Accomplished artists cannot be equated to people simply because they happen to be people.
—Pola Negri
That the case pivoted on Rick’s drug use became even clearer when a woman named Michelle Allen, called to the stand by the prosecution, testified that in December 1991 she had delivered 2.2 pounds of cocaine to him. She said she was to be paid $16,000, and while she, Rick, and Tanya waited for his bodyguards to fetch the purchase money, they smoked cocaine and had sex throughout the night and early morning.
But when she finally asked where the money was, she said, Rick became belligerent and abusive, and grabbed her and threw her to the ground, causing her to land on her right wrist and break her arm. “He said I should just be glad that I’m partying with Rick James,” Allen said.
Allen had been brought to court from prison, where she was serving a seven-year term on theft charges. Werksman described her to the jury as a “15-time-loser” who was trying to reduce her latest sentence by testifying against Rick. (Allen had used at least fifteen aliases, six dates of birth, and eight Social Security numbers at various times.) She had first been arrested in 1979 and had been convicted of offenses involving theft, burglary, and fraud, in addition to drugs. The Los Angeles Times later called Allen “a self-described ‘Hollywood party girl’ with a rap sheet as long as her legs.”
Allen’s story was semi-believable, except that she insisted for some reason that both Rick and Tanya had confessed to her about the two assaults for which Rick was now being tried. She said Rick had told her on at least three occasions while she, Rick, and Tanya smoked coke that he had sexually assaulted and tortured a woman, presumably Alley, in his Hollywood Hills home, and she quoted Rick as saying, “The bitch deserved it. She had it coming.”
Even more unbelievably, Allen said that after Rick and Tanya were arrested and jailed for allegedly assaulting Sauger, and Allen was arrested separately on theft charges, she and Tanya were placed in the same cell, where Tanya confessed to Allen that she had assaulted both Alley and Sauger.
A source close to the case characterized Allen as a jailhouse informer. Rick’s attorney in the Alley case, Sheahen, said in an interview for this book in 2014 that such informers had come into disrepute in Los Angeles a few years after this trial, because they often would “get hold of” a police report about a case and then say that a defendant had confessed to them what the police report charged them with doing. New cases that relied on such informers were set aside around 1999, Sheahen says.
Allen denied that prosecutors had promised her a sentence reduction for testifying against Rick, claiming her only goal was to stop Rick from hurting other women. “How many women have to be hurt before something gets done here?” she told the trial jury of ten men and two women.
Rick, during his three hours on the stand, denied all the accusations against him. Quietly sobbing, he said his mother’s final illness and her eventual death had contributed to his downward spiral of sex and drugs. He said he smoked cocaine more heavily in 1991 because he had learned of his mother’s cancer. “I didn’t care about living. I wanted to die,” he told an interviewer later. But, he added, he had never fallen so low as to brutalize women.
At one point during his testimony, Rick blamed the standard misinterpretation of the lyrics of his biggest hit for biasing the public against him. Because the title of that hit was “Super Freak,” the public, including members of the jury, thought he actually was the super freak being described, thus biasing them against him. He pointed out that the song was not about him but about a certain sort of women, who were, in fact, exactly the women who were attracted to him as a result of the song: “very kinky girl[s] . . . the type you don’t bring home to mother.”
While testifying on the stand, Rick was dressed relatively conservatively in a tan double-breasted suit with a white shirt buttoned at the collar. He wore his hair slicked back into a ponytail, a conservative style for him, and sported only one gold hoop earring. None of this impressed Flier, the prosecutor, who said outside the courtroom that Rick was a perjurer who fabricated stories. “He has a justification for every fact that goes against him,” Flier said.
Rick denied he’d assaulted Alley, saying that after he’d given her $300 to $400 to buy groceries, she’d returned a day and a half later with dirty bandages wrapped around burns on her legs. She said she’d been injured riding a motorcycle and would treat the wounds herself with medication from a drugstore, Rick said, but he told her that her burns needed more than ointment and suggested she go to the hospital.
Asked about the allegation that he had forced Alley to have sex with Tanya, Rick replied, looking jurors right in the eyes, “I never had to force a woman to do anything.” After the trial, he told reporters, “I abuse drugs, not women.”
While testifying, Rick smiled affectionately at Tazman, then fifteen months old, who was sitting in the courtroom on Tanya’s mother’s lap. Tanya was not present.
Rick did say under cross-examination that Tanya had struck Sauger with a champagne bucket, a comment on the Hollywood lifestyle if ever there was one. Saying Tanya struck Sauger while he himself did not was ungentlemanly, but since Tanya already had pled guilty, many would consider it allowable.
Years later, when asked about Sauger, Rick told the Buffalo News, “I had been in a fight with a girl, yes.” He elaborated on this account somewhat later in an interview with the New York Daily News. “I had been up for two weeks smoking cocaine, and this woman kicked my old lady [Tanya] in the stomach when she was pregnant,” he said of the scene at the center of the 1992 case. Tanya was carrying what would have been her second child with Rick, and later miscarried. “So I punched her [Sauger] in the fucking eye,” Rick told the Daily News, “and yeah, I jumped on her.” Tanya refused several requests for an interview for this book.