Cassie Ventura testifies Sean ‘Diddy' Combs threatened to release sex freakoff videos to ‘ruin' her

Yahoo

14-05-2025

NEW YORK — In the moments Sean 'Diddy' Combs was losing his grip on Casandra 'Cassie' Ventura, he threatened to release humiliating footage of her engaging in dehumanizing sex acts with strangers at his direction, a Manhattan jury heard at the hip-hop mogul's sex trafficking trial Wednesday.
During her second day on the stand in Manhattan federal court, Ventura said Combs made the threat several times when he was angry with her, including when he found out she was dating another man, and said she recalled him saying it would 'embarrass me and put my career in jeopardy.'
'That it could ruin everything that I worked for — would just make me look like a slut,' Ventura said. 'I would be shamed.'
The 'Me & U' singer, 38, said she worried deeply about the repercussions there could be to her career and about how she would explain the videos to her family.
'It's horrible, it's disgusting,' she said. 'No one should do that to anyone.'
Ventura took the stand as the trial's star witness early Tuesday and has described being in a complex, abusive, near decadelong relationship with Combs, 17 years her senior, starting in around 2006, not long after she was signed to Bad Boy Records at 19 years old.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney's office alleges that for two decades, while the music mogul was making millions as one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in hip-hop and entertainment — launching the careers of iconic artists like the Notorious B.I.G., Usher, and Mary J. Blige — Combs was coercing women, including Ventura, to participate in dehumanizing sexual performances with male escorts. The feds say he ran his criminal enterprise with assistance from a network of armed security guards and high-ranking staff, who helped threaten victims into silence and submission.
Ventura said Combs revealed his desire to see her with other men — calling it 'voyeurism' — when she was 22 after she'd fallen in love with him, and that as the years passed, he became excessively violent, beating her brutally and micromanaging every moment of her existence.
The so-called 'freakoff' performances, Ventura has said, sometimes involved Combs and other men urinating on her, Combs' directing her to rub escorts' semen on his body in private, and Combs requesting she engage in sordid sex acts with strangers. She said he was roping her into the dayslong sessions weekly for a period of years, often directing her to find escorts on Craiglist and other websites and to arrange their travel to hotels across the country and Ibiza, Spain.
Ventura, who on Tuesday said she was sexually inexperienced when she first met Combs, said she understood freakoffs to be closely associated with what he explained to her about swingers. She said she felt hollow after the sessions.
'Really empty. I definitely felt just gross,' she said.
The singer, who is testifying while 8 1/2 months pregnant, has said that Combs plied her with drugs like ecstasy, MDMA, ketamine, mushrooms, GHB and cocaine, which she said helped her dissociate. She said she developed an addiction to opiates that she relied on to 'come down' and numb out from the extreme physical exertion involved in the depraved sessions and that she frequently experienced gastrointestinal issues from freakoffs, urinary tract infections, and painful sores on her tongue from relentless drug use and oral sex.
'Sometimes they were back to back,' she said of the sessions. 'And I was doing the freakoff with an infection ... It just was a mess, really painful for a long time.'
The jury has also watched disturbing footage of Combs pummeling Ventura in a hallway at the Intercontinental Hotel in L.A. on March 5, 2016, multiple times and heard Tuesday from Ventura that the savage assault came after a rare instance of her trying to leave a freakoff after Combs punched her, fearing she'd be looking too battered to attend a movie premiere days later.
On Wednesday, jurors saw a selfie she took after leaving the hotel in an Uber, in which she said she had a 'black eye and a fat lip.' She said Combs texted and urged her to return, claiming he would be arrested. She said she wore heavy makeup on her face at the premiere and said her body was covered in bruises. The jury heard from a former hotel worker on the trial's first day, who said Combs tried to bribe him to stay silent about the beating with a brown bag filled with thousands of dollars.
On another occasion, in 2013, which jurors heard about Wednesday, Ventura said Combs threw her into a bed frame after she'd gone out with friends, causing a permanent scar to her eyebrow that one of his security guards brought her to see a plastic surgeon about. Jurors saw pictures of the pair taken soon after in Toronto with Ventura's hair over her injury.
Another year at the Cannes Film Festival, Ventura said Combs threw her off his boat after accusing her of stealing drugs. She wound up getting a commercial flight back to New York, and Combs traded a seat to sit next to her. During the trip, he showed videos he had taken of her in freakoffs, which Ventura thought had been erased, and threatened to release them, ultimately securing her agreement to participate in another freakoff once they returned to the city.
By 2017, jurors heard Wednesday, Ventura was frankly calling out Combs for his abuse, in a January 2017 text chain saying nothing good came of freakoffs. 'He put me down a lot. As much as I was built up, I was put down quite a bit. It's also just the sheer embarrassment,' Ventura said.
Combs, 55, could spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted. He's pleaded not guilty to a five-count indictment, including charges of sex trafficking, racketeering, transporting individuals for prostitution, and related offenses.
The mogul, once known as Puff Daddy, vehemently maintains that all sexual encounters jurors will hear about were consensual and that his 'swingers lifestyle' was not criminal. Combs' lawyers acknowledged from the outset to the jury that he had committed domestic violence but said he wasn't formally accused of such and is innocent of the crimes charged.
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