And as for what’s next for Rick James and his exciting and diversified career, there’s really no telling. He’s always been a few steps ahead of the trends (when he’s not too busy setting trends himself), and there’s every indication that he will continue to be an explosive and dominant force in pop music . . .
—Motown Press Release, 1985
Considering Rick and Tanya’s denials, along with Alley’s background and her close-to-inexplicable return to the alleged torture house, the case against Rick and Tanya looked weak. But as both sides were preparing for trial, Rick and Tanya were accused of torturing another young woman while they were out on bail.
Their alleged second victim was Mary Elizabeth Sauger, thirty-four, of West Hollywood. A brown-haired white woman who worked as a secretary at a small film company, Sauger had experience in the music business. She said she had known Rick for six years. Rick asked her to meet with him and Tanya on November 2, 1992, at a hotel room at the St. James’s Club and Hotel, later the Sunset Tower Hotel, on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. (Although Rick and Tanya had separated after being arrested in an effort to stay off drugs, they kept rejoining each other at various sites.) Rick told Sauger he wanted to talk to her about working for a record label he wanted to establish and call Mamma Records.
Sauger met with the couple on the eleventh floor of the hotel late one evening. The three of them drank wine and Sauger took one hit of cocaine, she said.
Rick and Tanya then began arguing, Sauger said, so she left and entered an elevator to go to the lobby. Somehow she ended up back on the eleventh floor, however, where Tanya persuaded her to stay. Tanya disappeared for a minute, then returned wearing only panties. After that, according to Sauger, the conversation rolled around to relationships that often develop when performers go on tour, how the wives and girlfriends of performers often are harassed by other musicians, and about Sauger possibly accompanying Rick on a future tour. Tanya suddenly became angry with Sauger and began slapping her repeatedly, Sauger said.
Rick’s version was that “Mary and Tanya started to get in a fight about being on the road. Mary said Tanya was too jealous and would never be able to tolerate the groupies and the sex,” he wrote in The Confessions of Rick James. “The next thing I knew the two of them were in a catfight and Mary was kicking Tanya in the stomach.”
Then Rick got involved. “Tanya had gotten pregnant again,” he said, “so when I saw Mary kick her like that I flipped out and pushed her away from Tanya. [He said Tanya later miscarried their child.] Mary swung at me and I punched her in the eye. We started punching each other and I slugged her good a few times.”
He continued, “Afterwards, Mary looked like a punch drunk prize fighter, her eyes bruised blue and swollen nearly shut and her lip split in three places. . . . There was blood spattered on the walls and carpet.”
Sauger sobbed through most of the two hours on the stand it took her to tell her version of the incident. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I thought that was it.” She also said Rick and Tanya seemed to be “getting their kicks out of beating someone.”
Rick then walked her out of the room they were in, Sauger said, and down the stairs to another room on the eighth floor. She speculated they may have made this move because of complaints by other guests at the hotel about the noise Rick and Tanya were making by beating her. Later, Sauger said, Tanya gave her cab fare home. Assuming Sauger’s testimony was correct, Rick, in true Super Freak style—in which there are no limits on outrageous behavior—had added immensely to his problems by repeating a crime with which he’d already been charged while out on bail awaiting trial on the first charge.
Although Sauger said her left eye was swollen closed and her right eye was nearly so after the alleged beating, Rick said she stayed with him and Tanya for two days after the fight, smoking their crack. When she finally went for treatment at a hospital, doctors notified police. Sauger consulted an attorney, and charges were filed against Rick and Tanya. Prosecutors convinced the judge to allow them to consolidate the allegations from both Alley and Sauger and try Rick and Tanya for both sets of offenses simultaneously.
Just before Rick’s criminal trial began, Sauger filed a civil suit against Rick, Tanya, and the St. James’s Club and Hotel for assault, battery, false imprisonment, and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. She eventually sought a total of $30 million from Rick in both lawsuits.
LeRoi Johnson believes the lawsuits by Alley and Sauger were motivated by greed and by Rick’s wealth. “Robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is,” he says. And, in fact, Sauger testified on the stand that she had wanted the criminal proceedings dropped because all she cared about was her civil litigation against Rick. Rick’s old pal, Deputy District Attorney Myron Jenkins, refused Sauger’s request because of the similar charges by Alley. He also insisted that Sauger testify.
When the police went to arrest Rick and Tanya on the new charges, they found them gone. Having panicked and fled, they were declared fugitives, but surrendered after a few days.
They were then charged with assault on Sauger with deadly weapons (Rick’s fists), causing great bodily injury, false imprisonment, and sale or transportation of cocaine. Rick was also charged with kidnapping. Facing maximum sentences of more than fourteen years on these new charges, they were returned to jail.
Anthony Brooklier, who had replaced Sheahen as Rick’s attorney, told an interviewer he had spoken with hotel security guards about Sauger’s accusation and that “many of the facts [were] disputed.”
Brooklier, who, the Los Angeles Times has noted, cultivated the appearance of a mob consigliere, was the son of Dominic Brooklier, a former Los Angeles Mafia boss. As a boy, one of Anthony Brooklier’s playmates was Aladena “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno, a Mafia hit man who killed at least five people. In 1986 Anthony Brooklier defended Robert “Fat Bobby” Paduano, whom the California state attorney general described as a Mafia associate, and succeeded in winning Paduano’s acquittal on stock-swindling charges. (Brooklier died of an apparent suicide in 2016.)
Before the trial began, however, Tanya decided to call it quits.