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As Sean Combs Rose to Hip-Hop Colossus, Troubling Accusations Trailed Him

 

As “Puffy,” “Diddy” or “Love,” the mogul found success and trouble. After years of accusations with few consequences, he’ll stand trial next month.

 

A college of images that includes the first page of the federal indictment against Sean Combs, a photo of him at a White Party, a photo of him in a tan suit, and a photo of him in a white tank-top and tilted ball cap leaning on the front hood of a car.
Jon Furniss/WireImage, Getty Images; Tony Cenicola/The New York Times; Brian Rasic/Getty Images

Jason Swain was on his way home to the Bronx when friends told him that something had happened to his brother at a charity basketball game in Harlem. Nine young people at a City College of New York gymnasium were crushed to death in an overcrowded stairwell. Dirk Swain, 21, was lying on the gym floor with a sheet draped over his body.

The promoter of the December 1991 event was a 22-year-old novice music producer named Sean Combs.

For more than six years, the Swains and other families pursued wrongful death suits, saying Mr. Combs had oversold the game, and that bad planning and inadequate security had led to the tragedy. By the time their cases were settled, Mr. Combs had skyrocketed from a junior record label employee to global superstardom; the $750,000 that he contributed to the $3.8 million in settlements represented a fraction of his wealth as hip-hop’s newest, flashiest mogul.

Mr. Combs never accepted full responsibility for the deaths and, for many people, the stampede faded into history. But not for the families who lost their loved ones.

“Every one of those nine people was doing something positive in their life,” Mr. Swain said in an interview.

The City College incident was Mr. Combs’s first moment of notoriety, but far from his last. In the ensuing three decades, he has repeatedly faced allegations of violence or serious misconduct. The beating of a rival music executive. Gunshots fired in a nightclub. The threatening of a reality-TV cast member. An assault of a college football coach.

 

 

 
If found guilty of all charges, Sean Combs, who has spent the last seven months in a Brooklyn jail, could spend the rest of his life in prison.Credit...Willy Sanjuan/Invision, via Associated Press

Some of the cases ended with criminal charges being modified or dismissed. One trial concluded in an acquittal. Some incidents resulted in sealed settlements.

But now things are different as Mr. Combs, 55, faces the most serious challenge to what has been largely a charmed life. In May, he will stand trial in New York on federal charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Prosecutors accuse him of running a “criminal enterprise” that coerced women — including his longtime former girlfriend, the singer Cassie — into participating in marathon sexual escapades he called “freak-offs,” which involved male prostitutes and copious drug use. If found guilty of all charges, Mr. Combs, who has spent the last seven months in a Brooklyn jail, could spend the rest of his life in prison.

In addition to the criminal charges, Mr. Combs faces more than 50 civil suits accusing him of sexual abuse.

Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and strenuously denied the accusations against him in both the criminal case and the civil suits. In a recent statement about the government’s indictment, Mr. Combs’s legal team said that the alleged victims in the case were “former long-term girlfriends, who were involved in consensual relationships. This was their private sex life, defined by consent, not coercion.”

When the criminal trial begins, the U.S. District Court in Lower Manhattan will be awash with camera trucks and commentators. The spotlight shines so brightly now because, while escaping so many legal entanglements that might have upended his career, Mr. Combs became a hit-minting, zeitgeist-dominating colossus. In the entertainment industry, he became known for his extraordinary wealth and a Gatsbyesque appetite for spectacle — and other things. All manner of celebrities and political figures — Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris Hilton, Al Sharpton — attended his lavish and risqué parties, where sometimes everyone wore white and some wore very little at all. He was a master of branding who made himself the star of his own talent roster, and he played a central role in transforming hip-hop into a global cultural force.

 

Sean Combs, dressed in all white including a white rimmed hat, speaks into a microphone in front of a phalanx of press.
Starting in the late 1990s, Mr. Combs’s White Parties, held at his Hamptons estate and exotic locales like St.-Tropez in France, were the apotheosis of everything he had come to represent.Credit...Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage, via Getty Images

 

Only two years ago, Mr. Combs was being feted as a statesmanlike visionary, a generous donor to educational institutions who wanted to build a network of Black entrepreneurship.

Now that halo has crumbled. Many now say they saw the seeds of his undoing long ago, in the destructive recklessness that had been enabled by years of escaping consequences.

“I think this end was inevitable for somebody who believed he could get away with anything and demanded everyone around him go along with that,” said Touré, a longtime music journalist who chronicled Mr. Combs’s rise. “Eventually, someone was going to say, ‘No more.’”

 

Sean Combs spent much of his childhood in a version of white-picket safety in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a working-class suburb just north of New York City.

It was not Shangri-La. But Mr. Combs has said his mother relocated the family there from Harlem, where he was born and where his father had been gunned down in 1972, shortly after Sean’s second birthday.

Melvin Combs was shot to death in his brand-new Lincoln Continental, which he had parked off Central Park West. Police detectives believed he was tied to a heroin ring that operated throughout Harlem, the Bronx and Westchester County.

Months after Melvin’s death, Sean’s mother, Janice, bought property in Mount Vernon. To support her children — Sean and a younger daughter, Keisha — Ms. Combs rented out the extra unit in their modest, two-family home on Dell Avenue and juggled multiple jobs, including driving a school bus and working at a day-care center. “I wasn’t going to be on welfare, if I had to work all day and all night,” she told The New York Times in 2001, while her son was on trial for gun possession and bribery. “Never, never.”

As a child, Sean spent part of his time in Harlem, where his grandmother lived. But he attended a Montessori school in Mount Vernon, homered in the Little League there and went to Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx, a mixed-race Catholic prep school for boys, where students wore jackets and ties. He was a starting cornerback on the school’s championship football team, No. 27, but left a mixed review in his graduation yearbook: “It was a great experience, but it could have been better!”

 

A black-and-white yearbook photo, showing a young Sean Combs with a quote from him.
The activities listed in Mr. Combs’s high school yearbook photo depict him as an athlete and involved student.

 

Damian Blyden, part of Mr. Combs’s circle in Mount Vernon who is known as “Deo,” remembers his bedroom on Dell Avenue filled with posters of basketball stars of the era like Michael Jordan, along with a video game system and comic books lying around.

“All the normal things,” Blyden said. “Regular teenage room.”

By then, Mr. Combs had acquired a nickname: Puffy. He has said it was because he would “huff and puff” when angry. Acquaintances from his Mount Vernon days have suggested other provenances, such as Mr. Combs puffing out his chest to enhance his girth.

Ruby Patterson, the Combses’ tenant, said that Sean and his family were friendly neighbors, and called Ms. Combs a kind landlord. “God wouldn’t like it if I said anything bad about them,” Ms. Patterson, now 86, said by phone, “because I can’t.”

Mr. Combs immersed himself in New York’s hip-hop scene, regularly heading into the city to dance and mingle at Harlem nightclubs. After graduating from Mount Saint Michael in 1987, he enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he built social capital — and earned good side money — throwing huge parties.

But New York, and specifically Harlem, became his destiny, and he focused his attentions there as if swimming back upstream toward his source. He made himself a bit player on the fringes of the music business, appearing as a backup dancer in music videos for Fine Young Cannibals and other acts.

Mr. Combs onstage with his group Diddy — Dirty Money in 2011.Credit...Chad Batka for The New York Times
Mr. Combs onstage with his group Diddy — Dirty Money in 2011.Credit...Chad Batka for The New York Times

 

Over the years, as Mr. Combs tended his back story, old friends and schoolmates noticed that Mount Vernon had been downgraded, with Mr. Combs emphasizing his Harlem roots above all else. “From Harlem to Hollywood!” he proclaimed when accepting a film prize in 2017.

Among his old Mount Vernon crew, there is a grudging acceptance of their diminished role in the legend.

“He don’t want to claim Mount Vernon,” recalled Howard Knox, known as Rudy, who was part of Mr. Combs’s hometown clique, “because it’s a bigger name if you say you’re from Harlem.”

 

There was one thing that Mr. Combs still needed in Mount Vernon: a way into the music business.

Mr. Combs beseeched Heavy D, the suburb’s rap pride and joy (“Moneyearnin’ Mount Vernon” was a signature tune), for an introduction to Andre Harrell, the head of his Manhattan-based label, Uptown Records. It worked. While still enrolled at Howard, Mr. Combs became an intern at Uptown, taking the train from Washington at 5 a.m.

Kurt Woodley, the label’s vice president of A&R, recalled in an interview that Mr. Combs did not make the greatest first impression.

“He didn’t look hip-hop,” Mr. Woodley said. “He had the Gumby-looking haircut, the polka-dot blue shirt. But he had that ‘I’m ready to go’ look on his face.”

Mr. Combs became Mr. Harrell’s all-purpose factotum, rounding up office supplies and fetching cheesecake from Junior’s in Brooklyn — a hazing ritual that Mr. Combs later imposed on another generation of clueless studio newbies on “Making the Band,” his hit MTV reality show from the 2000s.

 

A black-and-white photo of Sean Combs and Heavy D, both wearing leisure wear, rapping into microphones.
Mr. Combs and Heavy D, a fellow Mount Vernon resident who made it big in the rap industry.Credit...Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images

 

At the same time, Mr. Combs — who had dropped out of Howard — was learning the ropes in the studio and throwing wildly popular weekly dance parties that he called Daddy’s House, making himself an indispensable part of the scene. “He was tenacious, he was tenacious, he was tenacious,” Kirk Burrowes, an early Bad Boy executive, said in an interview before Mr. Combs’s arrest last year.

Then Mr. Combs and Heavy D signed on to promote the ill-fated basketball game at City College.

The event was advertised as a benefit for an unspecified AIDS education program, with celebrity attendees like Mike Tyson, Run-DMC and LL Cool J. Hyped on local radio, it drew more than 5,000 people to a venue with a capacity of 2,730.

A city investigation found that the crowd outside grew unruly once the first celebrity guests arrived. Fans toppled barricades, shattered glass and rushed down a stairwell, crushing people against a set of closed doors.

Eight people died that night, and another was pronounced dead at a hospital four days later.

No criminal charges were filed. But the news media zeroed in on Mr. Combs, with one New York Post columnist placing the blame squarely on “a fool named Puff Daddy.”

The legal proceedings were complex and time-consuming, in part because City College, which is run by New York State, was named as a defendant.

But some families felt Mr. Combs had deliberately dragged the process out. “I think some on the Combs team took numerous steps to impede the progress of the case and cause delays, and they continued to pursue this strategy throughout the process,” said Peter DeFilippis, a lawyer. His client saw her best friend suffocated at the game, and he said she developed a thyroid condition as a result of the stressful experience.

 

A black-and-white photo of a gym with debris on the floor and a police officer in the background, looking at something on the wall.
The aftermath of the December 1991 stampede at a charity basketball game, promoted by Mr. Combs, where nine people lost their lives.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

 

At a trial in 1998, the judge ruled that City College and New York State bore 50 percent of the responsibility for the incident, and Mr. Combs and Heavy D the other 50 percent.

In “Pain,” a track from 1997, Mr. Combs, as Puff Daddy, rapped:

 

To the City College deceased, may you rest in peace
To the families, I never meant to cause no pain
I know the truth, but if you want, then I shoulder the blame

 

For families of the victims, the lyrics rang hollow. Just a few years earlier, in a 1993 profile in Vibe magazine, Mr. Combs had seemed to shirk all responsibility. The deaths, he said, had not been caused by the event being oversold, nor were the police or the fire department at fault.

“It’s just that overall in the Black community there’s a lack of self-love,” he was quoted as saying. “The majority of the kids weren’t necessarily gonna put themselves in the position to get hurt, but when it came time to love their neighbors and move back, they couldn’t love their neighbors because they didn’t love themselves.”

The city report on its investigation noted that despite billing the event as a benefit for AIDS education, the promoters had made no such arrangements.

 

In the aftermath of the City College incident, people close to Mr. Combs said, he was distraught.

But within months, he made a spectacular comeback.

In the summer of 1992, Uptown released “What’s the 411?,” the debut album by the singer Mary J. Blige; Mr. Combs was one of the executive producers. “You Remind Me,” the first single, was a hit at New York clubs and on Black radio, and embodied Mr. Combs’s ambition.

At the time, rap and R&B music were distinct strands of Black pop; even at Uptown, R&B groups often dressed sharp, in shiny suits and rich colors, far from street style. But a blending of the two genres was taking hold among underground D.J.s, mingling raw hip-hop beats with soulful vocals. Mr. Combs seized on that bubbling hybrid, supercharging it into an irresistibly commercial sound and a smartly packaged cultural movement.

“He remixed what the streets were already doing,” Touré said.

 

Sean Combs, in a tux, with his arm around Clivd Davis, also dressed up.
Mr. Combs with Clive Davis of Arista Records, who took on Mr. Combs’s Bad Boy label with a multimillion-dollar distribution deal.Credit...Rose Hartman/Getty Images

 

“What’s the 411?” established a new blueprint — hip-hop soul — with Ms. Blige as its onstage heroine and Mr. Combs its mastermind. Ms. Blige’s image was as carefully orchestrated as her music, with long, wavy hair like a 1970s diva but B-girl clothes that placed her in contemporary street mode. Mr. Combs performed a similar makeover for the group Jodeci, and built radio support with a string of earworm remixes.

Mr. Harrell increasingly clashed with Mr. Combs, and in 1993 fired him. But his protégé quickly rebounded, bringing his Bad Boy imprint to Clive Davis of Arista Records for a multimillion-dollar distribution deal. Mr. Davis, the industry don who had led chart-conquering campaigns for Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin and many others, saw in Mr. Combs a promising mogul-to-be, and put his corporate team at Mr. Combs’s disposal.

“He was convinced that hip-hop could be much bigger than it had already become and could shape the music scene around itself,” Mr. Davis wrote in a memoir, “The Soundtrack of My Life” (2012). “He genuinely had a vision,” he added.

Mr. Combs’s next big act was the Notorious B.I.G., a Brooklyn rapper who was a captivating raconteur of the drug trade’s harsh realities.

With his debut album, “Ready to Die” (1994), B.I.G. became an instant star, and Mr. Combs came into his own as a new kind of hip-hop impresario, part Berry Gordy and part P.T. Barnum. He was as much the architect of the sound, laden with R&B harmonies and radio-ready pop hooks, as of its branding. Mr. Combs splurged on over-the-top music videos and turned his label roster into a mutually reinforcing product line — a “family” — in which artists made guest spots in each other’s songs and, with every appearance, amplified Bad Boy’s overall image.

Mr. Combs placed himself, as Puff Daddy, in the center of it all: rapping on tracks, posing on magazine covers, hamming it up beside his artists in their videos.

“With Puffy there was a firm aesthetic that he was developing early on,” said Monica Lynch, the former president of Tommy Boy Records, another New York hip-hop label. “With Mary, Biggie, Jodeci — there was a look, there was a sound. He sort of created a new Motown.”

By then he had begun a relationship with Kim Porter, a model and former receptionist at Uptown. Mr. Combs was known to have multiple romantic partners, but his off-and-on relationship with Ms. Porter lasted until about 2007, and they had three children together; after her death in 2018, Mr. Combs said they were “more than soul mates.”

When B.I.G. was killed in 1997 — a crime that remains unsolved but has long been seen as an act of retaliation over Tupac Shakur’s killing the year before — Mr. Combs grieved in public. Just two months after B.I.G.’s death, Puff Daddy released his song “I’ll Be Missing You,” featuring Faith Evans, B.I.G.’s widow, and 112, a Bad Boy R&B act.

In the song, Mr. Combs rapped over an uncleared sample of the Police’s 1983 hit “Every Breath You Take.” By utilizing a highly recognizable hook from a 1980s white pop classic, the track seemed to mark a strategic shift in hip-hop’s evolution into global pop culture. Inescapable in the summer of ’97 — on the streets of New York and everywhere else — “I’ll Be Missing You” held at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for 11 weeks and demonstrated how, in Mr. Combs’s hands, hip-hop had reached a new peak in the American pop mainstream, infiltrating every demographic.

 

The Notorious B.I.G., in a white suit and brimmed hat, raps into a microphone, standing above Sean Combs, in a black suit and hat, doing the same.
Mr. Combs, right, onstage with the Notorious B.I.G., his star rapper who was shot and killed in 1997.Credit...Rose Hartman/Getty Images

 

Mr. Combs became the media’s new darling of chest-beating ambition, always ready with an unabashed quote.

“Remember how fly Mozart was back in the day? I’m Mozart 1997,” he told The Times that summer.

Those who dismissed Mr. Combs as simply arrogant were missing the point. Fame itself became a performance art for him, as well as a way to prove that there was no limit to the worlds that hip-hop could conquer or the spoils that Mr. Combs could earn.

That included climbing the American social ladder to its summit. Mr. Combs hobnobbed with Martha Stewart, Anna Wintour, Salman Rushdie, Oprah Winfrey and Donald J. Trump — who, as Vibe noted, was the first celebrity guest to show up for Mr. Combs’s 29th birthday party in 1998.

“When you rolled with Puff, it was like you had the key to the city,” Quinnes Parker of the group 112 once told The New York Post.

 

Even as Mr. Combs rose, violence, or threats of it, were always part of the backbeat.

In 1996, he was found guilty of criminal mischief for threatening a tabloid photographer with a gun, and paid a $1,000 fine. He exploded in anger at journalists he viewed as insufficiently deferential. Of the many civil suits that have been filed against Mr. Combs since late 2023, at least five involve accusations of violence alleged to have taken place before 2000.

And later, in 2004, Kimora Lee Simmons, the former wife of another hip-hop mogul, Russell Simmons, said in an interview that Mr. Combs had once threatened to hit her while she was pregnant. (In the same interview, with New York magazine, Ms. Simmons said he apologized to her.) Three years after that, the choreographer Laurieann Gibson, part of the cast of “Making the Band,” told police that Mr. Combs had threatened her with a chair while someone held her in place. (They reconciled, and Ms. Gibson has continued working with Mr. Combs.)

Mr. Combs has spent years, perhaps decades, trying to defeat speculation that he somehow had a role in the beef between the Notorious B.I.G. and Mr. Shakur, which led to both of their deaths. In an interview, Mr. Shakur once said he believed that Mr. Combs had foreknowledge of an earlier shooting that had left him injured, but Mr. Combs has long denied it.

Before long, Mr. Combs was accused of even more brazen forms of violence.

In early 1999, after a dispute over a music video, Mr. Combs was charged in the attack of a rival music executive, Steve Stoute, in Mr. Stoute’s office in New York. Mr. Combs and two bodyguards were accused of kicking and punching him, and hitting him with a phone and a Champagne bottle.

Mr. Combs, pleading to a lesser charge, was sentenced to a one-day anger management course. He also reached a confidential settlement with Mr. Stoute. Reached by email, Mr. Stoute declined to comment.

The most publicized of Mr. Combs’s close calls came in late 1999.

 

Sean Combs, in a gray suit, walks with police and men in suits behind and beside him.
Mr. Combs outside a downtown New York courthouse in 2001, where he stood trial on gun possession and bribery charges.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

 

Just after midnight on Dec. 27 that year, Mr. Combs and his then-girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, were at Club New York on West 43rd Street with a rap protégé, Shyne, when gunshots rang out. Three people were injured, and Mr. Combs and Ms. Lopez fled in a Lincoln Navigator, running 11 red lights up Eighth Avenue before being pulled over.

Charged with gun possession and bribing a witness, Mr. Combs stood trial for seven weeks in early 2001, facing the possibility of 15 years in prison — and, possibly, the ruination of his career.

But witnesses were split over who had fired the guns. Seven said they saw shots fired by Shyne, who was born Jamal Barrow in Belize. Three said they saw Mr. Combs with a gun. One witness, a woman who had been shot in the face, said she saw flashes from two guns: one fired by Mr. Barrow, one by Mr. Combs.

Mr. Combs denied having a gun at the club, but a lawyer for Mr. Barrow told jurors that his client was carrying a gun and fired it twice at the ceiling.

The jury acquitted Mr. Combs on all counts. Mr. Barrow was found guilty of five of the eight charges against him, and he served nearly nine years in prison. Last year, Mr. Barrow, who has become a leading politician in Belize, said in a documentary that he had been “set up to be the fall guy” for Mr. Combs in the incident.

In response to Mr. Barrow’s claim, Mr. Combs’s legal team said in a statement: “These claims are unequivocally false. Mr. Combs was acquitted of all charges related to the 1999 Club New York incident and has consistently maintained his innocence.”

 

During the Club New York trial, Mr. Combs would meet with his team to work on his latest big project: designs for Sean John, his fashion line, which he had started in 1998. The trial didn’t slow the stratospheric rise of the brand, and its sales grew from $250 million in 2001 to $325 million two years later.

 

Sean Combs, dressed in white, raises his hands as though dancing, while surrounded by other partygoers in white in a beachy setting.
Celebrities flocked to Mr. Combs’s White Parties, which reveled in luxury, hedonistic pleasure and spectacle for its own sake.Credit...Jon Furniss/WireImage, via Getty Images

 

Leveraging his fame, Mr. Combs went on television, playing a demanding, foul-mouthed label boss on “Making the Band.” He even starred in a Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He created a cable and online media platform, Revolt. And he became the face of Ciroc vodka through a lucrative deal with the spirit conglomerate Diageo — though in a lawsuit, he later accused the company of racism in not promoting his products to his satisfaction. (The case was settled last year, when Diageo paid Mr. Combs about $200 million for his half of a jointly owned tequila brand.)

Starting in the late 1990s, Mr. Combs’s White Parties, held at his Hamptons estate and exotic locales like St.-Tropez in France, were the apotheosis of everything he had come to represent: Black culture kicking in the doors of white high society, unapologetically reveling in luxury, hedonistic pleasure and spectacle for its own sake. In some ways, Mr. Combs was still carrying out his first breakout talent, promoting buzzy parties — this time with the hip-hop version of a Roman bacchanal.

Even Mr. Combs’s personal brand, Puff Daddy, had evolved. Less than two weeks after his acquittal in the Club New York shooting, he announced, regally, that he would thenceforth be known as P. Diddy, an appellation eventually truncated to Diddy.

Then, in 2017, he made still another rebranding attempt, calling himself Love with no apparent sense of irony.

 

Sean Combs, dressed in black, hoists an amber-colored drink in a glass at a party in an opulent looking club.
Mr. Combs at a 2023 party in Manhattan following the Met Gala.Credit...Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times

 

“I have to always remind myself, we live in a toxic world,” Mr. Combs explained on a BBC talk show in 2023. “And it’s love versus hate. That’s what’s going on right now. And I choose love.”

The federal prosecutors of the Southern District of New York nodded at this history in their indictment of him last September, which was captioned “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. SEAN COMBS, a.k.a. ‘Puff Daddy,’ a.k.a. ‘P. Diddy,’ a.k.a. ‘Diddy,’ a.k.a. ‘P.D.,’ a.k.a. ‘Love.’”

 

Fists pounding on a Los Angeles apartment door broke the silence early one morning in September 2016.

Bryana Bongolan, who was visiting her friend, the singer Casandra Ventura, who goes by the stage name Cassie, later said in court papers that she recognized the unhinged voice of Ms. Ventura’s boyfriend, Sean Combs.

Ms. Ventura, who occupied the fashionable 17th-floor apartment, remained in her bedroom. But Ms. Bongolan said she quickly told a third friend to lock herself in the bathroom.

According to the account Ms. Bongolan, an artist and designer, gave in an ongoing lawsuit she filed last year, Mr. Combs soon entered the apartment and found Ms. Bongolan on the balcony. Shouting profanities, he began groping her breasts, the court papers say, then scooped her up by her armpits — she said she is 4 foot 11 and under 100 pounds — and dangled her over the balcony’s banister, “with only Combs’ grip keeping her from falling to her death.”

When Ms. Ventura emerged from her bedroom, screaming at Mr. Combs to stop, he pulled Ms. Bongolan back from the brink — only to slam her body onto a patio table, Ms. Bongolan said in her account, causing unspecified injuries.

After Ms. Bongolan’s suit was filed, representatives of Mr. Combs said he denied her allegations, and said they would “ultimately be proven baseless.”

 

By this time, Mr. Combs’s music career was stagnant. But brand diversification had made him richer than ever: In 2017, Forbes named Mr. Combs the wealthiest artist in hip-hop, worth an estimated $820 million.

 

A woman in a strapless dress turns and looks at the camera on a red carpet.
Casandra Ventura, who performs as the singer Cassie, accused Mr. Combs of rape, and of repeated physical abuse over about a decade in a 2023 lawsuit that was settled in a day. Credit...Amanda Edwards/WireImage, via Getty Images

 

Yet his predilection for violence, as an uncontrolled impulse or a manipulative tool, was far from in check, according to court papers. In their indictment, prosecutors said this behavior extended to Mr. Combs’s employees, alleging that he made use of various people in his entourage “to carry out, facilitate, and cover up his acts of violence, abuse, and commercial sex.”

The investigation that led to the indictment was triggered by a bombshell lawsuit that Ms. Ventura filed in November 2023.

In wrenching detail, Ms. Ventura alleged years of violence and sexual abuse, including “freak-offs”: drug-fueled episodes of coerced sex. Her suit was settled in just one day, with what Mr. Combs’s lawyers have said included an eight-figure payment to her (though no admission of wrongdoing).

One episode in Ms. Ventura’s complaint came just six months before the dangling incident alleged in Ms. Bongolan’s lawsuit.

Ms. Ventura and Mr. Combs were at an InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles, where, she said, a “freak-off” was underway. According to Ms. Ventura’s court papers, an intoxicated Mr. Combs punched her in the face, then followed her into the hotel hallway, where he yelled at her, grabbed her and threw glass vases at her.

Overhead, a security camera was recording.

Last May, CNN broadcast excerpts from that security footage, showing Mr. Combs beating, kicking and dragging Ms. Ventura in the hallway, while wearing only a towel. Two days later, a chastened Mr. Combs apologized, calling his behavior “inexcusable” and saying he took “full responsibility” for it.

By then, two of Mr. Combs’s homes had been raided by heavily armed federal agents, in scenes that were captured on live television. A lawyer for Mr. Combs complained of “a gross overuse of military-style force,” and a certain degree of sympathy for Mr. Combs and his family began to ripple through social media.

But the hotel video, showing in undeniable terms that Mr. Combs had brutally beaten Ms. Ventura, changed everything. Even Mr. Combs’s lawyers have admitted, in court papers, that the video “immediately and dramatically turned the tide of public opinion” against him.

 

A group of TV cameras parked at the end of a leafy street in Los Angeles.
The scene outside Mr. Combs’s home in Los Angeles in March 2024 when it was raided by federal agents.Credit...Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

 

 

In court, Mr. Combs’s lawyers have not denied the violence, but said it was part of a troubled, long-term relationship between him and Ms. Ventura, and is not evidence of sex trafficking. Last week, a judge ruled that video from this incident can be shown to jurors.

Last summer, Mr. Combs’s legal team began to prepare for his arrest. On Sept. 5, Mr. Combs flew to New York, intending to turn himself in. It was part of a plan to present Mr. Combs as cooperative and well-behaved, laying the groundwork to make a favorable argument before a judge that he should be released on bail after his arrest.

But on Sept. 16, the night before his indictment was set to be unsealed, federal agents in button-up shirts with badges hanging from their necks approached Mr. Combs in the lobby of the Park Hyatt New York, where he was staying. They separated the mogul, dressed in a long dark coat, from the group he was entering with and led him out of the luxurious hotel with his hands cuffed behind his back.

At his arraignment, Mr. Combs’s lawyers argued that he was not a flight risk or a danger to the community, and offered a $50 million bond. But prosecutors said the InterContinental hotel video showed the danger he posed, and noted that when agents arrested him, they found bags of pink powder in his room.

“At a time when he should be on his very, very best behavior,” Christy Slavik, one of the prosecutors, said at the hearing, “he had what appears to be narcotics at his hotel room.”

The magistrate judge denied the bail request, and Mr. Combs was remanded to the Metropolitan Detention Center, where has remained since.

“Your lawyer asked me to trust you and to trust him,” said the judge, Robyn F. Tarnofsky, “and I don’t know that I think you can trust yourself.”

Julia Jacobs and Nate Schweber contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

Author: Ben Sisario

Source: N.Y Times

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