For weekly updates on all the most pivotal and dramatic moments from Diddy’s trial, sign up for our newsletter: Court Appearances: United States v. Diddy, and check out the rest of our trial coverage here.
“Jane,” the third woman accusing Sean “Diddy” Combs of sexual misconduct in his Manhattan federal sex-trafficking trial, described an alleged beating in June 2024. She said the two were on a break for a few months after Casandra “Cassie” Ventura’s 2023 lawsuit but got back together earlier that year. Jane, who is testifying under a pseudonym, was referring to Cassie’s November 16, 2023, lawsuit against Diddy, in which she accused him of physical and psychological abuse, as well as rape; the parties settled the suit one day after its filing.
What was supposed to be a romantic evening on June 18, 2024, between Jane and Diddy erupted when she assumed that Diddy’s recent absence had to do with another woman, Jane said. During the argument, Jane pushed Diddy’s head into the counter when he bent down. She threw candles and glass. “I said, ‘I hate you!’” She said she wanted to leave and locked the door to her main bedroom, but Diddy kicked it down. She locked herself in the main bathroom and Diddy kicked that door down. When Jane tried to hide in the closet, Diddy kicked down that door, too. She slipped into the hallway. “Sean kicked me from the back of my thigh and then I fell down on my butt,” Jane said. “He picked me up in a chokehold and choked me.” Diddy, still constraining Jane’s neck, lifted her up. “I couldn’t breathe,” Jane said, saying she was on her tippy toes. She wriggled out. “I just wanted to run,” she said. Jane fled the house. “I was barefoot and I ran to this wall that I knew he wouldn’t find me at.” Jane hid there for what felt like hours. She eventually headed back home, but Diddy hadn’t left, and another fight unfolded outside. She punched him and said, “I hate you!”
“I ran to the backyard and just kept saying ‘Leave me alone,’” Jane told jurors. Diddy allegedly punched her on the forehead and around the eye area. She rolled into a ball, trying to cover her head. Diddy allegedly kicked Jane and dragged her back into the house. Jane wound up taking a shower. Diddy “started smacking me really hard in my face.” When Jane got out, she said Diddy started playing pornography on her phone. He then texted Anton, an entertainer who had participated in hotel nights with them, from this same phone. Anton came over. Jane had tried to cover her injuries with a side-swept hairstyle. “I greeted Anton, and I just tried to be polite and nice and just ask him how his day was and try to make small talk, but I could see Sean in the room just giving me this really evil stare,” Jane said. “He was like, ‘I need to talk to you.’”
Diddy took Jane aside. He noticed that Jane and Anton had some conversations in early 2024 and said the “text exchange wasn’t sitting well with him.” Jane said she and Anton had run into each other at a birthday party and that she saw him hooking up with someone else but that nothing untoward happened between them. Diddy told Jane to perform sexually on Anton and not to “ruin” his night. “I said, ‘I don’t want to!’” Jane said Diddy neared her face and said, “Is this coercion?” before pressuring her into taking ecstasy. As Jane recounted these moments to jurors, she patted her eyes with a Kleenex. “I had to perform oral sex on Anton. It just felt like forever.” Sean watched. “I felt so sick … I just felt disgusted. I just felt terrible.”
Earlier in the day, Jane described her reaction to Cassie publicly accusing Diddy of abuse in late 2023. “I’m distressed from reading all of this,” Jane said in a text to Diddy, which she discussed in her testimony on June 9. “I feel like I’m reading my own sexual trauma.” Cassie, who testified earlier in Diddy’s trial, said that he coerced her into drugged-up, days-long sexual encounters with male escorts called “Freak Offs.” Jane, now on her third day of testimony, told jurors that Diddy pressured her into ecstasy-fueled encounters with male escorts called “hotel nights.”
Some time after Jane told Diddy she was distraught over Cassie’s allegations, they spoke on the phone. Portions of this conversation were played in court; it was recorded without Jane knowing and discovered on a phone seized by federal agents in spring 2024. Diddy told Jane he needed her, saying, “I’m sorry you feel this way.” He thought they were enjoying “kinky shit” together. “I’m just trying to just … stop all this madness,” Diddy said. Jane told Diddy, “Just, like, reading it all, it’s so, like, word for word.” Jane also said, “Who’s there for me when I close my eyes and I have these fucked-up things in my head?” In a subsequent conversation, Diddy tried to smooth over the situation, telling Jane he needed her friendship. “You know you ain’t gotta worry about nothing else,” Diddy said. Jane understood this as referring to her rent, which he’d been paying since mid-2023. “Please pray for me. I’m going to be praying for you,” Diddy also said.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Diddy visibly reacted to portions of Jane’s testimony. He pushed his chair back and shook his head as Jane described feeling used to fulfill the fallen mogul’s sexual fantasies — while he lavished attention on other women. Diddy also appeared to be oscillating ever so slightly in his chair; his back and head were moving with the almost imperceptible back-and-forth that comes with leg-tapping.
Jane recalled one exchange with Diddy about travel plans to New York City. She thought it would be a romantic trip. Diddy told her to send him something showing her “being bad” — referring to tapes of their sexual encounters with escorts. Jane thought Diddy was with someone else and told him to “figure out how to get your dick hard on your own.” Diddy told her, “I got the phones,” which Jane took to mean devices that had videos of their sexual encounters on them. This worried Jane because they had a specific phone for these recordings, and they were not supposed to be on Diddy’s main phones — which all of his staff had access to. Jane was also angry because Diddy had appeared on a podcast where he “bragged about sex with another woman” for “48 hours straight.”
“I’m not coming to New York. I feel disrespected,” Jane told Diddy in a text. “It’s clear you [only] want me there to use me for a hotel binge. You have plenty of hos for that.” Around this point in Jane’s testimony, Diddy could be seen resting his head in his hand momentarily. He appeared to disagree with her statements. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be used,’” Jane recalled, referencing texts shown to jurors and read aloud in court. “‘As much as I want to see you, I don’t want to be treated like a ho in a hotel room … it doesn’t make me feel good.’” Diddy insisted she was wrong. “He said, ‘Girl, that was podcast talk. I haven’t even had sex.’”
“‘I don’t want to feel obligated to perform these nights for you in fear of losing the roof over my head,’” Jane also testified she said. Diddy left her a voice note where he said “I’m sick in bed” and didn’t understand why she was making a problem. As their exchanges continued, Jane claimed that Diddy said “that he loved me, that he missed me, that he wanted to see me.” Jane decided to visit him after all. Diddy told Jane she could do a little shopping. They would go to dinner. Diddy even asked her to bring a passport. It sounded like the romantic time she’d so desperately wanted. Jane received a text mid-flight. Diddy asked her about one of the entertainers who had participated in their hotel nights.
“He says, ‘I have a surprise, if that’s okay.’ I understood that he was going to introduce somebody new,” Jane said, breaking into tears and dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “I hated it.” After landing in New York, Jane went to the hotel. Diddy picked her up so late they couldn’t get a proper dinner; their only option was a lounge that was “almost closing.” Jane told him that she didn’t want a hotel night, and his demeanor turned defensive. “We started heading back to the hotel and he gives me a pill.” It was ecstasy. Back at the room, Jane had sexual encounters with two performers in Diddy’s presence. They didn’t do anything the remainder of Jane’s time in New York City. “We just rested, and Sean got me sick,” she said. “He gave me COVID.”
Diddy, who was wearing a pale-beige sweater and a white shirt, seemed like he was trying to behave well in front of jurors, despite his prior movements. When one of Diddy’s attorneys, Teny Geragos, was returning from a sidebar, he pulled out her chair and made as if helping push it back toward the table.
Jane has told jurors that Diddy lured her into a world of sexual encounters with male escorts under the false pretense of a romantic relationship. After Diddy wooed Jane with deeply intimate one-on-one attention for several months, she agreed to go along with Diddy’s pitch that she have sex with another man in front of him. This didn’t wind up being a one-off event, as Jane had thought. “I felt that that night just opened, like, a Pandora’s box in our relationship. It just completely set the tone for our relationship going forward,” Jane said on June 5. Diddy would soon want these encounters, which they called “hotel nights,” all the time — and he plied Jane with ecstasy so she could perform in days-long sexual events, she previously told jurors. “He would be like, ‘You’re not getting tired on me, are you? Let’s finish strong, hard. Let’s end on a high note,’” Jane recalled during her testimony on June 6.
Sign up for Court Appearances: United States v. Diddy
A newsletter covering the dramatic trial of a music mogul.
