Tera Patrick - Sinner Takes All

“You know what? You’re just like everybody else!” she’d scream at me.

“I’m your fiance. I love you. I’m trying to help you,” I would try to explain.

“Yeah, well you probably just want to see what you can get out if it.” She was relentless.

These episodes started getting more and more severe, and each one would last longer than the previous one. She’d turn that anger toward me and start screaming about how she hated me. She’d threaten to leave me, but then she’d snap out of it and have these moments of clarity and apologize. She was under extreme emotional stress, and I felt helpless.

When she got really worked up, she’d start throwing things at me. One day, she picked up a twelve-pound glass candle holder and clocked me in the head with it. It knocked me loopy.

“What the fuck is the matter with you?” I yelled. I don’t think she knew why she did what she did at this time.

She continued her assault, throwing more candle holders, my bass guitar, mirrors, whatever she could get her hands on, including a blackjack—a piece of lead wrapped in leather that I kept in the apartment for protection. She grabbed the blackjack and threw it at me. But she missed and hit a piece of Plexiglas that shattered all over the apartment. When she saw that she missed, she came at me swinging and clawing.

“Fine! I’ll just kill myself,” she said as she lunged at me and pulled me with her as she hurled herself down the stairs in the loft. We fell head over heels and hit the ground really hard. She was out to hurt herself, and she was taking me down with her. After we recovered from the fall, her rage continued.

With tears rolling down her face, she threatened, “I’m going to call the cops!”

“But you’re attacking me!” I tried to reason with her.

“They’ll never believe that, because I’m the girl,” she replied.

“And then they’ll arrest me and you’ll be all alone in this insanity. At least I’m here trying to help you!” I said as I tried to hold on to her so she would calm down.

“GET OFF ME!!!”

That was when I realized her problems were more than I was able to handle. I called our family therapist, Nelson Lugo, for some advice. Nelson is this wonderful Puerto Rican psychiatrist who I used when Sammy was having a hard time with my divorce from his mother. Nelson told me that I had to be careful Tera didn’t hurt herself or others because there was no way to reason with a person suffering like this. I would call Nelson regularly during this time and talk to him about Tera’s recurring episodes, and he said it sounded like she was having a nervous breakdown. I agreed.

When she did come out of these episodes and have a moment of clarity, she’d feel horrible and be hyper-apologetic. She’d apologize and say, “I’m sorry! I don’t know why I did that.” She’d write me little “I’m sorry” cards and dote on me for a while. She didn’t know what she was doing. Some nights she would go to bed mad as hell at me and then wake up all lovey-dovey, make me breakfast, and give me another huge apology note or flowers. I have tons of her apology notes. They’d often say “I’m sorry. I don’t know why you stay with me. I’m a crazy bitch. I’m going through a lot of shit right now. I don’t know what’s happening with me.”

When Biohazard was on tour in the UK in the fall of 2002, Tera came out on the road with me. One night in a London hotel, we were having sex and everything was great, and then that switch went off and she started getting angry with me and physically attacking me. She was really jealous at the time so I think the fight was out of some sort of jealous rage. She scratched me so hard that she drew blood on my face and my chest. She flung herself on me and was scratching and clawing at me. I never laid a hand on her. I just tried to calm her down, but her screams alerted hotel security and they called the police. The cops came and found Tera and me naked and scratched up. It looked bad. Then something clicked in her and she snapped out of it. She told the police, “Everything is OK. We were just having rough sex.” The cops looked at me and saw the blood and scratches and asked, “Sir, do you want us to take her away?” Of course I told them no, and after that Tera apologized.

The last three weeks before her big incident, from the time we were in London until the meltdown that landed her in the hospital, I was like Edward Norton in Fight Club. I always had a new scar, bruise, or black eye.

All of this was just the precursor to the meltdown of all meltdowns—the day she finally snapped and had to be institutionalized. This is where Tera’s a little fuzzy on the details. But here is how I remember it going down that night in the loft. Something set Tera off again. Maybe it was the phone call with the attorney like she remembers. But what she doesn’t remember is that she took that anger and frustration out on me again and started swinging at me and scratching me. We were at the top of the stairs and she’s attacking me and I’m trying to hold her back and we ended up falling down the stairs together… again. But this trip down the stairs was more serious. She was trying to kill herself. I just thought it was another freak-out, but it was way worse than that.

After our fall, she started throwing anything she could get her hands on. I was eventually able to get both of her hands behind her back and there was some duct tape lying around nearby (we used duct tape to tie each other up sometimes when we had sex, and duct tape is like the Swiss Army knife for musicians; we use it for everything). So I wrapped duct tape around her hands and threw her in the backseat of the Suburban and took her to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan.

We got to the emergency room at the hospital, and Tera was still kicking and screaming. “I’m not the crazy one! It’s him. He’s the crazy one. Look, he tied me up,” she told the nurses and cops. There are always cops in emergency rooms, and this night was no exception. When they saw Tera’s hysterical state, the cops naturally looked at me as the bad guy and sat me down in a chair to question me.

“Guys, just go talk to her for five minutes and you’ll understand completely who the crazy one is here,” I told them.

They didn’t know who to believe. To them, it must have looked like a scene from Natural Born Killers, like Mickey and Mallory, you know? Here’s this big, bald, tattooed guy with scratches on his face, bleeding, with the prettiest Asian girl they’ve ever seen, duct taped to herself, screaming bloody murder.

So one of the cops pulled me aside and said, “What are you doing? You can’t duct tape someone against their will. It’s against the law. You should have called 911.”

“It was a judgment call. I thought taking her to the hospital myself would be faster,” I said. “Take the fucking tape off her and see what she does. Go ahead.”

When things finally settled down, I had a chance to explain to them the emotional stress she had been under over her legal battles with Digital and how there had been many episodes leading up to this. I told them that I loved her very much and I would be there for her, but that she needed some serious help and she was a danger to herself. Tera would later admit that she was suicidal that night.

She ended up signing herself into the hospital, and they put her in the psychiatric ward for observation. She finally calmed down and fell asleep in her hospital bed and told me to go home. There was nothing else I could do. She spent two weeks in the psych ward at St. Vincent’s, and things got better after that.

Once the mayhem of being admitted to the psych ward at St. Vincent’s subsided and I realized I did need help, my doctors sat me down and told me that I was suffering a series of symptoms similar to bipolar disorder, though I’ve never officially been diagnosed as bipolar, then or now. When they explained the symptoms to me, I knew instantly it’s what I’ve been suffering from all along. It explained my crazy highs and lows, my wild spending, the way I would act out sexually, and my depression. I remember the doctor asking me a series of questions and one by one I answered yes to them all with a growing pit in the bottom of my stomach. He asked: Do you have sex a lot? Do you shop a lot? Do you overreact? Are you easily agitated? Do you throw things? Can you not control yourself at times? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. It clicked, and I cried about it a lot. I couldn’t believe that I was so psychologically damaged.