanya.
After his release, Rick was contrite enough to admit to an interviewer, “I am an addict,” and he called the three weeks he had served in jail “OK” because they “gave me three weeks of sobriety.” Johnson said later that he had resisted the idea of raising bail for his brother until Rick had been in jail long enough to break his habit. Rick may have been drug-free for those weeks, but once out, he soon reverted to form. As he later said of addiction, “It always calls you, it always beckons you, it’s always at your ear.”
Four days before the scheduled arraignment, on September 21, 1991, Rick’s mother, the major motivating force in his life, died of stomach cancer at age seventy-three. The arraignment was postponed until Rick’s return from the funeral.
Rick’s mother had been his best friend. “I loved her more than anything,” he told reporters, and he kept a framed photograph of her next to his bed. He said he was particularly devastated by her death because he felt he should have spent more time with her and tried to understand “more about what she was going through raising all those kids and being a black woman alone.” He told one interviewer her passing “was a stunning, terrible, terrible experience. . . . My mother’s gone, man, that’s the only thing that meant something to me. That’s what kept me surviving, that’s what kept me strong, that’s what kept me in the business, to show her, prove to her . . .”
On her deathbed, Rick’s mother had asked him to stop taking drugs. He was honest enough this time not to pledge reform. “It’s hard beating addiction, but I’m going to do my best,” he said.
While on release, on May 8, 1992, Rick joined Young M.C., Tone Loc, the Beach Boys, and Gerardo for a videotaped recording session of the song “City of Fallen Angels.” Considering Rick had recently been charged with assault, the song was oddly appropriate. It was dedicated to Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who had been pulled from his truck and beaten during the recent Los Angeles riots.
Soon after that recording session, on May 24, 1992, Tanya gave birth to Rick’s third child, a boy, Tazman James Johnson, also known as Taz. Rick’s friend Peter Kelly said Tazman’s name was inspired by Rick’s interest in and occasional practice of rituals linked with devil worship. (The name Tazman is a reference to the Tasmanian devil, a small but aggressive animal that lives in the Australian state of Tasmania, and the aboriginal myths that have clustered around that animal.) Kelly remembers seeing a drawing of a star within a circle hanging on the wall over Rick’s bed around the time Tazman was born, and indeed, a downward pointing pentacle, which could be described as a star in a circle, is a symbol of Satanism. Various rock stars have proclaimed themselves Satanists over the years, but Rick never did, and there’s no indication that either Rick or Tanya were ever serious Satanists. But Rick, like many who feel themselves lost, flirted with various religions over the decades. “I had revolted against my Catholic upbringing since my youth and had turned to other religions and the occult in my search for some meaning in life,” he wrote in The Confessions of Rick James.
Soon after Tazman’s birth, Rick, Tanya, and Tazman moved in with Tanya’s mother, Susanne Shapiro, in the L.A. suburb of Agoura Hills. The baby would stay with Tanya’s mother for years because the state would take Rick and Tanya away from him.