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Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cassie Ventura testifies Sean ‘Diddy' Combs threatened to release sex freakoff videos to ‘ruin' her
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. _____
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Wisconsin concludes odometer fraud investigation
The Brief The Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) investigated a Lake Villa woman's car history after she found an odometer discrepancy on a CARFAX. The state investigator ran into trouble establishing the car's chain-of-ownership due to private car sales. CARFAX estimates there are 32,300 vehicles in Wisconsin with rolled-back odometers. LAKE VILLA, Ill. - More than 100,000 miles were erased from her car's odometer. Now, a Lake Villa, Illinois woman has learned the outcome of a state investigation into her vehicle's history. What we know Dina Piazza has never been so happy to see her car on the back of a tow truck. In March, she finally sent it to a salvage yard. "(The salvage business) came and picked it up, towed it away, and now it is out of my life," said Piazza. "I won't put anyone else through the misery of trying to fix that mess." FREE DOWNLOAD: Get breaking news alerts in the FOX LOCAL Mobile app for iOS or Android It was the sixth time Piazza's car had been towed since she bought it in 2023. "All these things were going wrong with it pretty much as soon as I bought it," said Piazza. Dig deeper Last year, Piazza showed Contact 6 the many problems with her 2007 GMC Acadia. "It'll probably drive home, but along the way, who knows what will happen," Piazza said in 2024. Piazza paid $6,000 for the car. Then, came the repair bills for its battery, sensors, fuel injectors and more. "Thousands and thousands of dollars later, it still wasn't running," said Piazza. After seeing a Contact 6 report about odometer fraud, Piazza got a CARFAX. The salon owner made a troubling discovery. In 2020, her car had 206,000 miles listed. In 2024, her odometer showed nearly 115,000 miles. What's next An investigator for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) got to work. "He did a very good investigation. He talked to every single person who owned the car, where they got it, whether they saw it on Craiglist," said Piazza. SIGN UP TODAY: Get daily headlines, breaking news emails from FOX6 News The investigation report says the car's odometer was altered at least three years ago. The investigator spoke with two of the car's former owners on the phone, who either bought or sold the car on Craigslist. A third owner of the vehicle mailed the DOT a response to a questionnaire. He said he had no records from the sale. The state closed the case saying, without knowing who the man sold the car to, it could not "establish a clear chain-of-ownership nor a clear mileage history." The Source The information in this post comes from WisDOT, Piazza and CARFAX.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Yahoo
Houston man charged for stealing nearly $500k worth of back up power generators
The Brief A Houston man is charged with engaging in organized criminal activity for stealing nearly $500,000 worth of backup-power generators. Harris County Precinct 1 Constables say 46-year-old James Eric Barnes stole from 30 distributors across Texas. Constable Alan Rosen says Barnes used stolen credit cards to purchase the generators, and sold them on Facebook Marketplace using fake identities. HOUSTON - On Tuesday afternoon, Harris County Precinct 1 Constable announced that 46-year-old James Eric Barns is being charged with a first-degree felony of engaging in organized criminal activity. Constable Rosen says this comes after a case that started off small in 2023, but grew after a response to somebody who was scammed out of a generator. "What James would do is he would go online with stolen credit cards and buy generators. He ended up buying them from 30 companies in and around the Houston area." said Constable Rosen. The backstory Precinct 1 Constables say Barnes obtained stolen credit-card numbers to buy the new stationary generators for an average of $7,000 to $10,000 each and then sold them at a discounted rate on Facebook Marketplace. "He would buy thousands of dollars worth of generators. He would then get Craiglist drivers to come pick the generators up, and then he would take them to another location, stage them there and then start posting them on Facebook marketplace for sale, often thousands of dollars cheaper than the generators would otherwise cost." said Constable Alan Rosen," He only dealt in cash so you could only pay him in cash and this spanned from many many Texas cities Austin, Beaumont, Brookshire, Dallas, San Antonio." Investigators believe more than 30 companies have lost more than $470,000 since 2023 and that the thieves actually tried to scam more than $900,000., "He would pose on the Facebook marketplace with a fake picture and fake name," said Constable Alan Rosen. When Precinct One deputies closed in on Barnes' operation, they seized 10 new, boxed generators in a storage shed. The investigation showed the sale of about two generators every week for a year. Why you should care "It's terrible because some people rely on this for health reasons and otherwise, so it's better that we get it taken care of now verus during a hurricane or during some other bad weather event," said Constable Rosen. "They are standby generators, and they have the ones that actually plug in with an extension cord so they are the smaller ones the real portable ones that standby generators are the ones permanately attached to a home." Anyone who may have been among Barnes' sales victims should call Precinct One at 713-755-7628. Barnes could face up to life in prison if convicted.
