logo
Former assistant describes putting on gloves to clean up Diddy's freak offs - as $6k bill for hotel damage revealed

Former assistant describes putting on gloves to clean up Diddy's freak offs - as $6k bill for hotel damage revealed

Yahoo4 hours ago

The former assistant for Sean 'Diddy' Combs described how he set up and cleaned up hotel rooms after 'freak offs.'
Brendan Paul, who worked as the rapper's assistant for 18 months until he was arrested in March 2024 for cocaine possession, testified about his role preparing and tidying up hotel rooms after his boss and his then-girlfriend had 'freak offs.' Clad in a blue suit, the former Syracuse basketball player spoke quickly and confidently while on the stand Friday morning.
Paul, who worked 100-hour weeks for the mogul, recalled 'advancing' locations for his boss's hotel stays. This included setting up hotel rooms, bringing baby oil, lubricant, condoms, candles and liquor, as well as calling room service to bring up extra towels, sheets, and water, he testified.
Although Paul said he didn't know what the 'wild king nights' — another term for 'freak offs' — entailed, he understood they involved sex and partying.
When cleaning up, Paul recalled putting on gloves 'for sanity reasons' while placing towels and sheets 'in a nice pile.' He noted the rooms were often 'in disarray.' He said he understood he was tasked with tidying up the rooms after 'wild king nights' to 'avoid getting damage charges.' He then left cash tips for hotel staff.
Later in the day, however, the jury learned that Diddy was charged hundreds, and sometimes thousands, for damages to hotel rooms. Records revealed that the mogul was charged $6,000 for 'losses and damages' during his stay at the St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort in Miami in December 2021.
The mogul faces five federal charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution. He's pleaded not guilty. The former assistant's duties were one of several shocking revelations during Friday's testimony.
Paul recalled working three days straight without sleeping while the mogul worked on releasing his 2023 album 'The Love Album: Off the Grid.'
Diddy told his team to 'move like SEAL Team Six,' which Paul took to mean 'be militant' and 'get things done without him asking,' he testified.
Asked about how he feels about Diddy today, Paul replied: 'It's complicated.'
The mogul shot a 'thumbs up' at his defense attorney Brian Steel after he cross-examined Paul.
The government expects to rest its case as soon as Monday.
If that's the case, the defense said it could rest its case on Tuesday or Wednesday, meaning the jury could have the case as early as next week.
At The London West Hollywood in January 2023, records revealed a $3,750 charge for damaged furniture. A damage report read in court Friday stated that hotel staff noticed 'bodily fluids stained on the wood floor' as well as 'used linens in various sections of the room.'
Months later in April at the same hotel, a damage report revealed a $1,800 charge for towels that 'appear to have been soaked in baby oil' and signs of smoking in the room.
While on the stand, Paul clarified he was 'absolutely not' a drug mule. Brian Steel, one of Diddy's defense attorneys, asked if drugs were just a 'minor part' of what he did for his boss; Paul agreed.
The witness also clarified that when he was arrested, he had Diddy's cocaine. 'I was sweeping his room earlier that morning' when he grabbed the drugs and put them in his bag and 'I forgot to put it elsewhere," he said on the stand.
He had 0.7 grams of cocaine on him at the time of his arrest, he testified. Paul didn't tell police at the time that they weren't his drugs out of 'loyalty' to his boss, he told the court.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Four hospitalized after shooting at Compton park
Four hospitalized after shooting at Compton park

CBS News

time16 minutes ago

  • CBS News

Four hospitalized after shooting at Compton park

Four people were hospitalized following a shooting at a park in Compton on Saturday. It happened a little before 5:30 p.m. in the 1300 block of W. El Segundo Boulevard near Compton Avenue, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Upon arrival, deputies found two people suffering from gunshot wounds to their upper bodies. They were both taken to a nearby hospital in stable condition. Two other victims self-transported to the hospital and are also said to be stable, according to deputies. There was no information provided on a suspect or motive in the incident.

Tony Talk: Our extremely early 2026 awards predictions for ‘Ragtime,' ‘Waiting for Godot,' Kristin Chenoweth, and all the buzzy new shows
Tony Talk: Our extremely early 2026 awards predictions for ‘Ragtime,' ‘Waiting for Godot,' Kristin Chenoweth, and all the buzzy new shows

Yahoo

time27 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Tony Talk: Our extremely early 2026 awards predictions for ‘Ragtime,' ‘Waiting for Godot,' Kristin Chenoweth, and all the buzzy new shows

Welcome to Tony Talk, a column in which Gold Derby contributors Sam Eckmann and David Buchanan offer Tony Awards analysis. Two weeks after the 2025 Tonys, we discuss the upcoming Broadway season and forecast likely 2026 Tony contenders. David Buchanan: Last June, you and I offered our earliest predictions for what could contend and even win at the Tonys a whole 12 months in the future! Looking back at our extremely early 2025 predictions, we hit some nails on the head, including the Best Musical Revival and Best Actress in a Musical showdowns between Gypsy and Sunset Boulevard and stars Audra McDonald and Nicole Scherzinger, respectively. For the 2025-26 Broadway season — which has already kicked off with Jean Smart in the solo play Call Me Izzy — it looks like the revivals are once again front and center. We have remountings of musicals Ragtime, Chess, and The Rocky Horror Show forthcoming, as well as plays Art, Waiting for Godot, and Fallen Angels, among others. Do you think we have any potential winners in those lists? More from GoldDerby 'Rosemead,' starring Lucy Liu, takes top prize at Bentonville Film Festival 'The Last of Us': How the 'Lord of the Rings' VFX team (and marshmallows) made the Battle of Jackson 'Batman Forever' and 'Batman Begins' share an anniversary week - and a surprising Oscar connection Sam Eckmann: To your list of musical revivals, I would add Cats: The Jellicle Ball. This reimagining of the classic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical ditches the feline body suits and sets the story in the world of ballroom. The show was a sold-out hit off-Broadway and though a Broadway run isn't official, a cheeky new social media account for the show has been teasing a transfer for months. Should it transfer, it will be an immediate frontrunner in the Best Musical Revival category. That said, Ragtime, Chess, and The Rocky Horror Show (which will be directed by newly minted Tony winner Sam Pinkleton) are rarely seen but beloved musicals. So this category promises to be an epic showdown yet again! The race for Best Musical is harder to predict since so many new tuners have yet to officially announce their runs. But we do know that director Michael Arden (now a two-time Tony winner thanks to Parade and Maybe Happy Ending) will helm a pair of new musicals: The Queen of Versailles, starring Kristin Chenoweth, and a stage adaptation of The Lost Boys. Do you think Arden could add a third trophy to his mantle next year? Steve Eichner/Variety via Getty Images Buchanan: Next year, either Pinkleton or Arden could join the list of only eight directors in the history of the Tonys to win back-to-back trophies, like Danya Taymor tried to do this year with John Proctor Is the Villain, so that should make for a very exciting race! With his two Tony-winning projects plus Once on This Island and Deaf West's Spring Awakening, I know never to underestimate Arden. Queen of Versailles is a huge creative swing, and though I didn't see the Boston try-out, word of mouth suggests it needs some judicious tightening of its runtime and of its tone. Based on critics' reviews, it sounds like the show may be more of an awards contender for Chenoweth and composer Stephen Schwartz than for directing, despite the humongous scope and set of the musical, which centers on real-life billionaire Jackie Siegel and her dream to construct the largest private residence in America. The Lost Boys is the bigger question mark in my mind. Vampire musicals have an infamous track record on Broadway — Dance of the Vampires, Elton John's Lestat, to name just two — but the song officially released by the Rescues, who composed the score, is strong, as is Arden's creative team, so this could be a contender, sight unseen. But before we pivot to the play categories, let's stick with Chenoweth and dive into Best Actress in a Musical. Folks have called her performance as Siegel the best of her career, but she'll be potentially contending against Caissie Levy in Ragtime as Mother, a two-time Tony-nominated role for Marin Mazzie and Christiane Noll, plus Lea Michele in Chess as Florence, a Tony-nominated role for Judy Kuhn. Do you think we'll have as cutthroat a Best Actress race in 2026 as we did this year? SEE Tony Talk: Dissecting those shocking wins for 'Purpose,' Nicole Scherzinger, Darren Criss, and full show analysis Eckmann: You've already highlighted three formidable contenders who could make the lead actress race just as competitive as this year's. While we don't have a full picture of all the eligible contenders yet, it's hard to imagine a lineup without any of these women. That would mean that Levy and Michele score the first Tony nominations of their career. I believe Levy came close to a nomination with Hair and Frozen, and she is the type of Broadway mainstay that voters are eager to reward once the right part comes along. Michele is still riding high on a renewed sense of goodwill after rescuing the recent revival of Funny Girl, and the score to Chess is perfectly suited to her high belting capabilities. Speaking of Chess, Michele's costars should also find themselves hotly competitive. Most Broadway fans are already familiar with Tony winner Aaron Tveit, but I suspect the über-talented Nicholas Christopher to finally cement himself as a Broadway superstar with this revival. If you're a theater nerd whose never heard him sing before, prepare yourself for your new obsession. While there are far too many question marks with the musicals at this early stage — I desperately need to know who Pinkleton is going to cast as Frank 'N' Furter in Rocky Horror — we know much more about the plays since the fall is front-loaded with them. I attended Call Me Izzy, the first production of the 2025-26 season, the day before this year's Tony Awards. While the script itself may not be remembered a full year from now in the Best Play race, star Jean Smart is at the height of her powers, delivering a solo performance so devastating that voters will surely be able to remember it next spring. Other contenders for lead actress in a play will surely include whichever mystery actress is cast in Second Stage's revival of Marjorie Prime, which won accolades for star Lois Smith in the off-Broadway run — though at 94, I'm not expecting her to sign up for the Broadway staging. An audition notice has also spoiled that the play Little Bear Ridge is also aiming for Broadway this season. Laurie Metcalf starred in this Samuel D. Hunter play at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. This could be Hunter's first play to transfer to Broadway, and Metcalf is a seemingly guaranteed Tony nominee should she reprise her role. Hunter's The Whale earned Shuler Hensley a Lucille Lortel Award, and the film adaptation scored an Oscar for Brendan Fraser. Perhaps he's written Metcalf a role worthy of Tony No. 3. What plays are you looking forward to next season? SEE 'Every beat is meticulously crafted': An oral history of the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning play 'Purpose' Buchanan: It would be so wonderful to have Metcalf back on Broadway after her Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shuttered prematurely due to COVID in March 2020. Yes, there are a lot of very exciting plays already announced for the season, from Marjorie Prime to fellow Pulitzer finalist Becky Shaw and Tony winner David Lindsay-Abaire's upper-crust satire The Balusters. I'm particularly interested in the U.K. transfers of Oedipus starring the absolutely fabulous Mark Strong and Lesley Manville in a modern, election night retelling of the classic Greek tragedy, as well as the true-story, chilling Punch. The announcement of Pulitzer winner Stephen Adly Guirgis's stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon caught me by surprise but seems like a brilliant work to adapt to the stage, especially with its two The Bear stars Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal. Speaking of those performers, the Best Actor in a Play race already sounds competitive. We'll soon see Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot, and I'll be especially curious to know what director Jamie Lloyd does with the play. He's been in a musical mode lately with this year's Tony winner Sunset Boulevard and now the London revival of Evita with Rachel Zegler, but I have been most taken with his staging of plays including Betrayal in 2019, and it'll be interesting to see how his minimalism matches this classic drama. Yasmina Reza's ART brings a trio of Tony-winning heavyweights back to Broadway with Bobby Cannavale, Neil Patrick Harris, and James Corden. Sight unseen, I'm already rooting for Strong to take home his first Tony, but I'm excited for surprises this Broadway season, too! SIGN UP for Gold Derby's free newsletter with latest predictions Best of GoldDerby 'Maybe Happy Ending' star Darren Criss on his Tony nomination for playing a robot: 'Getting to do this is the true win' Who Needs a Tony to Reach EGOT? Sadie Sink on her character's 'emotional rage' in 'John Proctor Is the Villain' and her reaction to 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow' Click here to read the full article.

‘The Last of Us': How the ‘Lord of the Rings' VFX team (and marshmallows) made the Battle of Jackson
‘The Last of Us': How the ‘Lord of the Rings' VFX team (and marshmallows) made the Battle of Jackson

Yahoo

time27 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

‘The Last of Us': How the ‘Lord of the Rings' VFX team (and marshmallows) made the Battle of Jackson

The Last of Us ended its first season on a high note. The finale, written by series cocreators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, had the second-highest ratings among the first batch of episodes and proved that the cast and crew had done what was thought to be impossible. They had successfully (and faithfully) adapted a video game. More from GoldDerby 'Rosemead,' starring Lucy Liu, takes top prize at Bentonville Film Festival Tony Talk: Our extremely early 2026 awards predictions for 'Ragtime,' 'Waiting for Godot,' Kristin Chenoweth, and all the buzzy new shows 'Batman Forever' and 'Batman Begins' share an anniversary week - and a surprising Oscar connection Heading into Season 2, the Emmy-winning team behind the show, including the series' visual effect supervisor, Alex Wang, felt that they had proven their concept and were ready for something bigger. And on a show about surviving in a fungi-infested apocalypse, that means one thing. More infected. The VFX team had one big swarm under their belts — the infected's chaotic attack on a neighborhood cul-de-sac in Episode 5, "Endure and Survive." And for Season 2, there was only one direction in which to take things. "In the cul-de-sac, that was kind of the first glimpse of a horde of infected attacking, so we could get a sense of what we were capable of," Wang tells Gold Derby. "And Craig wanted to be bigger, and he wanted to really extend out in terms of scope for Season 2." What Mazin had in mind was something big and loud for the second episode, "Through the Valley," to counterbalance the gruesomely intimate drama playing out between Pedro Pascal's Joel and Kaitlyn Dever's Abby up at lodge. The solution Mazin came up with was a battle, embellishing a skirmish present in the game into something epic. And, to the eyes of Wang, epicly difficult. "When all the department heads read the script for Episode 2, we were gobsmacked," he recalls. "How were we going to pull this off? I mean, we were all like, 'No, this is, this is impossible. Guys, like, what? What are we doing here?'" But, as anyone who watched "Through the Valley" (and has the trauma to prove it) can attest, The Last of Us did indeed pull it off. And Gold Derby spoke with the team involved to find out just how they managed to do it. So why exactly did Wang's eyeballs nearly fall out of his head when he read the script for Episode 2? The goal of most visual effects shots is for the work to disappear and for the image that's being created to come to life. A battle sequence, especially one with hundreds of CGI characters, provides visual effects artists hundreds of opportunities to break the illusion. "Digital humans in this day and age are still difficult, especially when you're putting up a digital creature right next to a real person, because the question is not just, 'Does it look photoreal?'" Wang says. "Clearly we try to achieve that — and I hope we did — but also their movement. Performance is almost more important than how they look." And while the scripts alone were ambitious, Mazin's visual reference for the Battle of Jackson wasn't going to make the sequence any easier. "Craig definitely wanted his Two Towers," Wang says. If the visual effects team from The Last of Us was going to be able to evoke Helm's Deep for the proposed Battle of Jackson, Wang knew that there was one company better equipped than any other to take on the challenge: Weta FX. Director Peter Jackson founded the company, alongside Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk, and for The Lord of the Rings, the company pioneered technology that brought realistic, massive computer-generated simulated armies to the big screen for the first time, winning multiple Oscars along the way. Weta FX had done some work on Season 1 of The Last of Us, but the Battle of Jackson was going to test even the company's very experienced artists. Weta FX's Dennis Yoo, the animation supervisor on The Last of Us, originally moved to New Zealand, where he now lives, to work on The Return of the King. And he was able to explain how the old elves-versus-orcs tricks weren't going to work on the Battle of Jackson's recently thawed horde. The crowds running down the Wyoming mountainside couldn't be uniform like an army. They couldn't be all the same age. They couldn't wear the same clothes. And perhaps most importantly, they wouldn't move with military precision. "They're falling over each other," Yoo says. "They're tripping. They're pushing each other, and then there's this grander scale where it's almost like watching a huge mass of people reacting to different things." But even if the army of infected is moving right, they've got to look right too. Nick Epstein, the visual effects supervisor at Weta FX, and his team created a system to populate the digital throng with unique infected, based on scans of 30 stunt people in full prosthetics. Off of those bases, the team could add detail through a mix and match system that assigned specific hairstyles, wardrobe, and level of cordycep growth to each individual, resulting in a diverse mass. There's a major upside to staging a set piece like the Battle of Winterfell in the blackest of nights: It's harder to see detail. That wouldn't be the case with the Battle of Jackson, which would take place in daylight, albeit with some cover provided by a winter storm. "One of the only saving graces was that it was in the middle of a storm," Epstein says. "You'd have some visibility fall off at a certain point. But that doesn't help you with everything that's super close to camera. There's nowhere to hide at all. Blazing sunshine was definitely the worst." One of the first lines of defense for the people of Jackson, led by Gabriel Luna's Tommy Miller, are barrels of gasoline, which are shot and then lit aflame, sending the infected up with them. "Craig wanted performance changes, right?" Wang says. "The infected had to react to the fire, so here's a whole other type of mocap and animation from the animators that they had to consider." As the dead became deader and the corpses of the infected piled up outside the gates of Jackson, the visual effects team needs to account for what happens to those mounds, which are more logically complicated than you might imagine, or as Epstein describes them, his "biggest nightmare." Each pile of bodies wasn't one digital mass, but a collection of models, subject to ragdoll physics, which would fall on top of each other and then require their own simulated cloth to keep their clothing realistically moving. Multiply that 500 corpses, and it becomes easier to understand Epstein's struggle. For Tommy's 1-v-1 showdown with a bloater, Wang led his department on a journey to find the right visual reference for what it looks like when a massive mutated cordycep walks straight into a flamethrower. "We spent months doing research and trying physical burning of different materials, just to see what bubbling characteristics we wanted to include," Wang says. The team incinerated marshmallows and found macro photography YouTube videos of burning plastic, but ultimately found their favorite material in the produce section. "Tomato is actually one of the best things, because the skin would start to ripple and bubble and break apart," Wang says. "Then inside, there's all this juicy goodness that we wanted to match to. And it's basically what the skin of it represents, the skin of the bloater, because it had a hard shell, almost like armor." To a person, every visual effects artist who spoke with Gold Derby about the making of the Battle of Jackson agreed that it was the biggest challenge of their career. And each one of them reflected on the chaos they were able to render with genuine pride. "It was daunting to read the script," Wang says. "But everyone just wanted to give the script what it was calling for every single step." "This was just gnarly in terms of asset development, gnarly in terms of weather control, gnarly in terms of integration of our computer graphics with the plate," Epstein says. "It was really hard, really challenging, but also really rewarding, too." Best of GoldDerby Everything to know about 'The Pitt' Season 2 Adam Brody, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and the best of our Emmy Comedy Actor interviews Kristen Bell, Tina Fey, Bridget Everett, and the best of our Emmy Comedy Actress interviews Click here to read the full article.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store