‘Freak-offs’ and parties – now Diddy’s in a cell
Rapper Sean Combs partied with the A-list and met royalty. Prosecutors say he’s also a sex trafficker who coerced women into performing sex acts that he then filmed.
In a desperate bid to try to keep their client out of jail, lawyers for Sean “Diddy” Combs suggested a $US50 million ($72.5m) bail package, secured by his $US48 million Miami mansion and his mother’s home in Florida. He would live under house arrest, they suggested, with no female visitors or access to the internet. He was even trying to sell his private plane to demonstrate he was not a flight risk.
But prosecutors in his sexual abuse case had argued he had already attempted to interfere with witnesses, and the judge said he was concerned the music mogul would obstruct justice by continuing to try to contact alleged victims. So instead of staying in his luxury home on the private celebrity enclave of Star Island in Miami Beach, he was booked into his new temporary home: the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, whose previous inmates include Ghislaine Maxwell, and which has a reputation for being overcrowded and dangerous.
Combs, famous for his lavish, debauched parties, is now bunking down with the crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried, who is appealing against his conviction.
According to The New York Times, the two are in the same unit, with Combs sleeping in a dormitory with other defendants.
The Grammy award-winning rapper and producer, estimated to be worth $US1 billion a few years ago, was arrested this month and charged with racketeering, sex trafficking by force and transportation to engage in prostitution. The lurid allegations mark the start of court proceedings in a saga that began last year with the emergence of startling allegations from a series of women.
For decades, according to prosecutors, Combs “abused, threatened, and coerced women and others around him to fulfil his sexual desires, protect his reputation and conceal his conduct”. To do so he created a criminal enterprise whose members engaged in sex trafficking, forced labour, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice. He could face life in prison. He has pleaded not guilty.
At his “white parties” in the Hamptons and Miami, guests including Leonardo DiCaprio, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Russell Brand had to dress all in white. There has been no suggestion that any of the guests had knowledge of his much darker alleged activities at events he called “freak-offs”.
The indictment says he “manipulated women to participate in highly orchestrated performances of sexual activity with male commercial sex workers”. These sometimes lasted days and involved multiple prostitutes.
“Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during, and often electronically recorded” the events. Victims often required IV fluids to recover.
Combs is accused of giving the women drugs to keep them obedient and compliant; of controlling their careers by threatening to cut off financial support; and using intimidation and violence. The prosecutors say he assaulted women by striking, punching, dragging them by the hair and kicking, and also threw objects at victims. Injuries took days or weeks to heal.
“Combs also used the sensitive, embarrassing, and incriminating recordings that he made during Freak Offs as collateral to ensure the continued obedience and silence of the victims,” the indictment says. There were occasions when it was alleged he carried guns to intimidate and threaten victims and witnesses.
The victims were not named in the indictment but numerous women have accused Combs of abuse. The first was Cassie Ventura, a singer and longtime partner of Combs, who filed a lawsuit last year that claimed she had been subjected to a decade of “abuse, violence and sex trafficking” and was forced to take part in “freak-offs”. Her lawsuit described the way he treated a forced encounter “as a personal art project, adjusting the candles he used for lighting to frame the videos”.
That case was settled the day after it was filed, but surveillance footage emerged that showed him assaulting Ventura at a hotel in Los Angeles in 2016. He said his behaviour then was “inexcusable”. His lawyers have said the trysts with Ventura were consensual, and that there was no “force, fraud or coercion”.
Ten other alleged victims have made allegations. They include Adria English, a former adult film actor who said she was used as a “sexual pawn” during “white parties” and believed her drinks were laced with Ecstasy, and Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, a producer who claimed Combs forced him to hire prostitutes and engage in sex acts and used hidden cameras to film people having sex.
This week Thalia Graves alleged in a new lawsuit that Combs and a bodyguard sexually assaulted her two decades ago and a video of the attack was sold as porn.
In March this year Combs’s homes in LA and Miami were turned upside down in police raids. The indictment discloses that “freak-off” supplies were found during the searches, including drugs and a thousand bottles of baby oil and lubricant.
Combs, 54, has denied many of the claims. After the first slew of suits were filed he said the “sickening” allegations were untrue and made by people seeking a quick payday.
Combs’s mother, Janice, worked three jobs and raised him after his father, Melvin, a drug dealer, was shot dead when he was two years old. “Puff” was a boyhood nickname and he adopted “Puff Daddy” as a rapper, changing to P Diddy, Diddy and recently Brother Love, or just Love.
He helped to launch the careers of hip-hop stars such as the Notorious B.I.G., Mary J Blige and Lil’ Kim. Combs’s empire spanned a record label, TV production, a clothing line and drinks brands. Not inclined to understate his own brilliance, he once said: “Me hearing sounds is like how Messi kicks a ball – it’s a feeling.” Forbes estimated that he earned more in 2017 than any other entertainer.
There were controversies even early in his career. In 2001 he was acquitted of gun possession and bribery charges after an argument that led to gunfire in a New York nightclub he was in with the actor Jennifer Lopez, then his girlfriend. He was found not guilty, and said the trial “humbled him” – a claim that now looks questionable.
His biggest hit, I’ll Be Missing You, which sampled the riff from Every Breath You Take by the Police, was a tribute to his friend the Notorious B.I.G., who was shot dead aged 24. “In my life, man, it feels like I’m a tragic hero,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times last year.
Kim Porter, the mother of three of his seven children, died of pneumonia in 2018 and his first mentor, the record executive Andre Harrell, died two years later. Discussing last year’s release of The Love Album, he said: “I can only make a hit when my heart is broken. It was rough losing the mother of my children and my father figure. They were the stable parts of my life. I may be Diddy, but I’m just a human, and a big baby sometimes.”
In The Sunday Times interview he dropped the names of famous people he had met –“Mandela. Aretha. Kissinger. Messi. Obama. Michael Jackson” – and some astonishing claims. “I met aliens,” he said. “In Florida.” There was a strong smell of marijuana in the hotel suite.
He also claimed that the #MeToo movement “inspired me”. This was said just weeks before Ventura made the first allegations about him.
The model Karrine Steffans wrote a book, Confessions of a Video Vixen, in which she said she’d had relationships with a number of artists, including Combs. She was not a victim, she said in an interview with The Daily Beast this week, but described how she was “gifted” to Combs in 2001 by another music executive. “It’s not just Diddy, and it’s not just music or hip-hop,” she said. The problem is “men who hate women, men who hate who they are”.
The Times
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