The flood of allegations, lawsuits, and legal costs towards Sean “Diddy” Combs started with a 2023 lawsuit by Cassie Ventura, Combs’ former girlfriend and a recording artist for his Unhealthy Boy file label underneath the mononym Cassie. The lawsuit was shortly settled, but it surely set off a sequence of comparable lawsuits and an FBI investigation that led to costs of racketeering, intercourse trafficking, and transportation to have interaction in prostitution towards the music and vogue mogul. Disturbing footage of Combs bodily abusing Ventura on the Intercontinental Los Angeles Century Metropolis in 2016 additionally emerged a yr in the past, sparking a assertion from Ventura urging the general public to consider and help victims of violence. Tuesday, she testified towards Combs in federal courtroom.
Combs’ legal trial started Monday in New York. In her opening assertion, prosecutor Emily A. Johnson cited Ventura’s scenario:
Let’s begin now with only one evening. The defendant was on the hunt for his girlfriend, a lady named Cassie. For years, the defendant bodily abused Cassie. He additionally sexually exploited her, forcing her to have intercourse with male escorts whereas he watched and recorded it. However that evening, the defendant discovered he had misplaced management of Cassie. He discovered Cassie was seeing one other man. Livid, he got down to discover Cassie and that different man. However he couldn’t do it by himself. So he took his gun and he took his bodyguard, one in every of his most loyal lieutenants, to get up one of many defendant’s staff in the midst of the evening.
The defendant yelled that he was going to kill the person Cassie was with. He demanded that his worker take him to that man’s dwelling. The defendant compelled the worker out of her condominium and into an SUV. They drove to the home. The defendant and his bodyguard broke in, however nobody was there. The defendant didn’t hand over. He saved searching for Cassie. When he lastly discovered her, he did what he had completed numerous instances earlier than. He beat her brutally, kicking her within the again and flinging her round like a rag doll.
All of that violence wasn’t sufficient although. The defendant had to ensure he had management over Cassie as soon as once more. So he threatened her. The defendant instructed Cassie that if she defied him once more, he would publicly launch the movies of her having intercourse with male escorts that he saved as blackmail. Souvenirs of probably the most humiliating nights of her life.
After the opening assertion, the prosecution confirmed the resort surveillance video of Combs assaulting Ventura and dropped at the stand Israel Florez, an LA police officer who was a safety guard on the resort in 2016. He testified that after receiving a distressed name, he encountered Combs and Ventura on the sixth flooring of the resort. He stated her eye was purple, and she or he declined his suggestion to name the police.
Prosecutors additionally mentioned the abuse that allegedly passed off at Combs’ drug-fueled intercourse events, generally known as “freak-offs.” Monday’s second witness, a stripper named Daniel Phillip, stated he had intercourse with Ventura a number of instances in 2012 and 2013 whereas Combs watched and that he witnessed a number of situations of Combs bodily attacking her. “She actually jumped into my lap, and she or he was shaking, like actually her entire whole physique was shaking,” Phillip stated of Ventura. “She was terrified.”
At the moment, Ventura took the stand. Because the New York Instances experiences, Ventura testified that Combs “stifled” her singing profession and carefully managed her look, as soon as describing her look as “too Mexican.” He typically would confiscate her digital gadgets, together with her telephone and laptop computer, as a type of punishment, and a number of instances requested her to hold a gun for him throughout doubtlessly violent encounters with figures comparable to trade rival Suge Knight. She stated he made her confer with him as “pop pop” in emails as a result of that’s what she referred to as her grandfather, which made her really feel “bizarre.”
Ventura described feeling “soiled,” “disgusting,” and “humiliated” after the freak-offs, which she continued collaborating in on an ongoing foundation — in places together with New York Metropolis, Miami, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Ibiza, and Turks and Caicos — as a result of “I didn’t wish to make him upset. I didn’t wish to make him indignant and remorse telling me about this expertise that was so private.” Throughout these occasions, Ventura stated Combs was like a special particular person: “His eyes go black — the model of him I used to be in love with was now not there.”
For those who or somebody you realize is present process sexual abuse, please go to rainn.org or contact the Nationwide Sexual Assault Helpline at 1-800-656-4673.