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Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura returns to the witness stand on Wednesday in Sean “Diddy” Combs’s sex-trafficking trial following hours of chilling testimony where she described suffering through years of coerced encounters with male escorts. Cassie, who is eight and a half months pregnant, told jurors on Tuesday that Diddy’s extreme sexual appetites left her “humiliated” — and that his demands turned her life into a cycle of drugged-up “Freak Off” parties that could span days. “The Freak Offs became a job where there was no space to do anything else but to recover and just try to feel normal again.” On day one of Cassie’s testimony, the singer alleged that Diddy controlled her life to meet his demands — and force compliance. She said Diddy, obsessed with her appearance, demanded that her nails be painted white, or as French tips, when she participated in the parties he called Freak Offs. He suggested breast implants at one point. “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.” He suggested that Cassie pierce her nipples. Cassie got them pierced. She also got a “hood” piercing, near her clitoris, at “Sean’s suggestion.”
She also alleged that Diddy maintained control in their decade together with routine physical abuse — and Cassie’s fear that he could release videos of these encounters if she didn’t comply. “It turned into the fact that there were actually blackmail materials to — to basically make me feel like, if I didn’t do it, that it would be hung over my head in that way, or that these things would become public,” Cassie said early on in her testimony. As for the physical abuse, Cassie recalled, “He would mash me in my head, knock me over, um, drag me, kick me, stomp me in the head, if I was down.” He would batter Cassie often, “too frequently,” she alleged. “I would get knots in my forehead, busted lips, swollen lips, black eyes, the whites of my eyes would be red, bruises all over my body.” She also felt that Diddy wielded financial power over her. “If you’re not doing what I’m asking of you or if you’re out of line in any way, I’ll get my car taken away. Like, I got kicked out of the house, my apartment. I would have jewelry taken away,” Cassie said on the stand. “It was very random, depending on how he felt.”
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Federal prosecutors contend that Combs forced women to partake in Freak Off parties, which they have described as “elaborate and produced sex performances” with male escorts that Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during, and often electronically recorded.” They said that these encounters were enabled by drugs — which he provided — so that his victims could keep engaging in sex despite their physical exhaustion. Diddy has pleaded not guilty.
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