The Truth About Diddy Might Be Darker Than the Rumors

The Atlantic

2 days ago

Over the past year and a half, I've kept finding myself in unexpected conversations about Diddy. Cab drivers, deli cooks, and far-flung uncles have all wanted to chat about the 55-year-old rapper who's now on trial for charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution. There is, certainly, plenty to talk about: Federal prosecutors allege that the media mogul liked to throw baby-oil-slicked orgies—called 'freak-offs'—where abuse and exploitation regularly occurred. (He pleaded not guilty; his lawyers say he never coerced anyone into anything.) But the conversations tend to be less about Sean 'Diddy' Combs than about playing a guessing game: Who else was involved?
Some of the people I've spoken with had theories about Justin Bieber, citing rumors suggesting that the singer—a teenage protégé of Diddy's—had been preyed upon ('Justin is not among Sean Combs' victims,' Bieber's representative said in a statement last month). Others speculated that the Democratic Party, whose candidates Combs has campaigned for over the years, was in some way implicated in the case. Most of them agreed that Diddy was comparable to Jeffrey Epstein in that he was probably at the hub of a celebrity sex-crime ring.
Since the trial began a few weeks ago, it's become clear what these conversations were: distractions from the bleak, all-too-ordinary issues that this case is really about.
The wild nature of the conspiracist narratives surrounding Combs can't be understated. In January, social-media users wondered if the fires that swept through glitzy L.A. neighborhoods were meant to destroy evidence pointing to the participation of other celebrities. On Amazon last year, sales spiked for a salacious memoir purportedly written by the rapper's late girlfriend, Kimberly Porter, and published by a self-described investigative journalist using the pseudonym Jamal T. Millwood—the latter being the supposed alias that Tupac used after he, according to legend, faked his death. (Amazon pulled the book from its offerings after Porter's family lambasted it as a forgery.) One viral fake news story, based on no evidence at all, said that Will Smith had sold one of his children into Combs's servitude. On Truth Social last fall, Donald Trump himself shared a meme featuring a fabricated image of Kamala Harris and Diddy, with text reading, 'Madam vice president, have you ever been involved with or engaged in one of Puff Daddies freak offs?'
The media also stoked the fervor. A former bodyguard of Combs's gave an interview for a TMZ documentary saying that politicians, princes, and preachers were mixed up in the rapper's debauchery. The conservative influencer Charlie Kirk devoted a portion of one webcast to wondering, 'Maybe P. Diddy has footage of Barack Obama doing something he shouldn't have been doing?' Piers Morgan hosted a singer, Jaguar Wright, who insinuated that Jay-Z and Beyoncé had committed crimes much like the ones Diddy is charged with. After those stars issued a vigorous denial and threatened to sue, Morgan apologized and edited any mention of them out of the interview online—and then, in February, retired General Michael Flynn presented Wright with a 'Defender of Freedom Award' at Mar-a-Lago.
A few actual facts underlay all of this QAnon-esque speculation. For more than a decade, Combs's legendary White Parties attracted a medley of stars to the Hamptons, Los Angeles, and Saint-Tropez. Attendees often joked publicly about how rowdy the festivities could get. Over the past year or so, dozens of people—an array of musicians, workers, models, and others who have crossed paths with him since the 1990s—have sued Combs for a variety of offenses (all of which he denies), and some of those suits have alluded to alleged misdeeds by other celebrities. (One lawsuit naming Jay-Z was dropped after the star denied the claim; he has since countersued for defamation.)
Still, the speed and sheer giddiness with which conspiracist thinking eclipsed the known details of Combs's case confirmed a few bleak realities about the psyche of a country in which economic inequality and sexual abuse are both stubbornly endemic. A whole class of politicians, commentators, and media platforms exist to exploit the resentments that everyday people hold toward the rich and famous. Meanwhile, rates of sexual harassment and assault—reportedly experienced by 82 percent of women and 42 percent of men in the United States in their lifetime—remain as high as they were when the #MeToo movement erupted in 2017. Examining the real reasons for this is less fun—and, for many, less profitable—than imagining that Hollywood is a front for ritualistic sadism.
The trial itself, which began in Manhattan on May 12, has not yet revealed a network of super-famous evildoers. Although the testimony has surfaced vivid and bizarre details about the rarefied lives of celebrities, it's also told an intimate, human, oddly familiar story about how power can warp relationships in all sorts of ways. I realized that in the random conversations I'd had leading up to the trial, I'd heard a lot about the imagined villains, and very little about the people they were said to have hurt.
Combs's downfall in the public eye began in November 2023, when an ex-girlfriend, the singer Cassie Ventura, filed a lawsuit alleging that he had raped and physically abused her. The suit was settled one day later out of court, but many of its details are resurfacing now. Although the federal trial against Combs is expected to last at least eight weeks and feature dozens of witnesses, Diddy and Ventura's relationship has been central to the testimony. Prosecutors say Combs ran an organized criminal enterprise that served, in part, to assist in and cover up this one woman's subjugation.
Ventura, now 38, was a 19-year-old aspiring R&B singer when she met Combs around 2005. He'd heard her first-ever single, 'Me & U'; it would become a hit, but Diddy promised that he could guide her to a career of lasting success. He signed her to a 10-album deal with his label, Bad Boy Records, and released her debut album in 2006. It is still her only album to ever come out.
Their relationship soon evolved from professional to romantic. The singer said she'd initially rejected the rapper's advances but that she'd felt pressured to do what he wanted because her career was largely in his hands. He also reportedly provided her with gifts, threatened her with punishment, and supplied her with drugs until she felt he controlled her life. She said that he then used that control liberally, dictating what she wore, whom she socialized with, which medications she took.
He also beat her. Hotel security-camera footage from 2016 published by CNN last year—and used as evidence in the trial—showed Combs chasing Ventura down a hallway, throwing her to the ground, kicking her, and pulling her by her sweatshirt. The video is a small and terrible glimpse into their relationship. Diddy is in a towel and clearly furious; Ventura, starkly alone, makes no effort to defend herself. 'My behavior on that video is inexcusable,' Combs said in a filmed mea culpa last year; during the trial, his lawyers have acknowledged that he was violent toward her.
Other witnesses in the trial have testified that the hotel assault was not an isolated incident. One former assistant, Capricorn Clark, reported seeing Combs repeatedly kick Ventura after learning that she'd been romantically involved with the rapper Kid Cudi. Another former assistant, George Kaplan, described a 2015 altercation between Combs and Ventura on Diddy's private jet. He heard the sound of breaking glass in a private area, where he then saw Combs standing and holding a whiskey glass over Ventura, who was on her back. According to Kaplan, Ventura screamed, 'Isn't anybody seeing this?' No one on the plane intervened, Kaplan said.
The now-notorious freak-offs allegedly occurred against this backdrop of violence and intimidation. Ventura's lawsuit said that toward the beginning of Combs and Ventura's relationship, Combs hired a man to have sex with Ventura while Diddy watched. Encounters like that, involving sex workers and drugs, became regular occurrences that could last for days at a time. The freak-offs were, prosecutors say, 'performances' for Combs's pleasure. And they affected the performers; Ventura testified to having medical problems, mental-health issues, and drug addiction as a result of them.
Combs's defense argues that Ventura willingly participated in these events. His lawyers have cited text messages in which she appears to express enthusiasm: 'I'm always ready to freak off,' she wrote to him in August 2009. Other texts suggest a more complicated picture—in 2017, Ventura wrote, 'I love our FOs when we both want it.' She and prosecutors assert that whenever she tried to resist Combs's commands, he would bring her to heel with physical violence and threats of blackmail and financial harm. Ventura's lawsuit alleged that when she tried to break up with him for good in 2018, he raped her in her home (an accusation that Diddy's defense has concertedly pushed back on during the trial).
Ventura is not the only alleged victim of Combs's. His employees have shared particularly disturbing stories: Clark said that Combs kidnapped her twice; a former assistant identified as Mia testified last week that the rapper repeatedly sexually assaulted her. (Diddy's lawyers dispute that the kidnappings ever happened and have questioned Mia's credibility.) Prosecutors are pursuing racketeering charges on the theory that Combs didn't act alone: For example, they say he may have had someone set Kid Cudi's car on fire (the defense denies Combs's involvement in that arson). In this way, Diddy's case is also a story about what happens when it's easier to take the check and not ask too many questions.
But fundamentally, the trial is another highly public test of the definition of consent. It recalls the prosecutions of Harvey Weinstein, the movie producer who allegedly dangled job prospects to women interested in the film industry in exchange for sex (one of his convictions was overturned last year and is being retried now). It also evokes R. Kelly, the musician who wooed aspiring singers with promises of career help and then violently kept them—and other women—in sexual servitude (behavior for which he is currently serving 31 years in prison).
And the issues here transcend celebrity. When #MeToo erupted eight years ago, it forced many everyday Americans to reexamine experiences they'd had in their workplaces and homes. The movement has, by many indications, petered out or even curdled into backlash: Yesterday, one of Diddy's lawyers asked Mia whether she was looking for a 'Me Too money grab,' which suggests he thinks the very words Me Too might be tinged for some jury members. But to sit with the allegations against Combs—and the experiences of the alleged victims—is to again be confronted with the underlying reasons that movement happened. It's to be confronted with the intolerable things that happen when men are given the power to pursue their desires however they want, and to extract whatever they want from their underlings.
A lot of people would evidently prefer to turn away from that confrontation—and to focus on fantasy. Since I started paying attention to the case, my YouTube algorithm has become polluted by videos with AI-generated courtroom sketches of stars such as Will Smith and Jay-Z, paired with totally imaginary testimony about their involvement in Combs's crimes. The videos are yet another sign that our society is losing any shared sense of reality. They do, however, have disclaimers stipulating that they are fiction, which raises the question: Why is this the story someone wants to hear?
Perhaps because tales of demonic Hollywood cabals offer a simple, clear-cut narrative that doesn't ask us to reflect on how domestic violence and sexual coercion really get perpetuated—and perhaps because that narrative benefits certain agendas. Last month, I tuned in to Asmongold, a popular Twitch streamer who interprets the daily news for a large audience of young, often aggrieved men. He had a glazed look in his eyes as TV news footage related to the trial played on his screen. Then he said, 'I don't care about this case at all—until Diddy starts naming names.'