There’s no problem so awful that you can’t add some guilt to it and make it even worse.
—Calvin and Hobbes
On August 11, 1993, with one-year-old Taz to care for, Tanya pled guilty to assaulting Sauger and accepted a four-year prison term rather than risk a much longer sentence, or even life, in the slammer.
In return, prosecutors dismissed ten other charges against her on the grounds that she also had been a victim of physical abuse—by Rick—in the assault on Alley. (Alley had alleged that Rick had burned Tanya as well.) Sympathetic observers attributed Tanya’s guilty plea to her desire to be out of prison as soon as possible in order to take care of Taz. That certainly was her major motive. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she’d pled guilty to acts she hadn’t committed. Both Alley and Sauger had claimed Tanya had participated in their abuse.
On September 21, 1993, the judge in Rick and Tanya’s assault case, Michael R. Hoff, sentenced Tanya to four years in prison, as expected, and agreed to her request that she not report to prison until she and Rick could be married in court on the day Rick was sentenced.
Love and possible marriage aside, Tanya’s move left Rick alone facing fifteen felony counts.
Her decision to cop a plea looked smart on the first day of his trial, when deputy district attorney Andrew Flier, in his opening statement, called Rick a “sadistic animal” and showed the jury photos of Sauger’s swollen, blackened eyes and Alley’s burned legs and burned lower body. Shortly after charging that Rick “burned [Alley] for no reason whatsoever,” Flier somewhat contradictorily noted that Rick had accused Alley of stealing his narcotics, and for Rick “that is a good enough reason to torture someone.”
In response, one of Rick’s attorneys, Mark Werksman, noted that the prosecution had no eyewitnesses, no fingerprints, no blood samples, and no other scientific evidence. With the physical evidence inconclusive, Werksman said, the case would boil down to “he said v. she said.” Undermining whatever “she” was going to say, Werksman then denounced Alley and Sauger as “parasitic groupies” and said their testimony would be “incredible,” presumably meaning it would be unbelievable.
Werksman also argued that Rick was vulnerable to false claims of brutality just because he was a good guy who frequently opened up his home for wild sex-and-drug orgies. He said the case against Rick was not really a case about torture, mayhem, threats, forced oral sex, or copulation, because those charges were based on lies, but was really “about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” Considering the hundreds of thousands of people for whom these three were one and the same, this was the most trenchant comment issued during the course of the trial.
While he was being denounced in the courtroom, Rick played it cool—perhaps too cool. He often wore his bright red double-breasted coat with the three embroidered golden rings on each cuff, his black shirt and short red tie with black dots, his hoop earrings, and his snakeskin-and-leather red-and-black cowboy boots. He yawned at times and rested his head in his hands. At one point, during Sauger’s later testimony, he dozed off and began snoring audibly. Werksman tried to explain Rick’s behavior by saying his client had bronchitis, and that, along with the pressure of the trial, made it difficult for him to sleep at night. It occurred to many in the courtroom, however, that at what could be seen as the pivotal event of Rick’s life, he was still using crack.