Live Updates: Jurors Will Hear Sean Combs's Defense for Final Time

New York Times

5 hours ago

An InterContinental hotel in Times Square is one of the locations Sean Combs was said to have hosted a 'freak-off' at trial.
The term first came to public awareness in November 2023, when the singer Cassie filed a lawsuit accusing Sean Combs, her onetime boyfriend and record label boss, of years of sexual and physical abuse: 'freak-off.'
According to the suit by Cassie, who was born Casandra Ventura, a freak-off was what Mr. Combs called the highly choreographed sexual encounters that he directed 'to engage in a fantasy of his called 'voyeurism.'' They involved costumes, like masks and lingerie. 'Copious amounts of drugs,' including Ecstasy and ketamine. The hiring of male prostitutes. Mr. Combs watched and recorded the events on a phone while he masturbated.
Freak-offs have become a central part of the government's case, which charges Mr. Combs with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. (Other witnesses have referred to the events as 'hotel nights,' 'debauchery' or 'wild king nights.') Mr. Combs pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual encounters with women were not consensual.
In testimony last month, Ms. Ventura described the freak-offs in sometimes excruciating detail. The first one happened when she was 22, she said, when Mr. Combs hired a male stripper from Las Vegas to come to a home that Mr. Combs was renting in Los Angeles. Ms. Ventura said she wore a masquerade-style mask and provocative clothing from a 'sex store' She and the man took Ecstasy and drank alcohol before they had sex while Mr. Combs watched, she said.
Freak-offs soon became nearly weekly occurrences, Ms. Ventura testified. They took place in homes and hotels across the United States and in international locales like the Spanish island of Ibiza. Mr. Combs had his employees make travel arrangements for the men to come to him and Ms. Ventura — a key point in the government's case for sex trafficking. The events also became more elaborately staged, with candles and studio-style lighting, and Ms. Ventura said she would sometimes take an entire day to prepare herself for them. Mr. Combs controlled that process too, she said, down to the color of her nails.
She testified that she took part in the sex partly because she wanted to make Mr. Combs happy. 'When you're in love with someone you don't want to disappoint them,' she said.
But she also said she feared he would beat her if she refused and recounted episodes of him assaulting her. When Mr. Combs became angry, she said, his eyes would 'go black' and 'the version of him that I was in love with was no longer there.'
The sexual marathons drained her, she said, and it sometimes took days to recover: 'The freak-offs became a job where there was no space to do anything else but to recover and just try to feel normal again.'
The videos Mr. Combs made, she said, became 'blackmail materials' that were used to pressure her to agree to continue participating, she testified. She feared the videos might be released on the internet.
Fueled by drugs, the freak-offs could last from 36 hours to four days, Ms. Ventura testified. They also became more 'humiliating,' she said: Mr. Combs would direct her and the men on sexual positions, and he would order them to continually apply baby oil to keep themselves 'glistening.' Blood was sometimes left on bedding because Ms. Ventura was compelled to perform while menstruating, she said. There was also urine, as Mr. Combs sometimes ordered the men to urinate into her mouth while she lay on the floor.
In her testimony, Ms. Ventura said that a freak-off was underway in March 2016 at the InterContinental Century City hotel in Los Angeles, where a hallway security camera captured her trying to take the elevator before Mr. Combs assaulted her and dragged her away.
The freak-offs, she said, continued until she finally left Mr. Combs in 2018.
When Jane, another former girlfriend who dated Mr. Combs from 2021 until his arrest last year, took the stand, she described similar events and said her love affair with the music mogul turned into a pattern of unwanted sex with male prostitutes that she struggled to end: 'It was a door that I was unable to shut for the remainder of the relationship.'
Describing herself as a single mother who made her living as a social media influencer, Jane said she became financially dependent on Mr. Combs after he began sending her thousands of dollars and paying her rent.
She described one night when she had sex with two men, then retreated to a bathroom and vomited. Mr. Combs said the vomiting would make her feel better, Jane testified, and then he told her a third prostitute was ready for her. 'Let's go,' he said. She complied and had sex with the third man.
Jane also read aloud a private note from her phone that she wrote about Mr. Combs in 2022: 'I don't want to do drugs for days and days and have you use me to fulfill your freaky, wild desires in hotel rooms.' She said she suffered from urinary tract and yeast infections as a result of frequent sex with other men.
After news about Ms. Ventura's lawsuit broke, Jane said she recognized that Ms. Ventura's account mirrored her own 'sexual trauma.'
'I almost fainted,' Jane testified. 'In fact I think I did.'
'There was a whole other woman feeling the same thing,' she added.