This story was first published on Monday, May 12, providing an in-depth look at the opening arguments in Sean Combs’ sex trafficking trial. We are committed to delivering real-time updates as the case unfolds, with daily coverage of courtroom developments, witness testimonies, and breaking news. This story contains graphic descriptions of abuse, sexual violence, and drug use that may be distressing for some readers. Reader discretion is advised.
Update as of June 13
Kanye West, otherwise known as ‘Ye’ came to court on Friday and his arrival, lasting only 40 minutes, eclipsed court proceedings.
Here’s what he wore: straight-leg denim pants tailored to hug the hip—though washed bright, the topstitch could be seen through each seam. The matching jacket was closed with five silver buttons and a simple collar. The top featured two military-style pockets across the chest with a double-diagonal seam cascading down the closure. The rapper accessorized everything with brown pointy-toed leather boots and black strapped sunglasses.
Ye is working with Christian Combs on new music—but the designer-prenuer, when asked if he was there to support the Bad Boy mogul, nodded his head, “yes.”
West released, “Lonely Roads Still Go to Sunshine,” a song featuring a prison call with Sean Combs (and West’s daughter North West) where he’s thanking the fashion designer/rapper for “taking care of my kids,” he said. “Ain’t nobody reach out to them, ain’t nobody call them.”
Ye praised Combs, attributing his growth in music and lifestyle to the mogul, “You raised me. Even when I ain’t know you, know what I’m saying?”
In exclusive footage, from La’Janeé, journalist and true crime podcaster of Crazi Crimes, Ye can be seen being escorted by Christian Combs from his vehicle to the court entrance.
That news eclipsed juror No. 6, a Black man who Judge Arun Subramanian believes he’ll dismiss.
The prosecution originally asked that the juror be dismissed on June 11 to the objection of the defense who called their request “a thinly veiled effort to dismiss a Black juror.”
Judge Subramanian early Friday suggested Juror No. 6 answer a few questions—largely having to do with his residency, which is the issue. Initially, the juror said he lived in the Bronx. Now it appears, his residency is in New Jersey. There are, as the judge puts it, “several inconsistencies” having to do with where the juror lives.
“The juror is unable to answer simple questions,” Judge Subramanian said. “There are serious questions about the juror’s candor and ability to follow instructions.”
Monday, as the prosecution continues to close their case and the defense readies theirs—should Judge Subramanian dismiss Juror No. 6, one of the six alternates on the bench will be employed.
That was just one of the debates that took place before the first witness was called to the stand.
There were guns found during one of the search and seizures of Combs’ home in Los Angeles in 2024. The prosecution planned to call Special Agent Andre LaMon—who supervised the search. Defense lead Marc Agnifilo argued that because LaMon did not find the guns himself, he could not testify to the state in which they were found.
Those guns, which the prosecution and defense argued about before the witness took the stand, were found in Combs’ security room. One of the weapons had a scratched off serial number.
During cross-examination, Agnifilo asked about documentation protocol—and what LaMon’s responsibility was during Combs’ search and seizure.
The witness said his “sole purpose upon entering the location is to look for people, or if they encounter weapons to make weapons safe.”
Before the day ended, Jonathan Perez took the stand to talk about “King Nights,” another phrase the prosecution introduced for freak-offs. That’s three now.
Perez was hired by Kristina Khorram as Combs’ assistant and was one of four at the time, making $85,000 in 2021 before leaving in 2024 when he was making $100,000. He worked 12-hour shifts for the mogul and reported directly to Khorram.
The assistant, who exercised his Fifth Amendment, before being compelled to testify by the prosecution and was given immunity by the judge, testified at length about Combs and his relationship with Jane.
Through texts, shown in court, Perez spoke to the closeness of his relationship with Jane and their preparing for “King Nights,” which often included him buying supplies—baby oil, drugs, and lingerie for Jane using company cards, and cash he’d get from security.
During cross-examination, Perez said Jane never appeared unhappy about “King Nights,” to which the prosecution objected.
Update as of June 12
Court started on time but a sea of texts, uncertainty about Jane, regulations over what can be said, celebrities whose names were allowed to be mentioned, and whether Sean Combs could or should be allowed in the room when these things were being discussed—all delayed testimony on Thursday.
Jane is on her sixth day of testimony.
Defense attorney Teny Geragos advocated earlier in the day for an audio message where Combs expressed his confusion having to do with the influencer’s discomfort with “hotel nights.” Had this been allowed to play, which Judge Arun Subramanian ultimately ruled against, the jury could have further reasonable doubt towards the coercion piece in the sex trafficking charge—which the prosecution says has to do with, “Mr. Combs trying to feed Jane a narrative throughout their relationship,” adding, “the jury can’t unhear that.”
Before the jury arrived, attorneys from the defense and prosecution met in Judge Subramanian’s robing room twice—each for a substantial amount of time. This was different from sidebars, which have become a frequent and regular occurrence throughout the case.
Jane’s attorney, who has been present throughout her testimony, was included.
A January 2024 hotel event not to be confused with a “hotel night” was a point of discussion during one of the meetings in in Judge Subramanian’s robing room. Defense attorney Marc Agnifilo went on the record in his objection to not mention who was in attendance during the event—and the right to mention them by name. The defense attorney also objected to not allowing Combs to be present during the discussions.
In January of 2024, Jane found herself in another hotel room in Las Vegas. There was an entertainer there—and she knew him quite well.
Anton.
There was another big difference. Combs wasn’t there. The two had broken up—or more appropriately, they were on a break. Jane was there with a rapper. That night, she was not having sex with Anton. The rapper wasn’t named during trial. But Jane travelled to Sin City with he and his friends.
Together, with between seven to eight people in the room, including Jane, they watched a woman, whose name was also not mentioned, have sex with Anton.
Jane said, “he (the rapper) said something like he thought I was beautiful and always wanted to ‘blank’ me.” Whether this was before or after the influencer flashed her breast to the room, is unclear.
Jane said it was an “in the moment thing.”
Anton was a guest of the rapper’s. He knew him, and the girl who he’d slept with that night.
When Jane and Combs took a break from their breakup, and got back together, he accused her of cheating with the rapper.
Prior to the Cassie’s suit filing, Jane said she’d not had a violent moment with the mogul. When she confessed her discomfort with “hotel nights,” the mogul told her he was unaware of how she felt.
“At the time you believed him, right?” Geragos asked.
“Yes, I did,” Jane replied, saying that Combs became more loving after the footage was released by CNN.
That same year in 2024, things got volatile, after that, things got physical.
“You’re a pedophile! You’re a monster,” Jane screamed at Combs.
She threw two lit candles at the mogul. Yesterday she testified to slamming his head onto a countertop. Today, she was asked about throwing glass at him—which she confirmed.
“I think it was just a ball of emotions that night,” Jane said.
There was another woman, again. One that lived in Miami and could spend more time with him. Geragos asked, and Jane answered—she “didn’t like that.”
The woman in question “wasn’t underage.” The defense asked, and Jane confessed.
Today, Jane testified that when Combs finally did get to her, he held her so tightly, she “couldn’t breathe.”
She told the prosecution Combs’ demeanor was “evil.”
Geragos asked if she’d previously told the prosecution if she “almost couldn’t breathe,” in that same instance, to which Jane conceded, “yes.”
After the video from CNN, and the altercation with Combs, Jane’s friends advised she leave the relationship. One friend said, “you set the standard.”
Jane said her behavior, having to do with violence, had nothing to do with the lawsuit.
“At this point I had just reached my breaking point in the relationship.”
Jane felt owed and owned, she’d said through text.
“Please stop acting like I didn’t shelf myself to be just only your girl,” she texted the mogul.
Combs felt majorly disrespected by Jane’s attendance at Combs’ “friend’s” freak-off.
Other women in Combs’ life were posting clips from award-winning podcasts and features with birkens and bottegas—and Jane wasn’t allowed to go public. Could this have been her form of thought?
“At least say you understand that it wasn’t cool to have me just doing hotel nights and everyone got private jets all over the world. I don’t even have anything post worthy from our relationship,” she said in text.
The last time Jane saw the mogul in person, “It was OK,” she said.
In one of their last texts, Jane wrote “Good morning handsome,” to which Combs replied, “Can you please find a therapist?”
“Hotel nights” didn’t make Jane feel human—that’s something she remembered.
In a text to Paul, the entertainer she developed a friendship with, she wrote, “It had been 24 hours with no breaks for me and at first, I was going with the flow for the second linkup, but I had warned him that I just felt overwhelmed to overperform for a moment I’ve never done before. I’m not a robot, just a mix of tired, hungry, sleepy, sore.”
For Combs, “hotel nights” were a fantasy. Jane adopted the work of a fantasy worker to “put on a show,” as she said.
During another examination by the prosecution, she said, “I wish I could forget them,” of the “hotel nights.”
Here’s a breakdown of Jane’s finances:
- ESSENCE previously reported she was making $4,700 a month in child support.
- The influencer told Teny Geragos she makes $10,000 a month in income from OnlyFans, and has made up to $50,000 a month.
- Combs has given Jane an estimated $150,000.
When Geragos asked if she wanted more from Combs, Jane asked, “Do you think I’m worth more than that?”
Jane left today, but not before hugging members of the prosecution, and Geragos.
Update as of June 10
Jane remembers the foot rubs she gave Sean Combs. She also used to bathe him, she testified. The mogul introduced her to gospel music and a pastor—Combs’ favorite pastor, who she still streams today. Together, they’d watch his favorite TV show, Dateline, and though she hated the “hotel nights,” she loved making love to him.
Combs had a light, per Jane’s testimony. That light helped her with insecurities she’d had. “He would uplift me,” she told the defense, alluding to a shyness she struggled with. She was 35 when she met the mogul.
Jane’s testimony could aid the prosecution in their sex trafficking charges Combs is facing which carries a mandatory sentence of 15 years and a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Attorney Symone Redwine, who has been practicing law since 2008, traveled to New York to cover the case for her popular YouTube channel, “Girl, Is That Legal?” says “In order for the government to succeed on the sex trafficking charge, they have to show that it was a commercial sex act or an attempted one and that it was caused through coercion which can include serious financial pressure.” She added, “most importantly, they have to be able to prove that coercion made the victim believe she had no meaningful choice.”
Redwine is licensed to practice law in Texas and New York. She previously represented one of the victims in an R. Kelly civil suit. The attorney’s channel is a breakdown of celebrity cases in a relatable way that feels like brunch talk over mimosas with your homegirls. She’s been called, “Your Legal Bestie,” on Youtube and on Social Media.
Combs invested $20,000 into Jane’s swimwear line—though while with the mogul, she felt as though she could have earned a substantial amount higher. Today, she testified that she only earned 10 percent of her potential income. She receives $4,700 a month in child support.
Jane confirmed Combs hasn’t asked for any profits from the business.
In total, defense attorney Teny Geragos estimated, Combs gifted Jane about $150,000 to which Jane said, “I never really counted, but I would assume yeah, that would be close.”
In reference to the rent, the defense mentioned that Combs paid $40,000 in a deposit to the landlord. He’d pay several months’ rent in advance with each payment—which they say, Jane knew.
Where the coercion is concerned, Redwine says, more is needed because Jane was free to walk away at anytime. “If the only consequence for her at the end is the termination of that financial arrangement, that’s not going to be good enough under the law.”
Jane recalled times where Combs would leverage payments as a form of manipulation.
“There were times that I definitely felt that he would do that,” Jane conceded. “And he used it kind of as a little tool. The rent was always just like a little reminder,” she added.
Redwine says, to the issue of coercion, “The challenge there is that those examples of control, undermine the government’s theory that the victim had no real choice and it counters the concept that the participation was voluntary.”
Today, Caresha, otherwise known as Yung Miami—one half of the former rap duo City Girls, was mentioned by name.
When Combs began dating Yung Miami, the two’s relationship made headlines. If Combs was dating other women, this relationship was the one that was public. Per Jane, “Bert” and “Ernie” were still very much, an item.
“It was definitely not something that I signed up for,” she said. “I didn’t sign up to date a man that was in a public relationship.”
But there was another woman Jane had to deal with—one that had been there all along. This woman was there during Kim Porter, Cassandra Ventura, Virginia Huyhn, and yes, Yung Miami too.
Kristina Khorram.
“I believe that she had very strong opinions about me,” Jane said of Khorram. “(She) influenced a great deal of how Sean also treated me,” Jane added.
Could that be true? Jane thought so. The influencer testified that Combs’ chief of staff preferred the mogul focus more on work and hated when he partied, which most certainly included “hotel nights” and as an extension—Jane.
Those now infamous “…nights” which had become a part of Jane and the mogul’s relationship, included video recordings. Geragos questioned the influencer’s participation in the recordings and her willingness to be “sexy.”
“I did not like that part, but it was just a part of the relationship,” Jane said. Any recaps, involving her watching the films with Combs, was—according to the witness, her wanting to make sure he didn’t feel rejected.
Today, Jane said “my choices were made under a lot of emotional pressure” while under cross-examination.
Earlier, Jane referenced Combs’ light. Previous testimony from assistants referenced the mogul’s larger than life persona—mirroring a good versus bad situationship that kept them coming back—most notably, Cassie and Capricorn Clark.
Redwine says, “You have to be realistic” in reference to the prosecution having to compete with Combs’ legacy. “Some people don’t want their heroes to die; they don’t want their heroes to go out.” If that’s true, she suggests a strong strategy for the prosecution would be using Combs’ persona to explain why it would have been harder to say no to him, than the average individual.
“In Cassie’s case, he could have prevented her from working in the industry again and in Capricorn Clark’s case, he did prevent her from working again,” Redwine says.
Though the mogul is still financing Jane’s attorney’s fees and rent, she told the court today that she has not spoken to Combs since before his September 2024 arrest.
Judge Arun Subramanian has denied the defense’s motion for mistrial—which they filed over the weekend on the grounds of Bryana Bongolan’s testimony alleging Combs hung her from the balcony of a 17-story building. He also denied the prosecution’s request to bring expert witness Dawn Hughes back to the stand.
Court resumes tomorrow at 1 p.m.
Update as of June 9
“I’m not a porn star. I’m not an animal.”
The other women were a problem.
“Jane,” a pseudonym for the prosecution’s witness that’s in her third day of testimony referenced multiple women on Monday. They weren’t the only problem, but having different relationships to compare hers to caused a problem for the influencer who felt she was being used throughout her love contract with Sean Combs.
“I became the side chick and sex worker in my own relationship,” Jane said in an audio message to Combs.
The Turks and Caicos trip the two took at the beginning of their relationship was years past when Combs promised Jane a New York trip. In court today, it was referred to as a “proper New York trip.”
The mogul was not to mention a “hotel night”—the phrase the prosecution is likening to Jane’s sexual experiences with the Combs to separate the freak-offs he’d had with singer Cassandra Ventura.
On September 17, 2023, Jane readied herself for the trip, but when she boarded the plane, with Combs’ promise afoot, a text appeared from the mogul about arranging a “hotel night.”
“I just remember just taking a deep breath and just feeling upset and a little disappointed, a little defeated,” Jane said.
Jane still got on the plane.
“At this point, I’m just so used to this being the outcome of whatever we’re doing that I just accept it,” she said.
Combs had a surprise. “Just one,” he texted. Jane said he was introducing her to a new entertainer for a “hotel night.”
She “hated it,” she testified Monday.
Jane argued with Combs. A lot. The mogul was defensive, she recalled.
But after the arguing, the “hotel night” happened. When they returned and Jane visited Combs again in Miami, he wanted to “watch footage from the New York trip,” Jane said.
A month later when the mogul texted Jane—again—to ask her to arrange another “hotel night,” he was allegedly with another woman.
Jane knew and was furious.
“You got that girl next to you so figure it out,” Jane texted back.
When Combs suggested that Jane was the “only thing that would put him at peace,” after pleading with the influencer, she replied again, “Introduce her to P. It’s not me it’s the entertainment that puts you at peace.”
“P,” was Paul, an entertainer with whom she’d had numerous “hotel nights.”
Sex, per Jane, was sacred. But the experience and act itself was becoming desensitizing—especially with Combs.
“I don’t feel like performing loveless cold sex,” she wrote in a text to the mogul.
Things the other women seem to get effortlessly, Jane had to work for, she told the jury Monday.
“I had to earn just basic things from my relationship like love and respect and romance, but I felt like he was giving it to everyone else.”
“I’m tired,” Jane declared via text.
For three years she’d had sex with “strangers.” This included Sly who she’d nicknamed “Chef.” Per Jane’s testimony Sly threatened to release footage of her and him having sex.
“My heart was beating out of my chest and I couldn’t believe what he was saying to me,” according to Jane. Sly wanted $10,000. The footage was recorded on Sly’s phone by Combs—but after the mogul got involved, Jane didn’t hear anything else about it.
She needed a break.
When she pleaded her case to the Bad Boy, he texted, “So we’re breaking up.”
When Combs suggested the two spend the day together, just the two of them, Jane’s response was swift.
“Spend the day with your family or Gina, I need time to myself.”
Gina is Virginia Huynh, a previous girlfriend of Combs who was originally listed as Victim #3 in the prosecution’s case. Gina was slated to testify, but after unforeseen circumstances she’s no longer taking the stand.
“You beat the love out of us. You made it crystal clear exactly what you want me for. You’re going to spend the day love bombing me so you can get what you want?” Jane asked.
“It’s not genuine. I’ve hit a mental and spiritual wall,” Jane texted.
Jane’s house has been a part of their relationship—prominently as much as hers and Combs’ “hotel nights.”
When their break happened, Combs began calling her, and while she wasn’t answering. His audio messages ensued.
“That’s my house too,” Combs declared.
As we previously reported, Combs is paying Jane’s rent, but he’s also paying her attorneys fees.
At a sobriety party that turned into a “hotel night,” Jane got sick, vomiting—after having sex with three men.
“OK, that’s good, you’ll feel better now. Let’s go outside,” Combs said.
Jane later asked Combs for money after the incident. The mogul called the influencer “crazy.”
Jane had to deal with UTI’s and yeast infections as she previously testified.
“You placed and paid all these harmful men on me and risked my health,” she texted Combs.
When news of Cassie’s civil suit broke, Jane recalls reacting like ‘I can’t believe I’m reading my own story,’” adding, “I feel like I’m reading my own sexual trauma.”
She was with Combs when the March 5, 2016, InterContinental footage of the mogul beating Cassie was released by CNN.
“He said that that was the only time they had physical violence like that,” Jane testified.
After a fight Combs and Jane had that began to escalate, the influencer locked herself in a bathroom.
“Sean kicked me in the back of my thigh, and I fell down,” Jane said. “Then he picked me up in a chokehold and choked me.”
Jane ran from Combs, but the mogul caught up to her. “He started punching my head. He started kicking me. He started saying all kinds of things and just kept punching me,” she said.
The jury saw images of visible bruises on Jane.
During a phone call between Jane and Combs, which was played in court, the mogul could be heard telling her, “Combs said, “I need you to be there for me.”
Jane responded, “Who’s there for me when I close my eyes and I have these f**ked up things in my head.”
Update as of June 6
If we were going to be doing this,” Jane said, “I should choose who was going to be on my body.”
That’s when she hired Sly Diggler, an Atlanta-based adult entertainer whose real name is Kabrale Williams.
“Sean was encouraging and flirtatious about it,” Jane recalls. “I said I can probably message him and see what happens.”
And that’s exactly what she did—through Instagram. Jane direct messaged the entertainer who is also a chef and the two agreed to meet. Williams, according to Jane, knew that her partner would be present—though it is unclear if he knew that her partner was Sean “Diddy” Combs.
During the mogul’s freak-offs with Cassie Ventura, he was often covered.
Jane booked a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles for the entertainer. She was reimbursed by Combs. When the two had sex, Combs watched and as with Ventura, he masturbated.
“I would often suggest Kabrale, because he was familiar to me,” Jane said.
The entertainer was always paid between $2,000 and $4,000.
Kabrale, who she nicknamed “Chef,” because of his culinary business, and Anton Harris—another entertainer Jane hired, were often communicated with on FaceTime and Combs was always in the room.
Before lunch, the prosecution played audio from a hotel night, where Jane and Don—an entertainer she talked about yesterday, were looking for a condom at her request.
“You promised!” Jane pleaded with Combs when he enters the room asking what she and Don were searching for.
“You were just taking d**k,” Combs can be heard saying in response to Jane searching and then asking Don to wear a condom. “If you don’t just touch yourself right now,” he demands.
Combs looked disgusted, Jane recalled when she began to cry after 18 hours of sex with another entertainer. Combs had to leave, and Jane felt “terrible that he was going to leave me alone,” she said.
In a text to Combs, Jane wrote about her feelings of obligation tied to sex during their “hotel nights” and the mogul’s agreement to pay her rent.
“I feel it’s the only reason you have me around and why you pay for the house,” the text read. “I don’t want to feel obligated to perform these nights for you.”
Combs’ reply—“Girl stop.”
When Combs had Jane travel with drugs across state lines while on a commercial flight, she asked questions. Once Kristina Khorram gave her the “okay,” she proceeded.
It was 2022. Jane was going to Miami from Los Angeles to visit Combs—with a “package.”
“I just asked her if this was safe and okay,” Jane said of a conversation with Khorram. “It’s fine, I do it all the time, just put it in your check(ed) in luggage,” Combs’ chief of staff told her.
When she arrived in Miami, Jane and Combs took the pills together—it was ecstasy.
Jane didn’t go to an Island for her birthday in 2023. A hotel in Miami was as exotic as it got for the influencer that year.
She got a necklace, but she didn’t describe how it was designed. There were no diamonds or beautiful sentiments in the description of Jane’s retelling of this birthday. Right after she got the necklace an entertainer came—and it was clear that she was having a “hotel night.”
“I didn’t want to do this on my birthday,” Jane said sobbing. “I just remember at this point in our relationship, this just had become so routine that I just was in my same rhythm just, like, robotically just the same thing.”
Jane, concerned with ruining the mood for Combs on her birthday, only asked once for a condom.
She was grateful for the décor, though. “He made that suite look really nice for me when we got there,” Jane recalled.
Jane had sex with the man, and after he left, another arrived. She said they were directed by Combs to have, “hours and hours” of more sex. A third man arrived. “Inside I hated it,” Jane said.
Each “hotel night” was recorded by Combs and though Jane hated it, she said she acted as if she enjoyed “because I wanted to put on a good show.”
Jane still had to perform during “hotel nights” amid a urinary tract infections and yeast infections—both of which she’d had as a result of the sexual encounters.
But it was another woman that pushed her to her breaking point. In a text message she sent to Combs in 2021, she began feeling neglected.
“I felt mistreated that I was coming there to do a ‘hotel night’ and when I leave he’s giving another woman this quality time that I was like begging for,” she writes. In another text, she adds, “I need a breather and a break from you. This doesn’t make me feel good at all. Your true intentions with me are in plain sight.”
It was sad for Jane when she saw Combs’ new relationship on social media. The birthday party he threw his new girlfriend felt even worse.
“It was really heartbreaking for me because I felt that I saw this big grandiose birthday that he did for her versus the type of birthday that I just experienced with him,” she testified.
One thing was for sure, at least for Jane—the “hotel nights,” were done. “I don’t ever want to do another hotel night,” she texted.
Jane began comparing what Combs was doing for her to his new girlfriend.
“It was really hurtful to see that Sean was so capable of doing these really romantic, love gestures but when it came to me I was just always met with excuses,” Jane said.
Jane confessed to Combs in text, “I didn’t want to do all of that on my birthday,” adding, “I want to get off the hamster wheel.”
She didn’t get the response she wanted from Combs. “I’m tired of these long texts telling me what I’m doing wrong.”
Jane kept notes about Combs—none more poignant than the following, “You know what babe it’s okay I just accept the fact that you were a pathological liar,” adding she felt she was “being used every Friday to get high.”
When the two reunited for a couple’s trip “back down memory lane,” in Turks and Caicos—somehow, a “hotel night,” ensued.
Five nights on the island where they’d first said ‘I love you,’ and then Paul arrives.
“We’re both laying down, and I’m just so excited that I just get to cuddle with him and he gets this, like, look like he still wants more, and he’s saying like ‘do you have more in you?’,” Jane recalls.
She was sore. It had been hours, again, of sex. But when the two – she and Combs arrived to Turks, he’d given her a bracelet.
Out of anger, she threw the bracelet against the wall and stormed out of the villa.
“I remember him (Combs) saying like ‘Are you crazy? How could you make me look like that.’”
Combs is still paying Jane’s rent as part of a “love contract” that the two have—though she has always been afraid that she would be cut off financially.
“You better get on your job, that’s all it is,” Combs warned after the two argued. In an audio message, Combs said, “I can’t do this sh*t with you every time you get upset.”
In court today, she referred to Combs as a rollercoaster of confusion.
Update as of June 5
“I was really consumed by Sean.”
“Jane” was immediately swept off her feet. For her, it was an old-fashioned love story, filled with “so many lovely things”—she remembered.
The two met when Jane was on a girl’s trip in Miami in 2020. At the time, Sean Combs was romantically linked to one of Jane’s friends. Jane admits to an immediate attraction.
“He was really charming, really nice, and I was already drawn to him pretty instantly,” she said.
Jane’s first experience with drugs together with Combs involved a pink powdery substance at the mogul’s Miami residence. She and her friends left abruptly.
When it was her birthday in February of 2021, the mogul took her to Turks and Caicos where they spent nine days and then they took his private jet to the Bahamas where they spent another six days. Though she wasn’t ignorant to the fact that there were “other women,” as she’d eventually say, at least for those 15 days it was all about her.
“I understood on his end, it was an open relationship,” Jane said. “He made it clear he really liked me, but he was seeing multiple women.”
Jane had only used drugs twice in her life, she said; so when the mogul offered her ecstasy on the beach in Turks and Caicos and she took the whole pill, her reaction was “euphoric.”
“I was walking down the beach,” she recalled, “and I just fell to the sand and KK tried to help me.”
Combs’ staff—which included Kristina Khorram, his chief of staff, a chef, and a barber, were all present on the trip, per Jane. According to the witness, she had to be put in a shower by KK (commonly referred to as Kristina Khorram) “to calm my senses.”
Throughout the nine days Jane was at Turks specifically, she was given ecstasy 10 times by Combs.
By the end of the trip, the two were telling one another, “I love you.”
When the two would have sex, it was always while under the influence according to Jane—ecstasy, ketamine, molly, and cocaine. Usually, the two would be awake for 15-24 hours.
Their first date in late 2021 lasted five days. Jane was flown to Miami. Combs purchased a hotel for her. At a dinner, they’d talked about past relationships. Jane didn’t feel as bad about moving forward with the mogul, because her friend had gotten engaged and relocated overseas; but there was something the mogul didn’t know.
The father of Jane’s child was a public nemesis of the mogul. That, and in 2015, she’d dated a close friend of Combs.
Still, he didn’t care. Her forthrightness sustained their “situationship” up until his arrest in 2024.
Throughout their relationship, he’d wired her as much as $20,000 at one time. Jane said to her, “that was a lot of money.”
In May of 2021, Jane experienced what the prosecution is calling a “hotel night.”
Jane’s testimony about “hotel nights” are eerily similar to Cassandra Ventura’s. While the timeline is years apart, there’s a familiarity in wardrobe, and props. Combs would direct “hotel nights” as well.
“I can make this fantasy a reality if you like,” Combs told Jane when the two were looking at pornography she testified.
For the first time, Jane’s voice trembled as she grabbed a tissue and patted her eyes.
“I was really into my partner,” she said.
But within hours, she found herself no longer at Combs’ Miami residence and was instead in a hotel. She was wearing what she described as “provocative lingerie,” and “really high stripper heels.”
Combs’ staff was there setting up the room, just as his assistants had been testifying for weeks.
“The light was already red,” Jane recalled. “I was super nervous.”
Don was there in the hotel suite. “Cowboys 4 Angels, a male escort site,” she told the prosecution.
Combs knew Don, but when Jane asked him to wear a condom, the mogul didn’t like that.
“These guys get tested all the time,” he told her.
After she and Don had sex, she had sex with Combs.
“I felt excited, I was happy, it was taboo, it was fun, I had a good time with my partner,” Jane said.
But after that night, 90 percent of her sexual encounters with Combs involved other men.
“I truly felt that that night just opened like a Pandora’s box in the relationship,” Jane said. “It was too much.”
As an influencer, most of Jane’s income—other than child support, came from promotion on social media. When she began dating Combs, he was paying her rent on an apartment in Los Angeles totaling $10,000 monthly.
“My feeling of obligation really started to stem from the fact that my partner was paying my rent.”
When she began to protest bringing other men into the bedroom, Combs alluded to no longer financing her apartment.
“If you want to break up, that’s fine,” Jane said Combs told her. “I’m not paying rent for a woman I’m not seeing—per her recollection.
“I felt frustrated,” Jane said.
Jane is expected to spend multiple days on the witness stand. Judge Arun Subramanian warns against revealing the identity of Jane either in the press, or on social media. The witness is testifying under strict anonymity.
Yesterday, Bryana Bongolan recalled an experience that the defense tried to debunk today, through schedule discrepancies.
Nicole Westmoreland, Combs’ only Black female attorney through a hotel bill at a Trump Hotel property dated September 24-27, 2016, brought into question the date Bongolan says she was held over a ledge outside of Cassie’s apartment in a 17-story building—September 26, 2016.
“Isn’t it true that you continued to hang out at Cassie’s home because Mr. Combs did not cause you those injuries?” Westmoreland asked.
“Part of that statement is true, part of that statement I can’t agree with,” Bongolan said.
Of the schedule discrepancy, Westmoreland asked— “You agree that one person cannot be in two places at the same time?”
“In theory, yeah,” Bongolan said.
Update as of June 4
The adrenaline of it all left Bryana Bongolan in disbelief for a while, she recalled. At just five feet tall, her feet dangled from the outside of Cassie’s apartment in a 17-floor building.
“Do you know what the fuck you did?” Combs demanded several times.
“I either lit the blunt or was about to light it,” Bongolan testified. “He basically came up behind me.
It was unclear if Combs was under the influence of a narcotic at the time.
Bongolan was smoking marijuana at the time of the mogul’s attack.
It’s been nine years since that attack and she still doesn’t know what she did.
It was the middle of the night. Bongolan’s now ex-girlfriend at the time was hiding in the guest bathroom. Even then, she considered herself a protector of sorts. Today, Bongolan testified that she didn’t want to expose her ex-girlfriend to the things she’d seen.
Cassie for once wasn’t the target. She too, was in another room.
This time, the target was Bongolan, per her testimony.
“I don’t know what the fuck I did!” she fired back at the mogul as her legs dangled in the atmosphere. There was no space, nothing to break her fall that night if Combs would have slipped and dropped her.
She still gets “nightmares, a lot of paranoia, and I used to scream a lot in my sleep, but it’s dissipated a little bit.”
Bongolan is still close friends with Cassie and testified under immunity from Judge Arun Subramanian after invoking her Fifth Amendment right.
Combs didn’t drop her that night in 2016. He did throw her onto balcony furniture. She was injured, but didn’t realize until much later.
She didn’t report the incident to the police, she said, because “I was just scared of Puff.”
Previously, while on a shoot with Cassie, the mogul had threatened Bongolan.
“He came up really close to my face and said something around the lines of, ‘I’m the devil and I could kill you.’”
Days after being hung over the ledge of Cassie’s apartment, the mogul FaceTime called her.
“I remember saying a couple times, I don’t want any problems with you,” Bongolan testified.
She and Cassie met, working at a clothing brand. The two became fast friends—and when the singer pushed for Bongolan to meet Combs, she resisted.
“I did not want to meet him right away; I had seen a black eye.”
Bongolan did drugs with Cassie and admitted on the stand to being under the influence on several occasions—through their relationship to 2018 when she became sober transitioning to a “sporadic” basis.
After filing a suit against Combs “because I wanted to seek justice for what happened to me,” Bongolan said, Cassie’s friend is seeking $10 million.
Earlier today, the prosecution called Frank Piazza to the witness stand. He’s an audio and video editor who is being paid $295 an hour to be in court. He analyzed the March 5, 2016 video and several “sex videos” obtained from a laptop.
The InterContinental Hotel video footage has been a primary source of evidence for the prosecution, and as such the defense has disputed the authenticity of the initial submission from when CNN originally broke the story of Combs’ abuse scandal—saying the footage might have been sped up.
In reference to the March 5, 2016 video—Piazza said that a file conversion during a technical processing had sped the video. The expert slowed the footage to its original speed. Despite the technical speed, Piazza testified that he believed the video showed an accurate portrayal of what took place.
The “sex videos”—each from 2012 to 2014, were taken from a laptop where the username was “Frank Black.” There were 10 in total, all of which were enhanced by Piazza. The laptop was turned over to the prosecution from Cassie.
The “sex videos” have been admitted into evidence under a seal.
Update as of June 3
It took three men to restrain a woman and remove her from the courtroom on the 26th floor Tuesday morning. “You’re laughing at a Black man’s legacy!” she screamed.
“Don’t do it,” a guard warned.”
But the woman didn’t back down. “Pull your gun out nigga, I dare you!”
The jury hadn’t arrived.
Tuesday morning at around 7:10 a.m. a tight-waisted, impeccably-dressed female journalist with honey blonde hair did her routine count of the press line. It was her way of maintaining order in an otherwise chaotic line of public and passerby. Her mathematics was always on point, especially today when security came to move the people from the side of Worth Street to the doors of the courthouse. Her count has become a precursor for a list that you want to be on in order to make it onto the 26th floor—otherwise you land in the overflow room.
Why is this important? Because the media has become as much a part of the Sean Combs sex trafficking trial as the mogul himself. And today in line, that’s all anyone was talking about—that, and the woman who for days, had been getting put out of the courtroom.
She was the same woman who was forcibly removed by three guards 30 minutes into the day.
Sean Combs turned around as the woman was being pulled out of the brown double doors and within minutes, it was as if nothing had happened. Eddy Garcia was on the witness stand under immunity from Judge Arun Subramanian telling the jury about how the mogul would refer to him as “Eddy My Angel.”
The former InterContinential Hotel security guard, who was 24 at the time, took a bribe from the mogul in the amount of $30,000 in exchange for a flash drive containing the footage of the March 5, 2016 beating involving Combs and Cassie Ventura.
A little over an hour into his shift the day of the incident, the witness says, Kristina Khorram called to ask for the footage.
Garcia would talk to Khorram and Combs separately and together—even on his cell phone (though he did not give them his number) and each time they’d ask for the footage from the March 5 beating.
The witness initially told Khorram, “she would have to reach out to hotel management or get a subpoena,” eventually telling them both, “off the record, it’s bad.”
It could ruin him, Combs told Garcia.
Anxiously, the mogul begged the ex-security guard for the footage Garcia testified.
“He stated that I sounded like a good guy, that I sounded like I wanted to help.”
When Garcia called his boss, there was a pause with a moment of silence and then an offer. He’d “do it for 50,” Garcia recalled.
Khorram and Combs made the arrangements.
“Eddy, my angel, I knew you could help. I knew you could do it,” Garcia remembers being told by Combs.
When Garcia went to meet him in person, he had to let the other guards know that he was running an errand. He testified today that he was nervous. His voice didn’t sound the same. It began to crack and he spoke, but he told Combs he was coming down with something. The mogul sent Khorram into another room to get a tea for the ex-security guard. There, Garcia together with Combs and the mogul’s own bodyguard stood.
“He said it had to be the only copy and that he didn’t want it getting out and if I was sure nothing was on the cloud,” Garcia recalled. “This only works if we’re all on the same page.”
But Garcia was concerned about Ventura filing a report later. When he told Combs about his concerns, he called the singer on FaceTime. She vouched for Combs.
Garcia said “She (Ventura) wanted this to go away.”
Before Garcia got his (and his boss’) money, he had to sign an NDA that had a $1 million penalty. He never read the document. At the time, he was making $10.50 an hour as a security guard.
“I was nervous, I was in a rush to get out of there,” he recalled.
Garcia was given $100,000 in a brown paper bag. He gave $50,000 to his boss, $20,000 to another worker, and kept $30,000 for himself. He purchased a used car with his share of the bribe.
Mid-day, Derek Ferguson was called to the stand. He worked at Bad Boy Enterprises from 1998 to 2017 as Chief Financial Officer. Originally from the Bronx, the businessman said he thought Combs’ companies were an opportunity to employ people from neighborhoods like his. Ferguson was hired a year after the death of Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace. Ferguson, who was hired a year after Christopher Wallace’s death, offered mostly terse “yes” or “no” answers, but revealed that artists were paid in cash during Bad Boy’s early years, he was unaware security carried bags of money, he left the label for REVOLT TV in 2017, and Combs unsuccessfully tried to reconnect with him in 2024.
Mia, who we previously reported, is a pseudonym, has had her identity revealed by two media outlets. Judge Subramanian has barred one outlet from attending the case in person. The other outlet, which revealed the witness’ identity on X, will likely face the same consequence.
The witness who is testifying under the pseudonym Jane Doe is going to take multiple days to testify. She is expected to go to the end of the week per prosecution.
Update as of June 2
Could there be something incriminating; enough for the next witness to invoke his fifth amendment right not to testify? Eddie Garcia thinks so. Before he’s slated to talk to the jury and while Mia was still being questioned by Young Thug’s (and now Diddy’s) attorney Brian Steele, the former InterContinental Hotel security employee did just that—urging Judge Arun Subramanian to sign an immunity agreement.
This is the second time this has happened. The first time was with Combs’ former assistant, George Kaplan.
The defense presented Mia with a compilation of her greatest hits via social media—all having to do with Combs and Bad Boy as an extension. Not many (if any) were negative.
While in a deep slumber in 2019, Mia said, she found herself in an impossible situation—running from a former king of R&B, now disgraced in the culture. He was chasing her in a dream that was more appropriately, a nightmare.
It was R. Kelly; the singer, who in New York, ironically, had been charged with racketeering and sex-trafficking—two of the same charges Combs is currently facing.
Today, Steele asked Mia about her text to Combs in 2019.
“I wrote,” she began to say slowly… “I wrote, I had a nightmare I was being chased by R. Kelly and you saved me.”
Steele immediately asked, “the person you say raped you, saved you?”
The prosecution objected before Mia could answer.
Where Capricorn Clark spoke to an unspoken need to act as a “protector” to Combs, Mia felt as though Combs was her protector—even when she was being reprimanded and attacked.
“Nobody acted like what was happening to me was wrong, and his threats about that he was going to tell Cassie about what happened made me internalize blame and shame,” she said today.
On Friday, she said often when being attacked (and sexually assaulted) by Combs, she felt unprotected.
In a video for his 44th birthday, Mia is seen blowing a kiss to the mogul and telling him she loved him. The prosecution objected to the jury being allowed to see the film—saying it presented a facade, but the judge allowed it. In most of the texts from Mia to Combs, the ex-assistant finished with “I love you.”
During mediation for her severance agreement, Mia said she didn’t mention the multiple times she was sexually assaulted by Combs—allegedly. As we stated previously, she was awarded $400,000 but walked away with $200,000.
Steele consistently called MeToo, especially in reference to Combs, a money grab. Mia vehemently denies being aware of the viral movement prior to filing her wrongful termination suit.
Receipts totaling $500 and sometimes more would be the norm for Combs—Sylvia Oken, who took the stand shortly after Mia departed, corroborated as much in her position as the director of sales and marketing at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
The jury was shown a bill for one such charge dating back to March 2015. That bill was for when Combs and Cassie were together, and the mogul entered the hotel under his now infamous alias Frank Black.
The defense had no cross-examination for the hotel worker.
Tomorrow, under an imposed immunity from the judge—Eddie Garcia will testify after his invoking his Fifth Amendment rights earlier today.
Update as of May 30
The best friend dynamic kept her safe, Mia said on her second day of testifying.
She’d send texts to the mogul, “love you” without hesitation today saying, “Because it’s just how we talked to each other.” She even added, “you’re just desperate to keep it there because you’re safe,” of the friendship dynamic.
But then there were times when that dynamic didn’t work for her—like when the mogul couldn’t find Cassie Ventura and Mia found herself in the middle. The sexual assault allegations she leveled against Combs yesterday were all used to control her.
In 2015, when Ventura was in South Africa for a film, she was ignoring Combs. The mogul had been cheating on her. He reached out to Mia to get to the singer.
“If you don’t call me now fuck it all. And imma tell everything. And don’t ever speak to me again. You have 2 min. Fuck her. Call my house now or never speak to me again. Fuck ABC and all lawyers. Let’s go to war,” he wrote in a text.
The mogul threatened to put a spin on his assaults, per Mia’s testimony, “as though it was my fault or that I was, or that I had a part in it.”
Combs sent Mia to South Africa to accompany Ventura while she was shooting the film, but after the incident, he told her to leave—not before sending one last text.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best that we no longer have any dealings.”
Like Capricorn Clark, Mia was fired and hired numerous times, before really and truly leaving in 2017.
When she was kicked off his yacht in 2010 for counting money too slow, he told her, “You better learn to walk on water like Jesus, bitch. Get the fuck out of here.”
In 2017, after a settlement offer of $10 million, Mia received $200,000. Kristina Khorram said on behalf of the mogul, he felt “stabbed him in the back” when Mia hired employment attorneys.
When Ventura filed her civil suit against the mogul, D-Roc began contacting Mia repeatedly. Mia believes it was to make sure she wasn’t “a threat.”
“(I) can’t believe you’re not hitting me back,” D-Roc texted the ex-assistant.
He, at one point, asked for her address. “I’m allowed to send my sister a gift.”
Mia believes the gift was money.
On February 4, 2024, she received a text from Combs directly.
“Hey Mia it’s Puff. Please let me know when you get 10 min to talk. Love.”
Three days later on the 7th he followed up.
“Hey I don’t wanna be blowing up your phone. Just needed to talk to you for 10 minutes. Just need my memory jogged on some things. You were my right hand for years so I just to speak to you to remember who was even around me. And it would be good to hear your voice. But if you don’t want to all good. Just let me know. Love. Hope you’re well.”
Mia told the prosecution she didn’t respond to either message.
“I just didn’t want anything to do with him at all.” She added, “He was the person I was traumatized by.”
The afternoon was spent with Mia being cross-examined by Brian Steele—Combs’ defense attorney who was also famously on the Young Thug case.
Social media was a focus for the defense.
When things were good, Mia almost forgot about the bad times, she confessed.
She’d often promote the mogul and the Bad Boy projects—and Revolt as an extension, having previously expressed an interest in wanting to develop TV projects.
When a scrapbook was brought up, she’d fondly said, “I remember this, it was so nice of me.”
Steele questioned Mia’s ability to make sense of her experience with sexual assault, to which she attributed her logic brain and trauma brain battling each other.
“Eventually it becomes normalized, and you’re just trying to get back to the good. You make excuses for people. I’m a people pleaser. I’m an empath. I’m a rule follower,” she said.
There’s more to come, Mia will take the stand again on Monday.
Update as of May 29
It had only been a few months for “Mia” when she found herself alone in a room with Sean Combs on his 40th birthday. They were at The Plaza Hotel; she was his new personal assistant.
“We’re going to be working closer together,” he told her as he poured them each two shots of vodka.
“They hit me hard,” Mia recalled. “Usually, I could take it easily,” she said.
Mia’s eyes couldn’t focus. Combs’ face crept closer to hers. She recalls the mogul moving his arms up the side of her dress. “He kissed me,” she recalled. “Next thing I knew, it was morning, and I was in a chair in the penthouse.”
That was Mia’s testimony of her first sexual encounter with Sean Combs. The music mogul’s ex-assistant who took the stand today under a pseudonym, recounted several times she’d been forced into several sexual encounters with Combs who is facing charges of sex-trafficking.
“It felt like forever. But he wouldn’t leave a job unfinished,” Mia said, sobbing on the stand.
Each time left the assistant feeling more terrified. Closets, hotels, exotic destinations—per Mia’s testimony, left her feeling unprotected.
“I would never work in that industry again,” she said when the prosecution asked why she didn’t tell him no. But for Mia, it was a lot more complex. “I’d be attacked. I don’t want to die.”
Cassie Ventura was never present for the times Mia was sexually assaulted, and in fact “he threated that he would tell Cass that I had something to do with it.”
Mia and Ventura have remained friends and today the witness corroborated Delonte Nash’s story about the beating the singer sustained at the hands of Combs in the hotel where Nash jumped on the mogul’s back in an attempt to restrain him.
Mia added detail to Capricorn Clark’s account related to Kid Cudi. When the rapper and Cassie began to date, Combs appeared to be sad—according to Mia.
“He seemed heartbroken. It was ominous. It felt like something bad would happen,” she told the jurors and the prosecution.
In an email to D-Roc, Mia wrote, “I’m worried about P, this feels different.”
The ‘Me Too’ Movement changed things, especially in the music industry as Mia noted during her testimony. Before then, the ex-assistant noted, there were no examples for proof of consequence.
“I believed Puff’s authority was above the police,” she said. “This was a period where — years and years before social media or ‘Me Too’ or any sort of example where someone had stood up successfully to someone in power such as him.”
Mia and Ventura would often fall victim at the same time.
“Cass and I debated like little kids if we should sneak out of the house for probably what felt like forever,” she said referring to their decision to sneak out to a party at Prince’s house.
When the mogul caught up with them, they both ran out of the house.
“Puff caught Cass,” Mia recalled. But that’s when Prince’s security team intervened.
“Punishment was typically unpredictable but typically pretty terrifying,” Mia said, who testified to seeing Combs “crack her [Cassie’s] head open.”
In Turks and Caicos, Ventura ran into Mia’s room screaming for help. “You gotta help me, he’s gonna kill me,’” Mia said the singer pleaded.
The two, after pushing furniture to the hotel room door ran into the beach and hid.
Often when hiding, which happened numerous times, Mia recalled—they’d have to decide if it was “scarier to face Mother Nature or to go back to Puff.”
Mia’s experience with being forced by Combs to do things extended beyond the scope of physical and sexual activites—extending into drugs.
She was told she was “now a part of the breakfast club” after playing a guessing game involving MDMA.
“I didn’t think I had a choice,” Mia recalled when describing an incident involving her having to snort white powder after pretending to do so to Combs’ disgust.
She’d never taken ketamine before.
When asked how she felt Combs treated her, she replied, “sometimes like I was a worthless piece of crap.”
Mia will testify again tomorrow and be cross-examined by the defense.
Update as of May 28
Today, when Los Angeles Police Department officer Christopher Ignacio took the stand, he corroborated Capricorn Clark’s story about the black escalade—so much as seeing one on the scene. At 8:20 a.m. he and his partner responded to a possible burglary at rapper Kid Cudi’s home. He saw a vehicle matching Clark’s description from yesterday but did not pursue, he said, because no crime had been committed at that point.
The plates were connected to Bad Boy Productions, per Ignacio. When Cudi got back to the house, he filed a trespassing report.
Lance Jimenez followed Ignacio and was key in Cudi’s claims, specifically about his vehicle, because he investigated the car fire from 2012. Throughout his testimony, images of the the rapper’s Porsche were shown.
“There was a bottle on the front seat and there was like a cloth, a handkerchief, on the center console that was burned,” Jimenez said. A small lighter laid just a few feet outside of the car, per the expert.
But the fire was supposed to be much worse, according to Jimenez.
The cloth fell outside of the bottle that didn’t shatter. Had that not been the case, the fire could have spread expanding to the greenery and eventually to Cudi’s home.
After the trespassing report was filed, Jimenez said Cudi’s house was swept for fingerprints—but he then said the prints card became part of evidence for the arson case, and was destroyed by an LAPD officer, specifically in August of 2012.
Per his testimony, Jimenez had to always sign off on the destruction of evidence.
Marc Agnifilo objected immediately saying, “They were suggesting to this jury that someone in this courtroom had something to do with the improper and suspicious destruction of these fingerprints.”
The defense called for a mistrial and were denied.
Judge Subramanian instructed the jury to disregard the testimony about the fingerprint cards.
Jimenez said he attempted to contact both Clark and Ventura multiple times—reaching out to Ventura through a family member.
The prosecution expected to have four witnesses take the stand today, but celebrity stylist Deonte Nash closed the day. He worked for Combs from 2008 to 2018 first as an intern for Sean John. He later became friends with Ventura.
Nash told the jury about multiple times he’d heard Combs threaten the singer—saying he’d “beat her ass.”
When asked by the prosecution how she would respond, he replied, “she would cry, sometimes she would just stay in the house for days and go in a cocoon.”
Other times, Nash said, the mogul would leverage her music by threatening not to release her songs, “anytime she did something he didn’t like.”
And then, one time between 2013 and 2014 he witnessed the singer get physically attacked by the mogul. Ventura was asleep on a couch the stylist remembered. Combs entered the room, “grabbed her by the hair and pulled her off the couch and started hitting her.”
During cross-examination, it was revealed that Nash jumped on Combs’ back in an attempt to “protect him from doing something more serious,” he said.
Nash ran into another room with “Mia” another victim in the case who is operating under a pseudonym.
“When he (Combs) noticed the blood, he just panicked,” Nash said. When the stylist dialed 9-1-1 someone told him to hang up. He can’t remember who instructed him to do so.
Today, Nash testified to Combs threatening to release explicit videos of Ventura “on a schedule,” he told the jury.
“I’m the only one that protected her,” he remembers Combs saying.
Ventura cried when Combs threatened to release the videos, per Nash’s testimony.
The stylist had been physically assaulted by Combs once, he testified in a parking lot after going out with Ventura when the mogul threw him up against a car, but says to this day, he doesn’t hate him. Nash is going to continue to be cross-examined tomorrow. Victim “Mia” will be questioned on the witness stand tomorrow and into Friday according to the prosecution.
As this story goes live, ESSENCE can confirm that Ventura and husband Alex Fine have welcomed their first son together. They share two daughters– Frankie and Sunny.
Update as of May 27
The prosecution and the defense tried to tell two different versions of the same events today involving ex-Sean John Enterprises employee Capricorn Clark.
The defense’s position was—if it was so bad, why come back? Further, why keep coming back?
The prosecution didn’t focus on motive and instead presented on the crimes, emphasizing the multiple aspects of how each event was carried out.
Clark and Combs started as friends in 2002, a platonic threesome together with a woman named Jeannette who introduced the two. The now ex-employee wouldn’t work for the mogul until 2004 when her resume was circulated to Sean Combs Enterprises through a headhunter.
The mogul had no idea that her best friend was the mother (one of them) of Suge Knight.
When he hired her, he took her to Central Park at night with Uncle Paul—one of his security guards and threatened her, she testified.
“He (Combs) told me he didn’t know I had anything to do with Suge Knight and if anything happened, he would have to kill me,” to which Clark remembers telling Combs, “We’ll just have to see.”
She held several positions while working for the mogul, but as his assistant, she made $65,000 a year. Together with human resources, she discovered she was owed $80,000 in overtime. She was never paid that money.
After being accused of stealing jewelry, Clark remembers being held at a building for five days and being forced to take a lie-detector test. At 1710 Broadway she was told, “If you fail the test, they’re going to throw you in the east river.”
After five days, she was allowed to go back to work. When asked why she didn’t leave after the experience, she said “I felt if I would have left, it would have been written off as I stole anyway.”
Combs threatened to kill her more than once, she testified. Including her kidnapping.
On Thursday, when Kid Cudi took the stand, he testified that he and Cassie Ventura spoke with Clark—further, she was being held at his home by Combs and his “affiliates.”
The ex-assistant provided more insight as to what happened that day.
On cross-examination by the defense, Mr. Agnifilo recalled a previous statement made by Clark where she said she called actress Lauren London prior to speaking with Ventura and Kid Cudi.
We now know why she was mentioned during jury selection weeks ago.
“She was like my sister at the time, and I just wanted somebody to know where I was,” Clark said as she began to cry. “He was in the house and if he did get killed, I just needed somebody to know where I was in case this all went really bad.”
In a previous testimony from earlier in the day, Clark said her parents had been deceased since she was 17.
Still unsure if she was on a three-way call with London and Ventura, or if she called them separately—at the end, she conceded to the possibility of a conference call.
London and Combs, per Agnifilo were friends, until most recently.
When the mogul came to Clark’s home (which was paid for by his company), he didn’t give her any choice but to come to Cudi’s house, she said.
“Get dressed, we’re going to go kill this nigga” Combs said.
When she tried to protest, he replied, “I don’t give a fuck what you want to do, go get dressed,” Combs replied.
Cudi didn’t mention that Combs and his security chased him in his Porsche for miles. He got back to his home in time, but he didn’t get out of the car. When he pulled up, according to Clark their eyes met and Combs said, “There’s that nigga right there.” Immediately, Cudi pulled off.
The last time Clark spoke to Ventura, it was 2018. The defense asked where Ventura fell on the talent versus talented discussion. She was quick to say, that Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey were talented, but “Cassie had talent.”
Clark called Regina Ventura—Cassie’s mother, urging her to call the police the night after she (Clark) was kidnapped. She said the call was prompted by what she witnessed the night before, when Combs allegedly kicked Cassie multiple times in her presence after the singer returned to his residence.
But then, in 2023 when the singer filed her civil suit against the mogul, “it triggered me,” Clark recalled.
She met with Combs’ attorneys in 2024 according to the defense. They say she proposed coming back to the company as chief of staff. Further, getting him into rehab. While Clark said she didn’t recall the verbiage, she always felt like she was his “protector.”
Clark cried again when old emails were shown and read where she was asking the mogul to forgive her. This was after her kidnapping. In one of the emails, she mentions Ventura saying, “she never wanted me around.”
When the defense asks how it felt to know that she got rehired in 2016 only at the request of Ventura, Clark replied, “I have no parents. My son has autism and is non-verbal. My stakes are higher sir.”
Update as of May 22
After dropping Cassie off that night, rapper Scott ‘Kid Cudi’ Mescudi tried to rush back to his house. He’d already spoken to Capricorn Clark. “She was forced to get in the car by Sean Combs and a few of his affiliates,” he told the jury today.
He called the mogul when he was on his way. Their conversation didn’t go well.
“Motherf****r you in my house?” He said when asked by the prosecution what that initial call was like.
If you’re wondering what Combs looked like just feet away from Mescudi as he proceeded to tell his side of the story—wonder no more.
Quick glances to the left, caught the “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop” Diddy-bop trying his hardest to be unbothered. But then at other times—like when Kid Cudi referenced the hip-hop pioneer together with the Marvel Universe, he turned as gray as his hair.
But right before Mescudi took the stand, George Kaplan finished his testimony.
The prosecution pushed to figure out why Kaplan only lasted at Combs Enterprises for 15 months. The personal assistant, who reported directly to Kristina Khorram—Combs’ Director of Operations, said two domestic abuse incidents caused him to quit.
One incident involved Cassie Ventura, who is listed in the court’s complaint as Victim One. The other incident involved who we can now confirm is Victim Three, Gina Huynh—who is no longer testifying in this case.
On Combs’ private jet to Vegas during the second half of 2015, Kaplan recalled an incident involving broken glass.
“I saw Mr. Combs standing over Cassie. She (Cassie) screamed, isn’t anyone seeing this?” he testified today.
But in fact, no one—including Kaplan, did anything.
“All I wanted,” he said “was to have a good job in the entertainment industry.”
Then in Miami on 2 Star Island, he witnessed another domestic incident—this time involving Gina.
“Mr. Combs was very angry. He started throwing these decorative apples at Gina.”
“How hard?” the prosecution asked.
“Really hard,” he answered.
But when asked what he did, he replied, “I left” and you could hear a collective sigh of disappointment in the courtroom towards the back of the galley. “I wished it wasn’t happening.”
Those two incidents were mentioned to Khorram, who Kaplan called KK. “It was the last straw for me.”
Ultimately, Kaplan told Combs that his reason for quitting had to do with a new cancer diagnosis for his father—which also was the truth.
The ex-assistant said on the stand today that he did not want to testify against Combs, who he referred to today as a God among men.
“I desperately did not want to be here today.”
Kaplan would clean the hotel rooms after Combs’ freak-offs. Most times he was instructed to do so, but he also understood why.
“I didn’t want his reputation to be compromised,” he said, adding, “most people are looking for a payout.”
When cross-examined, Marc Agnofilo reminded the ex-assistant that yesterday was Christopher Wallace’s birthday and at Combs Enterprises, all employee received a paid day off. As he brought this up, both Kaplan and a Black female member of the jury could be seen nodding their heads in admiration of the Notorious BIG.
After exiting, the prosecution called Mescudi and the entire galley turned their heads to the doors in the back. Nothing happened for at least 90 seconds. Then, the artist appeared in a vintage-cut pair of rich blue jeans and a faded-black well-worn moto jacket.
The prosecution didn’t waste any time. Sometime in December 2011 at 5:30 a.m. Kid Cudi got a call from Ventura. The two were dating and her ex-found out.
In a panic, she was concerned that he would come to Mescudi’s house because when he asked for his address, she gave it to him.
Mescudi picked up Ventura and took her to the Sunset Marquis. That’s when the two talked to Capricorn Clark—a close friend to the singer at the time.
He lived just 15 minutes from the Sunset Marquis. Per Mescudi’s testimony, the call with Combs went like this:
“Motherf****r you in my house?”—Kid Cudi.
He (Combs) said, “I wanna talk to you.”
“I’m on my way now.”—Kid Cudi.
But then Mescudi said to himself “wait let me think about this.” He told the jury and prosecution that he said, “I thought about the reality of the situation, and I decided to call the police.”
When he got home, no one was there. He’d had some gifts for family, some stuff from Chanel—all of that was opened, and unwrapped. And “my dog was locked up in my bathroom.”
He usually gave his dog free reign throughout his house. Since that incident, his dog was different—almost traumatized.
After Kid Cudi and Ventura decided to spend Christmas together with her family in Connecticut, Combs began to call him. A lot. According to the rapper.
And then in January of 2012 he got a call from his dog’s babysitter saying that his car was on fire.
“I knew he (Combs) had something to do with it,” Mescudi said. The defense objected.
That same year, Ventura and Mescudi called it quits.
The “Day And Night” rapper wasn’t home when his car caught on fire. DNA from the fire matches a woman. The defense mentioned that to date, no one has been charged in the arson. The prosecution objected.
“It was intentional,” Mescudi said.
The rapper did get to confront Combs about his vehicle face to face in 2012 when he, the mogul, and Ventura met one last time at SoHo House in LA.
D-Roc who has become as famous in the case as Combs for the amount of times his name has been mentioned, escorted Mescudi upstairs to a suite. There, the rapper said he saw him—Ventura hadn’t arrived.
“Sean Combs was staring out the window with his hands behind his back like a Marvel super villain,” he said sarcastically.
The whole courtroom erupted in laughter.
The two talked about how Ventura never told Mescudi that she was in an on-again, off-again relationship with the mogul.
“I was upset that she went back to him,” he said of Ventura, who at one point during his testimony, he said he loved.
She eventually walked into the room, confessing her love for Combs, per Mescudi’s testimony.
When he and Mescudi shook hands, he asked, “what are we going to do about my car?”
He said Combs replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ultimately, the relationship between Ventura and Mescudi ended because of safety concerns.
“I knew Sean Combs was violent,” Mescudi said. “The drama was getting out of hand, and I wanted to give her some space.”
During cross-examination, defense attorney Brian Steele got Mescudi to admit that he felt, “played” by Ventura and in fact when asked if he and Combs were both played by the singer, he said “True.”
Around that same time, Ventura was no longer taking modeling opportunities—focusing solely on music, per her Bad Boy branding strategy. However, making appearances on red carpets as Combs’ date, required hair, makeup, and styling.
Mylah Morales, a celebrity makeup artist had been someoneVentura’s known since the singer was 16. The two met on an editorial in Brooklyn.
Morales introduced Ventura to Ryan Leslie.
From 2000—2005 she worked as a groomer for Combs and has worked on Rihanna and Cassie consistently for years.
“We were close, she (Cassie) was like a little sister to me,” Morales said.
The MUA was today’s third witness.
Morales was asked specifically about a Grammy Weekend job in 2010 that involved the artist removing Ventura from the hotel where she was applying makeup and taking her to her home after an altercation with Combs.
“I was just frantic. I didn’t know what to do,” Morales said.
Combs and Ventura were arguing in the bedroom of a suite in Los Angeles. When the two emerged, she’d noticed Ventura had a black eye, a knot on her head, and a fat lip.
A friend who happened to be a doctor came to Morales’ home to perform a check up on Ventura. The police were not called.
“I feared for my life,” Morales said as to her reasons for not calling the authorities.
Since then, the MUA has talked to several journalists about this incident. The defense said—and Morales has confirmed, that she’s sold images of she and Kim Porter to the press for $1,000.
Initially, Morales said she’d stopped doing interviews and was not seeking more press opportunities. But then, she was shown a document on the stand that included a reach out from Dateline and a request from her to the prosecution to participate.
As with Morales’ incident, hotels are linked to Combs’ trial, which is why Frederic Zemmour being called to testify, is a consistent addition. Zemmour is the general manager at the L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. The defense chose not to cross-examine.
Zemmour spoke to the names and data linked to Combs’ profile under the hotel such as:
- Pls monitor outside his room – down the hall to spray air freshener
- ALWAYS spills candle wax on everything and uses excessive amounts of oil, place the room out of order upon departure for deep cleaning
- Please authorize an extra $1000 when guest stays with us to cover any room damages.
Lastly, Computer Forensics Specialist Joshua Croft was called to the stand.
Croft was tasked with pulling data from three of Cassie’s laptops.
One wouldn’t turn on. One was set to factory default settings. One opened to a profile for “Frank Black” and a guest profile.
Earlier in the day, Kaplan referenced Frank Black being a nod to Christopher “The Notorious BIG” Wallace who also went by Frank White.
The computers were collected with files processed under a warrant. Nothing has been uncovered. Yet.
Update as of May 21
Today, Justin and Christian Combs were both in the third row directly behind their father. They both were wearing black—variations of what they’ve worn each time they’ve appeared in support of the mogul.
Christian is said to look most like his dad; and when one of Combs’ ex-assistants was on the stand talking about baby oil and drugs—though the two were feet away from each other, they were identical in their body motions. Christian and Sean Combs were bobbing their heads in an upright position. It was as if they were both listening to the same Bad Boy record from the 90s.
The morning concluded with Special Agent Gerard Gannon who finished his testimony. During the raid on Combs’ home in Miami from March 2024, Gannon and his agents found three phones inside black Balenciaga boots—that, and a small handgun with a box of bullets—this time with the serial number.
Yesterday, Gannon testified to finding parts of an AR-15, eye drops, and high heels. Today, he showed a pair seven-inch red heels to the jury. The bottle of drops had MDMA and ketamine, per the agent’s testimony.
A Gucci pouch containing pills was brought into the courtroom. That too, was found during the raid.
Upon cross-examination, the defense asked about documenting the procedure, which Gannon said was essential in the process. His team of agents which included between 80-90 took an estimated 500 photos of Combs’ 20,000 square foot estate.
When asked about the front gate, which was destroyed to get in, Gannon said his team did not photograph that part of the warrant and seizure. When Gannon and his team arrived at the scene, Combs and his family were not present, but six staff were present. According to the special agent, they were put in cuffs.
“There was one individual who wasn’t happy with us and wasn’t cooperating, so we kept him in handcuffs longer,” Gannon said.
Before Gannon took the stand, the prosecution and defense debated the scope of Dr. Dawn Hughes’ testimony. Presented as a “blind witness,” Hughes—a clinical and forensic psychologist with over 30 years of experience in trauma, sexual abuse, and domestic violence—was called to provide expert insight into why victims may remain in abusive relationships.
Prior to the doctor taking the stand, Judge Subramanian ruled that Hughes is not allowed to talk about coercive control or speak to the credibility of Combs or Cassie.
Hughes was also an expert witness in the R. Kelly trial. She told the jury today that she’s being paid $6,000 for her testimony. That meant Hughes wasn’t supposed to be familiar with the case, or the evidence. The defense didn’t ask if she was familiar with the March 5, 2016 assault video.
One lingering question has been why Cassie remained in a relationship with Combs for nearly a decade—a point the defense has used to challenge the prosecution’s claim of coercion in the sex-trafficking charge.
When asked directly why victims stay in relationships with their abusers, Hughes answered, “There are psychological bonds. And the psychological consequences of the abuse.”
Of the violence she said, “It ranges from physical violence to butterflies” but added, “violence doesn’t have to happen all the time.”
Psychological violence, she classified as different forms of intimidation such as telling someone where they can and cannot go. Hughes mentioned several coping strategies that would be typically employed by a victim, including minimalization—of which she said, “the victim says, “Maybe they had a bad day at work. Maybe they were intoxicated.” It’s a way to stay in the relationship, but it increases their risk. It’s not a long-term strategy. It gets from one assaultive episode to next.”
Labeling these relationships, a “very private harm,” Hughes said, “They experience a tremendous amount of shame, humiliation, degradation.”
Another reason why they often stay is lack of resources, Hughes said. “How are you to leave if you don’t have access to those tangible resources,” she asked. It can sometimes take multiple attempts, she added.
Hughes was asked several times, if she knew of Cassie, or was familiar with the case. The witness said no. The psychological expert says she met six times with prosecution—even after opening statements.
The defense in cross examination asked about a seminar Hughes had given in 2015 and suggested she may be biased to which she answered, “I don’t evaluate offenders.”
Today, the defense and prosecution had several sidebars before calling their last witness—one of Combs’ ex-assistants. George Kaplan only worked for the mogul 15 months. During that time, he was paid $125,000.
The ex-assistant said he reported to Kristina Korram—Combs’ chief of staff who he says, “managed Mr. Combs’ life.”
The witness invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not testify on the grounds of potential self-incrimination—but the judge signed an order of immunity. Why did Kaplan invoke his Fifth Amendment right? Well, so far, he’s admitted to purchasing drugs for the mogul at his boss’s request.
Update as of May 20
The conclusion of David James’ testimony today is integral in trying to establish the prosecution’s RICO charges against music mogul Sean Combs. James was Combs’ assistant from 2007-2009. Whether or not they succeeded, is up to the jury.
While James was working for Combs, he described “setting up” hotel rooms for his boss, a process that included bringing clothes and bags in advance that often included: toiletries, clothing, food and drinks, but mostly medicine bags. That bag always included 30 or more pill bottles with mostly ecstasy and percocet.
James had to pay for condoms and baby oil and get reimbursed out of the cash Combs’ security would carry in Louis Vuitton bags—they would usually carry $10,000 at a time.
One Stop, a drug procurer who Cassie and other witnesses have referenced several times by now, would get drugs for Combs according to James. Percocet, he said would be taken by the mogul during the day. Ecstasy, he said, would be taken at night.
But James testified that he too, would get drugs for Combs and his friends—saying, he thought it was part of his job to do so.
When Marc Agnifilo asked directly whether James was offered immunity, the witness didn’t offer a clear response—saying he wasn’t sure of the details that his attorney worked out.
The Mel’s Diner incident Cassie originally brought up when she said Combs told her to put a gun inside of her purse was also mentioned by James.
Suge Knight was a known rival of Combs’. When cross-examined by Agnifilo, James was asked why he didn’t speak up in reference to Combs approaching Knight.
James responded, “Respectfully sir, you have someone with three guns in this close proximity, I didn’t think I had the option to say something.”
In preliminary court documents, James said the incident happened inside the diner. Today, he testified that the events happened outside the diner. When Agnifilo asked about the inconsistency James said, “I think these are inaccurate notes.”
Before James left the stand, he’d admitted to having a physical altercation with one of Combs’ chefs which involved him grabbing her wrists, squeezing them tightly and telling her to, “stay in her lane.” Ironically, this is what he was once told, when he asked too many questions—per his testimony on Friday.
When she filed a report to human resources at Bad Boy Entertainment, it got back to Combs who doubly-ironically told him, “you can’t be putting your hands on women” and instructed his former assistant to get the chef a gift and apologize.
That same woman Combs had an altercation with later at his home in Alpine, New Jersey. When the police came, James testified, he was told by Combs to say that she was the aggressor.
“He (Combs) instructed me to say that she (the chef) was the aggressor and hit him first,” James said. Combs’ ex-assistant said he didn’t want to lie to the police and instead drove around. Upon his return, he lied to Combs, saying that he made the report.
He was the seventh person to take the stand. Cassie’s mother was next. But first, there was the issue of a bribe. Before Regina Ventura took the stand and the jury was present, the defense and prosecution argued before the judge about what she’d be allowed to say.
The prosecution alleged Combs demanded Cassie’s parents pay him $20,000 citing “reimbursement” for money he’d spent on the singer after learning she was romantically linked to Kid Cudi. This was days after threatening the new couple, and saying he’d release sexually explicit videos of Ventura. The prosecution has bank records showing Cassie’s mother taking a loan out to accommodate Combs’ demand.
Days later, the money was returned.
The defense’s position was, since the money was returned it shouldn’t be discussed. Further, the fact that Cassie’s mother had to get a loan highlight’s the income gap disparity. The prosecution’s argument is simple — they think it furthers Combs’ coercive nature. Ultimately, Judge Subramanian allowed it, but gave the defense permission to object when it comes up.
In 2011, the singer’s mother received an email from her daughter saying that she was being threatened by her ex-boyfriend Sean Combs. The singer believes, it was because she was dating rapper Kid Cudi.
Regina Ventura read the email aloud today in court. “The threats that have been made towards me by Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs are that are that he is going to release 2 explicit sex tapes of me. One on Christmas Day, maybe before or right after and another one some time soon after that. He has also said that he will be having someone hurt me and Scott Mescudi physically (he made a point that it wouldn’t be by his hands, he actually said he’d be out of the country when it happened).”
The email came from Veronica Bang, which was an alias per Ventura.
“I did not understand a lot of it. The sex tapes threw me. I did not know the other person but knew that he was going to try to hurt my daughter,” Ventura testified today.
Combs called her around the same time she received the email from her daughter, she said. The mogul told her he needed to “recoup the money,” he invested in her daughter, Ventura testified.
Cassie’s mother took out a home equity loan saying, “That’s the only way we could get the money.”
Also, around that same time, Ventura began photographing her daughter to document injuries Cassie sustained after she was assaulted by Combs.
“She was bruised, and I wanted to make sure that we memorialized it,” Ventura testified.
Images of Cassie’s injuries were shown to the jury from an alleged incident in December 2011.
The defense declined to cross-examine Ventura.
But that’s when The Punisher came. Sharay Hayes is 51 now, but from 2012 to 2016, he was known as The Punisher, an exotic dancer working across multiple states who was intimately familiar with Combs and Cassie.
Hayes, who has a book, In Search of Freezer Meat, writes about his experience with Combs and Cassie. In his book, “I call them a married, wealthy couple,” he told the jury and prosecution today. “Six pages out of 186—I sensationalize it, I wanted it to be enjoyable,” calling it “highs and lows.”
Initially, Hayes was contacted by Cassie in the fall of 2012. He didn’t recognize the singer because she was in a full wig according to the former dancer. He said that he thought he was going to do a small striptease for an intimate group of ladies—but when he arrived, Cassie was the only one there. He met her at Trump International Hotel in New York and was told upon arrival that her husband would be watching.
At the beginning of night, he was given $800 in cash.
“I was specifically told to not acknowledge her husband, try not to look at him, no communication or anything,” he testified.
As Cassie began to pour baby oil on herself, Hayes did too. Then, Combs walked in.
He (Combs) began to instruct Cassie, according to Hayes.
At the end of the night, Hayes was given an additional $1,200.
In total, Hayes said he’d been with the couple 12 times, but didn’t initially recognize either of the two. The former exotic dancer didn’t realize who they were until coming to a second venue and seeing “The Essex House would like to welcome Mr. Sean Combs” on the TV.
The ex-dancer said he’d followed Combs on social media prior to his dealings with the couple. When meeting up with Cassie and Combs, Hayes says he would stay sometimes from 2:30 a.m. until 11 a.m. and was usually paid between $1,200 and $2,000 per meeting.
“My understanding was we were creating a scene, a sexy scene, that was enjoyable to her partner,” Hayes testified.
When asked whether Cassie enjoyed the encounters, the ex-dancer said, “I did observe sometimes a sigh, a wince, that seemed to be frustration at the frequency of Combs’ directions.”
But then in 2016 when he wasn’t able to perform sexually, he was never called back. On the stand, he cited “pressure” as a main reason. He was still paid and thanked for his services.
When cross-examined, Hayes was asked if he’d developed feelings for Cassie. He answered, “no.” But notes from the ex-dancer’s preliminary conversation with the prosecution showed that he’d said he had developed feelings for the singer.
When defense attorney Xavier Donaldson asked about the conversation Hayes had with prosecution, he replied, “that may have been taken out of context, because that’s not the case.”
Later in the day, Special Agent Gerard Gannon testified that a warrant was executed on Sean Combs’ Miami home March 25, 2024. This was on the basis of human-trafficking.
Combs’ Miami property is an estimated 20,000 square feet—and so, Gannon entered with between 80 and 90 special agents, prepared, he testified, for a confrontation with Combs’ guards, if one should occur.
Combs’ master bedroom closet was discussed largely during Gannon’s testimony today. The agent said they found sex toys, heels, and baby oil—the photos were shown to the jury. When the agent put on gloves, it was because a special bag containing parts of AR-15s were shown. They also were seized during the raid. The jury was shown images of scratched out serial numbers on the weapons (and pieces).
Gannon said “It’s a lot more difficult, or impossible,” when asked if it was possible to tell who the firearm belonged to without the serial number.
Update as of May 19
Today, Sean Combs’ defense team questioned Dawn Richard once more about the incident she mentioned involving a skillet and eggs. When asked about specific dates, the singer replied, “I don’t recall.”
Defense attorney Nicole Westmoreland handled questioning Richard on Monday. “You would agree with me that as time progresses your story changes,” Westmoreland asked to which Richard replied, “Yes.”
In 2011, Richards left Bad Boy Records but reached out to Combs several times—per her testimony to be signed once more. This would continue as early as 2020. Richard was originally part of Danity Kane, a girl group which started as a reality TV show and an MTV season of the widely popular Making the Band series which Combs executive produced and starred in.
Multiple times on the stand, Richard says she reached out to “help a friend,” referring to Diddy Dirty Money bandmate Kalenna Harper, who continues to refute Richard’s claims in the press.
Westmoreland asked Richard if she filed suit against Combs to, “get a lot of money.” Richard quickly replied, “No” but she said she wanted to be “compensated for the work [she] put forth.”
Today, Harvey Pierre, One-Stop, Capricorn Clark, and D-Roc who has been mentioned consistently throughout last week—have all been mentioned in testimony, but after Richard was cross-examined, Cassie’s ex-best friend Kerry Morgan took the stand.
The two were 15 and 16 when they met in 2001.
Morgan, 38, who is now a personal assistant in Los Angeles, traveled to several countries with Cassie and Combs, she testified. The mogul provided drugs for them all, adding, “she (Cassie) lost her confidence,” during the time they dated.
During testimony, she recalls two times Combs assaulted Cassie.
“I saw him push her, I’m pretty sure he hit her,” she said. “They were on the other side of a bed, so I’m not sure if he kicked her or something.”
Cassie didn’t have a response.
Another hotel hallway incident, this time in Jamaica in 2013—involved Morgan running to her friend’s defense.
“I heard Cassie screaming so I ran into the hallway where she was,” she recalled. Combs dragged the singer by her hair down the hallway until she broke free and ran away. When Morgan looked for the singer after the incident and found her, she says the two hid in a ditch.
Morgan and Cassie stopped being best friends after she says she didn’t get support from the singer when Combs assaulted her. The prosecution questioned her later about being assaulted by the mogul.
“He came up behind me and choked me and then boomeranged a wooden hanger at my head,” she said.
The incident occurred in 2018 in Cassie’s apartment. A month after the alleged assault, Morgan said Cassie told her she was over-exaggerating. She was told that she would be getting $30,000 from Combs. Morgan and Cassie didn’t speak after that meeting—the now-assistant signed a non-disclosure agreement and testified that she received the money.
When they were talking, Morgan said Combs controlled everything. Still, she advised Cassie to leave her relationship on several occasions.
When questioned on the stand by the prosecution, she presented several reasons for Cassie’s logic, “because of her job, her car, her apartment. He controlled everything. She would’ve lost all of her livelihood.”
Several of the singer’s friends were employed by the mogul or his associates, per Morgan, who said that they would often convince the singer to stay in her relationship.
Combs’ former assistant David James remembered Cassie as well. He was there during parts of the two’s relationship.
When interviewing as a personal assistant, James testified that another executive told him, “This is Mr. Combs’ kingdom. We’re all here to serve in it.”
When he got the job, he was told immediately by his security staff to “stay in my lane.” That was when, he said, he asked too many questions.
James and Cassie didn’t spend much time together, per testimony. However, the former assistant said on one occasion in Miami he urged the singer to leave her relationship with the mogul.
“I can’t. I can’t get out,” he recalled Cassie saying.
“I just didn’t think that she could easily leave,” James told the jury.
Cassie’s mother, Regina Ventura, Sharay Hayes, a sex worker, and Combs’ former chef are all scheduled to testify this week. James will continue his testimony tomorrow morning.
Update as of May 16
“You always want to show me that you have the power, and you knock me around. I’m not a rag doll I’m someone’s child.”
That’s what Cassie Ventura, 38, texted her then boyfriend Sean Combs 55, a day after he attacked her at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles, California. She read that text aloud today while on the witness stand in Combs’ sex trafficking court case.
Ventura’s 8.5-month pregnancy is part of the case, per the prosecution, who wrote in a letter to the judge Friday morning, that the defense’s cross-examination is taking several hours longer than her direct examination. The witness could go into labor should her questioning go into next week. “The inefficiency of cross-examination yesterday” per the letter, “raises the inference that the defendant hopes to accomplish precisely that outcome.”
In 2018 when Ventura was dating Alex Fine, she was also still in communication with Combs—largely via text. The defense is relying heavily on texts to try to persuade the jury that Combs is not guilty of sex trafficking. When the mogul sent the singer this, “Can I not get a chance to make things right?”
She replied, “You took care of me materialistically, not where I needed it,” she added, “I needed you to love me and put me first.”
“I have love for the past, and what it was,” Ventura said. “I don’t hate him.”
Her then boyfriend, Fine punched a wall when he found out—Ventura testified. Fine FaceTimed the singer in the middle of her having sex with Combs.
“Your now-husband didn’t know that you were with Mr. Combs at the time, correct?” Estavao asked.
During this section of questioning, Fine was asked to leave the courtroom.
The defense focused for a while on this timeline and transitioned to Combs’ children’s mother—one of them.
When Kim Porter died, the mogul referred to her in the public as his “soulmate”—Ventura admitted to being hurt. Porter is the mother of three of his children. Ventura attended her funeral and it was the last time she saw Combs in person. Shortly after, she texted Combs again after his soulmate declaration.
“What was the 11 years all about?” the text read.
When Estavao asked if Combs let her go afterwards, Ventura replied, “I don’t know about letting me go.”
After the two broke up permanently, Ventura would still hear from Combs. In 2020, she received a text saying, “you’re one of the greatest women in the world and don’t ever forget that.”
Throughout the day, the defense furthered their assertion that Combs and Ventura worked together as a unit to engage in freak-offs and use drugs.
An audio recording was played where Ventura was threatening an unnamed man. “It’s my life and I’ll kill you,” she was heard saying.
This was over an alleged sex tape leak.
“I’ve never killed anybody in my life, but I will kill you,” she firmly said.
The defense played the audio for Ventura as her shock transitioned to laughter within seconds on the stand.
Combs told the singer to keep the man where he was for as long as she could she recollected.
When Ventura was questioned by the prosecution about the same incident, she said, “I was just sick about it and was feeling pressure from Sean,” adding, “It was a weird day.”
After breaking up with Combs, Ventura and her family (which included Fine), moved in with her parents in Connecticut. The defense said this was because of money problems. Ventura said it was because they wanted to be on the east coast.
Prior to settling with Combs for $20 million, the singer had a tour set up.
“As soon as you saw that you were going to get the $20 million, you canceled the tour because you didn’t need it anymore, right?”
The tour was cancelled, that fact Ventura did not argue. Her reasoning was due to not wanting to be away from her children.
Towards the end of her testimony, Ventura confessed, “My mind’s a little all over the place.”
The prosecution asked if she would exchange the settlement she received for never having to experience a freak-off.
“If I never had to have freak-offs I would have agency and autonomy,” she added, “I wouldn’t have had to work so hard to get it back.”
Ventura’s testimony for both sides ended today. The judge told her to have a good weekend. She slowly stood clutching her belly and smiling at the jury before exiting.
In an attempt to stay on schedule, Judge Arun Subramanian allowed Danity Kane and Diddy Dirty Money member Dawn Richard to take the witness stand.
“He came downstairs angry and was saying ‘where the f**k was his eggs,’” Richard recounted on the stand. One time in particular, the prosecution asked her about an incident in 2009 when she witnessed the mogul attack the singer over breakfast.
She didn’t have time to say much before justice Subramanian adjourned for the day. Though she confidently recalled Combs, “screaming, belligerent, asking where his food was.”
The skillet still filled with eggs, she said, was used to try and hit Ventura over the head, Robinson said. Assuming a fetal position, Ventura thwarted Combs’ attempts, per Robinson.
“He started to punch and kick her … body and her head,” she continued on the stand. “I was scared for her and scared to do anything,” Robinson added.
“Where he was from, people go missing if they talk,” Richard told the jury.
The singer will continue testifying on Monday.
In a statement from Ventura and her husband, delievered by her attorney.
“This week has been extremely challenging but also healing for me,” she adds “the more I heal, the more I can remember, and the more I can remember, the more I can never forget.”
Alex Fine’s statement read, “You did not break her spirit or her smile that lights up the room. Cassie saved Cassie. She did the work of fighting the demons that only a demon could have done to her. This horrific chapter is forever put behind her.”
Update as of May 15
Today, the defense attempted to establish Cassie Ventura’s accountability—allegedly, in the freak-offs which are a major part of the government’s claims of sex-trafficking in the Sean Combs court case. If they can convince the jury that Ventura was not coerced into participating, this could potentially aid in one of the charges being thrown out.
Combs’ legal team entered into evidence hundreds of pages of text messages. Many were read by Cassie and Anna Estevao—the attorney for the defense who is questioning Ventura. In the texts, Ventura and Combs appeared to arrange freak-offs enthusiastically.
In 2009, early in their relationship, Ventura wrote a text to Combs saying, “I’m always ready to freak off lolol.” When Combs said that he couldn’t wait to watch her (have sex) she replied, “Me too. I just want it to be uncontrollable.” Ventura told Estavao that those kind of exchanges were typical for the two.
Ventura told jurors that her wanting to participate had to do with pleasing Combs—and had very little (if anything) to do with wanting to be involved in the freak-offs themselves.
That same year, she emailed this to the mogul, “I get nervous that I’m just becoming the girlfriend that you get your fantasies off with and that’s it.”
Likewise, the defense followed this line by seeking to establish that Ventura was a girlfriend who appeared to knowingly participate in freak-offs for fear of being replaced. Further, she stayed through a decade of domestic abuse for the same reasons.
At several points throughout the day, Ventura testified that Combs was throughout their relationship, addicted to drugs—”He was more irritable,” Ventura said when Combs would withdraw from opioids.
Previously, “Combs’ legal team attempted to argue the incarcerated rapper did not have the “mental capacity” to commit alleged sex crimes due to his being under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time.”—per News Nation.
“If he suspected you of cheating, he’d call you incessantly?” Estavao asked.
To which, Ventura answered, “that was one of the reasons.”
A few times today, Ventura laughed on the stand re-reading some of her texts she’d sent to Combs—this one in particular, “I see that Kerry is better fitting for you. I’m hurt that you think I’m malicious. You’re very important to me. X. Cass.”
Estavao asked what she meant; Ventura said that it was more of a journal entry.
After breaking it off with Kid Cudi, that relationship would be brought up frequently by Combs, per Ventura’s testimony.
Estavao said, “When he (Combs) cheated, he said, well you had an affair with Kid Cudi, right?”
Ventura replied, “sometimes.”
Last week during a lengthy jury selection, prospects were asked about actor Michael B. Jordan who stars in the box office hit Sinners.
At one point, the singer was in South Africa filming Honey 3.
“While you were there, (in South Africa) you saw a photo of Mr. Combs with Gina (Huynh) and were irate?” Estavao declares.
“Angry” Ventura decidedly corrects.
The singer said Combs suspected she was dating the Sinners star.
There in South Africa, she blocked the mogul and decided to focus on the movie, until she recorded a video and sent it to Combs and his staff.
“I was hurt. I spent all my time with them,” she said.
The two called themselves get high partners—though she said Combs did not like it when she got high without him.
Today, Combs didn’t have a full house. His daughters weren’t there. Misa Hylton wasn’t present either. But his three sons and mother were still in attendance, dressed in all black with spots of white. The mogul was noticeably fidgety—frequently removing his glasses throughout Ventura’s testimony.
Victim No.3 is still a no show—and the press is unsure of whether she’ll testify. Speculation about her identity is swirling, but there’s not yet been confirmation.
Update as of May 14
Cassie didn’t look at her ex-boyfriend once today, but her husband did. He looked at Combs more than once—and the tension in the Southern District of New York courthouse could be felt throughout the room.
The InterContinental Hotel is still at the center of the prosecution’s questioning for Cassie Ventura in her second day on the witness stand for the Sean Combs sex trafficking trial.
An in-office memo sent from Israel Florez was entered into evidence today. Some of the details shared in the message add context to his testimony given before the jury on Monday—most notably the time lapse between the assault and Cassie’s exit from the hotel.
The jury has watched footage from the March 5, 2016 incident three days in a row, but today they saw multiple angles via an extended version of the short viral clip that was aired on CNN. The 15-minute video shows Florez deescalating the incident while trying to separate Combs and Ventura. Per her testimony, Cassie was leaving a freak-off.
Cassie began taking opioids when the “antibiotics stopped working.” This was, as a result of too much oral sex. When the prosecution asked her how it felt, she replied, “it burned.”
Scott Mescudi made an appearance via Cassie’s testimony. Mescudi is of course, Kid Cudi. Though their relationship was short, she said, “I broke it off with him. It was too dangerous.”
The defense yelled “objection.”
The judge replied “overruled.”
“Sean said he would hurt both of us” Cassie continued.
When the prosecution asked about Mescudi’s car, Cassie said “Sean said he wanted Scott’s friends to see Scott’s car blown up.” Kid Cudi and Cassie dated briefly in 2011.
In 2018 before ending their relationship, Cassie says she was being taken to her home by Combs when he raped her in her living room.
“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast.”
But then, the singer admitted to having consensual sex with the mogul after being raped saying, “You don’t just turn feelings off that way,” she said. “I still had a good vision of who he was as a person.”
Combs and Cassie still kept in touch after they broke up—but in 2019, she said she received a text from the mogul referring to “iPads full of skeletons.” She knew it meant videos of her involvement in freak-offs.
After filing suit against Combs in 2023. Cassie said she received $20 million in the settlement.
In 2023, the singer tried to walk into oncoming traffic.
“You can do this without me. You don’t need me anymore,” Cassie remembers telling her husband. He stopped her.
After entering rehab, she decided to start writing a book about her relationship with Combs as trauma therapy. “I really wanted Sean to read the information. I wanted him to understand what I had to learn to understand over that period,” she testified.
Cassie is expected to be questioned by the defense on Thursday.
Update as of May 13
Today, Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura, 38, sat just a few feet away from the man she accused of rape and domestic abuse. The last time the two saw one another was at Kim Porter’s funeral. today, she’s in her third trimester of pregnancy.
Cassie cried on the stand as the jury looked on to hear in detail the second half of what she described in her federal complaint almost two full years ago.
Mrs. Ventura-Fine is a key witness in the prosecution’s federal sex-trafficking case against Sean Combs, 55. Two years ago, in November, the singer filed suit against her ex-boyfriend alleging among other things rape and domestic abuse. Cassie settled for an undisclosed amount within 24 hours of filing.
Before the prosecution and defense prepared to question Cassie, defense attorney Anna Estevao requested Cassie’s husband Alex Fine, be asked to leave the courtroom saying, “we’d like Ms. Ventura’s husband to not be allowed in the courtroom during her testimony. We may need to call him as a witness later, depending on the direct.”
Defense attorney Teny Geragos added, “We ask that he be excluded when the testimony gets into post 2018.”
Alex Fine and Cassandra Ventura married in August 2019. She’s pregnant with their third child. Fine was hired by Combs to be Cassie’s personal trainer.
“Men who hit women aren’t men. Men who enable it and protect those people aren’t men,” Fine once posted on Instagram.
Cassie met Combs in 2006 and signed a 10-record deal with Bad Boy Records. She released one album on the label.
When the two began to date, she says, “I was insanely jealous.”
Freak offs became more like a job for her. “The longest was four days,” Cassie said. “Sean said, you need to be glistening,” in reference to the baby oil.
But when Cassie testified to being urinated on by Phillip and Combs, there appeared to be a sense of shock in the room.
“Why were you chocking?” Cassie was asked by the prosecution.
“Too much urine in my mouth,” she replied.
When asked how often it happened. She replied, “often enough.”
The prosecution asked in graphic detail about what happened during various freak-off sessions. Cassie testified to scenes involving blood and baby oil from being on her menstrual cycle. She also spoke of being instructed by Combs to place semen on his nipples from male sex workers.
At several points during questioning, the prosecution asked if Cassie enjoyed the freak-offs, to which she always replied, no.
Cassie’s husband wasn’t spotted in the room at the point when she said the freak-offs “made me feel worthless,” as if “I didn’t have anything else to offer him.”
We now know that the third person in the InterContinental Hotel that Israel Florez testified about on Monday and did not mention in his incident report from March 5, 2016, was a sex worker named Jules. The assault witnessed in the now viral video was during a freak-off session.
The prosecution showed Cassie the video today. “At this point all I could think about was getting out of there safely,” she said, thinking back to 2016. The next day, the singer had a film premiere. She’d had a black eye—which was the same injury Florez referred to during his testimony on Monday.
Often, she recalled, she would take drugs as a numbing agent. “Whatever was the drug of choice at that point,” she said. That list included, ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana, ketamine, mushrooms.
Cassie has not been questioned by the defense and will take the stand again Wednesday.
Below is the originally published story on the opening of Sean Combs’ sex trafficking trial. For the latest updates and courtroom developments, see the updates posted above.
The prosecution and the defense told two versions of Sean Combs, 55, Monday morning as jury selection concluded and opening statements immediately followed in the US v. Sean Combs sex trafficking case.
Emily Johnson, attorney for the prosecution, gave opening remarks.
“To the public he was Puff Daddy or Diddy. A cultural icon. A businessman. Larger than life. But there was another side to him. A side that ran a criminal enterprise. You’re going to hear about 20 years of crime,” Johnson said pointing to a gray-haired Sean Combs as he leaned deep into his chair.
She said the courts would be hearing about Cassandra Ventura otherwise known as Cassie, and another victim they’d refer to as Jane. These women were forced into unwanted sex. They were drugged and physically assaulted and per the prosecution, Combs didn’t act alone. He used high-level employees and bodyguards.
“Together they agreed to commit different crimes, kidnapping, arson, distributing drugs to other people, exploiting employees for labor.”
In the coming days, texts, and video footage of Combs’ freak-offs will be shown as evidence.
Teny Geragos had Combs stand as she introduced the music mogul. She described him as “complicated” and “very flawed.”
The defense drew a clear distinction between jealousy-driven domestic violence, trafficking, and conspiracy charges.
“This case is about love, jealousy, infidelity and money,” Geragos said. “There has been a tremendous amount of noise around this case over the past year. It is time to cancel that noise.”
The Defense calls the 2006 video of Combs assaulting Cassie, indefensible—but argues that it is domestic violence, not sex trafficking.
Gossip, compounded with jealousy on both sides, per the defense, was at the center of Ventura and Combs’ relationship.
“She made a choice, every single day for years—a choice to stay with him, a choice to fight for him, because for 11 years, that was the better choice. That was her preferred choice. So she made the choice to stay with him until one day she decided she was going to break up with him, because that was her preferred choice,” Geragos said.
Jane was involved primarily in freak-offs with Combs according to the prosecution. The defense calls their relationship “toxic and dysfunctional.” The prosecution is alleging Jane was coerced into sexual acts which qualifies the sex trafficking charge.
“Being a willing participant in your own sex life is not sex trafficking,” per Geragos.
When Combs walked into court today, the first two rows behind him were filled with his children, sister and mother—to which he smiled. The mogul motioned a heart sign with his hands. His daughters and sons replied by tapping their hearts.
Celebrity stylist and the mother of his first child Justin Combs, Misa Hylton came, later in the day. Hylton, who is currently suing Mary J. Blige, was noticeably aided by a walker. When asked if she was injured, she had no comment.
The video of Combs assaulting Ventura at the InterContinental Hotel in Century City is a major part of the case. Last week, prospective jurors were asked if they could remain impartial after seeing the footage.
Several said no.
The prosecution called their first witness, Los Angeles Police Officer Israel Florez who was the security guard who was on the scene March 5, 2016. InterContinental’s security was handled by Securitas where he was the Assistant Director.
At around 11 a.m., Lorez testified, he received a call about a woman in distress. Additional footage shown in court today proves that the call came from Ventura who made the call from a phone in the hallway near the elevators. There, he said he saw Combs in a towel and some colored socks.
Florez filed an incident report which included images of the damage to the hotel. When the security guard arrived off the elevator, he said Combs was sitting looking at him with, “a devilish stare.”
As for Ventura, Florez said she looked scared with her hoodie pulled up.
Florez escorted the two back to the room after telling Combs that he would be responsible for the damage. Ventura said she wanted to leave to which Combs said no. Florez said he interjected, “If she wants to leave, she can leave.”
When they reach the room, Florez testified that he inserted his body in between the door’s opening to ensure that it would not close. There, he noticed a silent third person present.
Combs approached Florez with a stack of cash—Florez interpreted it to be a bribe—though no words were exchanged. Florez declined the cash. When Ventura retrieved her phone, she exited—but not before the security guard noticed she had a purple eye. He asked if she wanted him to call the police, to which she responded, “I want to leave.”
Later, Florez returned to Combs’ room with another hotel worker. When the mogul thought he was being recorded, he snatched the hotel worker’s phone at which point Florez testified that he pinned Combs to the wall.
The incident report for all of this was filed at 3 p.m. that same day and included Combs and Ventura’s names. The third unidentified man was not mentioned.
Florez didn’t call the police he said, because by the time he saw the surveillance video, everyone had left the hotel, “there was no victim there, obviously nobody was pressing charges.”
During questioning by the defense, he was asked about the incident report.
Brian Steel pointed out that Florez didn’t write about Ventura’s purple eye, or the look Combs gave him that he testified about today in the report, to which the officer replied, “It was my opinion then and now.”
Immediately after Florez exits, the prosecution calls their second witness—Daniel Phillip.
One minute into his testimony he’d told the jury that in 2012 upon meeting Ventura, he was given money “to have sex with her,” as he put it.
Combs’ daughters noticeably exit the courtroom for Phillip’s testimony.
The scene was Gramercy Park Hotel. At the time, Phillip was managing an all-male revue. When the prosecution asked him what that meant, he said, “strippers.”
Phillip arrived a little after midnight. It was supposed to be a small striptease. But when the door opened there was Ventura in lingerie. “When I arrived, Cassie opened the door and she asked me if I was okay if it was just going to be us,” he said.
She was dressed in red lace with red hair he said.
“Her husband wanted to do something special for her, so she asked me if I would mind rubbing baby oil on her and giving her a massage and wherever things went from there it went based on how comfortable it was,” he told the jury.
But there was a man in the room, Phillip said. He was wearing a white robe, a hat and a bandana covering his face from his nose down. He recognized his voice immediately—it was Combs who was masturbating as the two had sex. Ventura assured Phillip that her “husband” wasn’t gay and wouldn’t touch him during their encounter.
Phillip testified that he slept with Ventura while Combs watched multiple times through 2014. That first night, he was paid, “a few thousand dollars,” he said.
Often Combs would record Ventura and Phillip having sex, which included baby oil—per testimony. Phillip did not use a condom and had to bring an STD history at one point.
Combs was also said to have asked Phillip to urinate on Ventura as he masturbated.
According to his testimony, Phillip would get paid between $700 and $5,000-6,000. Sometimes he said, he wouldn’t get paid at all. “I was just excited that I was in this world, and happy to be involved with people with such notoriety.”
But Phillip remembered seeing Ventura being physically assaulted by Combs, he testified.
The couple were at home. Combs called for Ventura and when she didn’t come to him quick enough according to Phillip, he slapped her and began to grab her by her hair and drag her.
“I was shocked,” Phillip said hearing Combs tell Ventura, “B*tch, when I tell you to come here, you come. Now, not later.”
Phillip said he thought to himself, “In my mind, it was going through my head if I tried to do something, I might lose my life.”
Cross examination by the defense for Phillip is expected to fully commence tomorrow with Cassandra Ventura set to testify.