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Casandra “Cassie” Ventura broke into tears at Sean “Diddy” Combs’s Manhattan federal court sex-trafficking trial on Tuesday as she testified that his extreme sexual demands left her “humiliated.”
“I felt pretty horrible about myself,” said Cassie, who told jurors that Combs lured her into a dark world of coercive sex with male escorts shortly after they started dating. She was 22. “I felt disgusted.” Cassie, who is 8½ months pregnant, is the star witness in prosecutors’ sprawling criminal case against Diddy. Over hours of harrowing testimony, Cassie described acquiescing to Diddy. At first, a self-described lovestruck “naïf” who wanted to make him happy, Cassie later worried that if she didn’t comply Diddy would release videos of these encounters.
When she arrived just after 11 a.m., Diddy kept his eyes trained on her as she walked to the witness stand in his Manhattan Federal Court sex-trafficking trial. Cassie, sporting a long-sleeved, high-necked mocha-colored maxi dress with suede boots, did not look in Diddy’s direction while passing by — or as she testified about a decade of alleged abuse.
“We were in a relationship a little over ten years,” Cassie said, leaning toward the mic. When arguments turned violent, she said, Diddy would get physical.
“He would mash in my head, knock me over, drag me, kick me — stomp me in the head if I was down.”
“How frequently?” prosecutor Emily Johnson asked.
“Too frequently.”
She’d have knots on her head. Swollen eyes. “Bruises all over my body.”
When Johnson displayed a still from a video showing Diddy beating her on a screen in the courtroom, Cassie grabbed a tissue. “We were having an encounter … it was called a ‘Freak Off,’” she said. These parties started in the first year of their relationship — when she was in her early 20s and a self-described naïf. “Sean proposed to me this idea … called voyeurism; he would watch me in sexual activity with another person, specifically another male.”
“It just involved Sean being able to watch me with the other person.” Cassie said she was done with Freak Offs pretty quickly. “I knew it wasn’t something I wanted to be doing as regularly as it became,” she said. “I was just trying to make him happy.” As time went on, Cassie’s participation was motivated by fear. Diddy had recorded these encounters — and could blackmail her at any time. “It was always in the back of my mind.”
She described being stuck in Diddy’s web despite disliking these encounters. “Sean is a really polarizing person — also very charming. It’s hard to be able to describe in the moment.” A few moments later, as Johnson asked Cassie to describe aspects of her life before getting involved with Diddy, she dabbed her eyes with the tissue several times. Diddy’s daughters sat through this testimony, looking forward.
“I wanted to be around Sean for the same reasons as everyone else,” Cassie recalled of her early involvement with Diddy, who had signed her to his record label for a ten-album deal. He “was just this exciting, entertaining, funny guy who also happened to hold my career in his hands.”
She told jurors that Diddy wielded extreme control over her life to satisfy his proclivities and that appearance was “very important” to him; that for Freak Offs, her nails needed to be painted white or with French tips; that they talked about Cassie getting breast implants. “If I wasn’t doing my nails, I was getting a tan. If I wasn’t getting a tan, I was getting something else. The physical prep was for the Freak Offs — I had to look a certain way during Freak Offs.” Diddy suggested that Cassie pierce her nipples, according to Cassie. She did. Cassie also got a piercing near her clitoris — “Sean’s suggestion,” she said. She said he also wanted Cassie to have a nickname for him and asked her: “What did you call your grandfather?” Cassie said “Pop Pop.” That became her nickname for Diddy.
Diddy allegedly orchestrated Freak Offs with a heavy hand, telling participants “you need to be shining” if they didn’t glisten with baby oil. To keep up Diddy’s desired sheen, Cassie said, baby oil might be applied every five minutes. At one point, Diddy wanted Cassie to get into a small “pool of baby oil.” She worried it was dangerous but did it anyway. “I couldn’t say no,” Cassie said. “If Sean wanted to have it, that was going to happen. No way around it.”
She described Freak Off rooms as being “pungent” with oil and body odor. “The room was pretty bad off. There was oil all over the walls, door handles, bed sheets.” Sometimes, she said, they were soiled with blood and urine. “I was expected to have Freak Offs on my period,” Cassie said. Sometimes Diddy or an escort would urinate on her, she said. Cassie said she did not want this. According to Cassie, when she gingerly tried to tell Diddy how she felt about Freak Offs — sometimes just in an email — he’d call her “predictable.” Cassie also thought the Freak Offs were “the only time I could get” with Diddy alone, and she wanted to be with him. Johnson asked: Did you want to have sex with escorts?” “No,” she replied.
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Cassie also described other incidents that made her feel fearful. “Sean and I were having a Freak Off at one of his homes in L.A. We were kind of just like chilling.” Then, she said, one of Combs’s security guards entered. “D Roc came in and said Suge [Knight] was at Mel’s Diner and they quickly packed up and drove down there.” She said they grabbed guns and got into an SUV. “I Was crying. I was screaming, ‘Please don’t do anything stupid!’”
As more time went on, Cassie said, Freak Offs became her life. “When I wasn’t working on my music, I was recovering from partying,” but “the Freak Offs became a job where there was no space to do anything else but recover and just kind of feel normal again.” Cassie said that her life was a sleepless cycle of sex with men fueled by drugs. “Thirty-six, 48, 72 hours,” she recalled of Freak Off lengths. “The longest one I [remember] was four days, maybe even longer with breaks.”
Before Cassie testified, prosecutors called two other witnesses on May 12 whose testimony bolsters her allegations: the first, a present-day LAPD officer who worked hotel security during the 2016 attack, and the second, a onetime manager of a male strip club. Officer Israel Florez described receiving a call to the sixth floor “saying there was a woman in distress.” When Florez arrived to the sixth floor, he saw a male and female in the elevator lobby — and recognized Diddy. “I [saw] Mr. Combs in a towel and some, like, colored socks, sitting down to my— farther away from me on my right side. And I seen Ms. Cassie in the corner kind of like covering her face and bundled up in the corner,” he said. The woman “was in the corner. She was— she had her hoodie on. She was pretty much just covered up. I couldn’t see her face and she was just, you know, just pretty much in the corner.” A vase in the elevator area was “destroyed” on the floor. The woman “just said that she wanted her phone and her bag and she wanted to leave.” He escorted them back to the room, positioning himself in the doorway to monitor the situation, while she got her things. On the way back to the room, “He did tell her at one point that— he said you’re not going to leave.” She eventually left the hotel in a black SUV.
Following Florez’s testimony, Daniel Phillip, the former manager of a male strip club, took the stand. Around late 2012 or early 2013, Phillip’s boss asked him if he could do a bachelorette party at the Gramercy Park Hotel saying they had requested a Black male dancer, but all the other candidates were off. Phillip went to what he thought was a bachelorette party only to find that he was alone with Cassie and Diddy. She said her husband wanted to do something special for her. “She asked me if I would mind rubbing baby oil on her and giving her a massage and, um, you know, wherever things went from there, if it went, if, you know, based on how comfortable I was.” Cassie paid him several thousand dollars. Phillip and Cassie wound up having sex while Diddy masturbated in the corner. Over the course of a year, they would have numerous such encounters. Phillip told jurors that Diddy abused Cassie. He recalled seeing Diddy grab Cassie by the hair and dragging her into the bedroom. “I could hear him — what I could hear what sound like him — slapping her. She was screaming ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’”
Cassie first prompted the onslaught of allegations against Diddy — which culminated in his arrest last September — in a bombshell November 2023 lawsuit in which she alleged that the music mogul coerced her into having sex with male escorts while he watched. Diddy settled Cassie’s shock lawsuit just one day after she sued him.
Prosecutors allege Combs forced women to partake in Freak Offs, which authorities describe as “elaborate and produced sex performances” with male escorts that Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during, and often electronically recorded.” Freak Offs were fueled by drugs, including molly, so that Diddy’s victims could continue participating despite physical exhaustion.
Early on in their relationship, around 2007, Combs made it Cassie’s job to “find and book escorts for Freak Offs,” prosecutor Johnson said during her opening on Monday. “Freak Offs that were happening as often as once a week for days at a time. Meaning that for almost half of every week, Cassie was in a dark hotel room, high and awake for days, performing sex acts that she did not want to do on male escorts,” Johnson told jurors.
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