Woman Tells Court Rock Singer Tortured Her : Crime: The 24-year-old from Georgia testifies at a hearing that Rick James and his girlfriend burned and sexually abused her after a weeklong cocaine binge.

A weeping 24-year-old Georgia woman testified in San Fernando Municipal Court on Wednesday that rock singer Rick James tortured her, forced her to have sex with his girlfriend and threatened to kill her if she told police.

James, 43, and his girlfriend, Tanya Ann Hijazi, 21, scoffed and laughed from the defendants’ table as the woman said that the Grammy Award-winning musician used a cocaine pipe, a kitchen knife and a cigarette lighter to burn her legs, knees and stomach.

The singer has denied all charges and has sought through his attorneys to portray the woman as a drug addict seeking a civil settlement and publicity.

James and Hijazi, who are charged with aggravated mayhem, assault with a deadly weapon, torture, false imprisonment and forced oral copulation, could be imprisoned for life if convicted on all counts.

James, whose real name is Leroi Curwall Johnson, is sometimes called the King of Funk and is best known for his 1981 hit “Super Freak.”

In the first day of a preliminary hearing in the case, the Georgia woman said the torture and sexual abuse occurred at the singer’s Hollywood Hills home above Studio City on July 16 after she, James, Hijazi and several others had used cocaine almost nonstop for a week.

The woman, who said she had arrived in Los Angeles from Georgia several weeks before the incident, wept several times as she told Judge John C. Gunn that James had abruptly become enraged at her and accused her of stealing his cocaine. James ordered her to undress, then tied her to a chair, she said.

“He said he had to teach me a lesson . . . not to steal from him,” she said.

The woman raised the legs of her pants to show the judge and attorneys partly healed scars from what she said was 45 minutes of torture by burning at the hands of James. Deputy Dist. Atty. Myron L. Jenkins introduced photographs of the woman taken at a hospital showing large burns over much of her lower body.

She also said that James forced her and Hijazi to orally copulate one another. Hijazi, who the woman said was also burned on the back by James at least twice, had stroked the woman’s arm and squeezed her hands during the torture session.

At the close of the torture session, the woman said, the three of them engaged in “mixed-up three-person sex.”

During cross-examination, Anthony P. Brooklier, one of James’ two attorneys, questioned the woman sharply about her admission that, after leaving James’ house, she returned twice over the next four days.

The woman said that James and one of his bodyguards had threatened to kill her if she filed charges with police, who had interviewed her after hospital personnel reported the burn marks to them.

“I was afraid to go back and afraid not to go back” to James’ house, she said. She also acknowledged that she voluntarily had sex with James twice before the torture incident, had been a heavy cocaine user for about four years and had worked in a massage parlor for one week after arriving in Los Angeles.

But the judge halted several attempts by Brooklier to question the woman about her background in Georgia.

The hearing, which is to determine if James and Hijazi should be tried on the charges, continues today. Both defendants are free on bail.