OAKLAND — A Sacramento-area cook was sentenced to four years in state prison after pleading no contest to assault of a woman who later testified that she earned $500,000 for him through prostitution.
Renford Evans, 42, pleaded no contest to assaulting the woman in February 2025, after she allegedly started talking to another man. The woman was arrested nine days after the alleged assault, and identified Evans as a man who’d been pimping her for years, then testified at a preliminary hearing that his restaurant “kingdom” crumbled after she left his life.
“He came to own a food truck. He came to run two kitchens from two nightclubs to cook in,” she said at Evans’ 2025 preliminary hearing. “But once I left all that crumbled … He lost both kitchens. He lost the food truck.”
She also told police he held her to a quota of $1,000 per day, according to court records.
Evans stayed in jail for a year, which will count toward his sentence. He also receives an extra year of time credits for good behavior while in jail, court records show. Evans’ plea deal was finalized last March. The Alameda County District Attorney’s office dropped pimping and human trafficking charges against him in exchange for his plea.
Evans has prior convictions for statutory rape and lewd acts with a minor. Those stem from a 2014 case in Sacramento, where Evans was accused of sexually abusing a teen girl, according to court records and media reports.