Diddy’s Ex-Employees Detail Alleged Kidnapping, Sex Assaults

This week, during the sex-trafficking trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the court heard from several of the mogul’s former employees, who said they experienced his extreme, volatile temper firsthand. Capricorn Clark, a former personal assistant who went on to serve several other roles in his companies, alleged that Combs kidnapped her. “Mia,” another ex-personal assistant testifying under a pseudonym, told jurors that Combs sexually assaulted and raped her on several occasions. Mia wept through much of her testimony, as reported by CNN, explaining that she “absolutely” did not want to speak about the alleged assaults and had planned on taking them to her grave. But “when you’re scared into silence,” she said, “these things continue to happen to others.”

Additionally, the court heard from a stylist who remains a close friend of Combs’s ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, and several witnesses involved in investigating a breakin and car fire at Kid Cudi’s (given name Scott Mescudi) home in 2011. Here are the key takeaways from this week’s testimony.

Who is Capricorn Clark, Diddy’s former assistant?

On Tuesday, Combs’s former personal assistant, Capricorn Clark, took the stand. During her tenure with Combs, she was fired and rehired several times, and her roles also changed over time. She eventually transitioned to director of marketing for Sean John Women, and then served as Ventura’s creative director until 2018.

Clark alleged that, on her first day working for Combs in 2004, he threatened to kill her because she previously worked for his professional enemy, Suge Knight. Clark told the court that she considered Combs “very serious” in that moment. Shortly after her start date, she underwent five days of interrogation about missing jewelry that had been loaned to the mogul. According to the New York Times, this meant round after round of lie-detector testing in a “dilapidated” office building. Clark testified that the man conducting the tests warned her that “they’re going to throw you in the East River” if she failed, making her so nervous that they couldn’t get conclusive results. Clark had to keep coming back until she definitively passed the test, according to NBC News.

Clark told the court that her days were long — sometimes stretching 7 a.m. to 4 a.m. the next day — and her professional obligations included setting up Combs’s hotel rooms and unpacking his bags. She recalled him traveling with drugs including ecstasy, baby oil, a camera, and IV drips for recovery. She said he sometimes made her get drugs for him, both prescription and hard: On a 2006 trip to France, for example, Clark said Combs had her buy cocaine for him.

Clark alleged that Diddy kidnapped her at gunpoint.

Clark also claimed that, when she learned about Ventura’s brief relationship with Mescudi, she urged the singer to get a burner phone, otherwise she’d “get us all killed.” When Combs eventually found out about the relationship, on December 22, 2011, Clark testified that she woke up to him banging on her door. “He just said, ‘Get dressed, we’re going to go kill’” Mescudi, she recalled, per NBC. “The gun was in his hand.” When Clark told Combs she didn’t want to go, she remembered him saying, “I don’t give a fuck what you want to do,” according to Vulture. Clark testified that she obeyed because he was armed.

Clark said she initially stayed in the car while Combs broke in through Mescudi’s front door, calling Ventura to warn her to keep Mescudi away from Combs. “I said, “Cassie, stop him — he’s going to get himself killed!” When Combs returned to the car, he demanded to see Clark’s phone and then drove her to a nightclub, she testified. From there, Clark says Combs made her call Ventura and say she was being held until Ventura agreed to return. As Clark put it at the top of her testimony: “I was kidnapped.”

Clark also said that Combs threatened to “kill all you” if she and Ventura didn’t convince Mescudi not to go to the police, according to CNN. When Ventura did come back to him, Combs beat her “100 percent full force” and threatened to do the same to Clark if she tried to stop him, according to NBC. Instead, Clark said she called Ventura’s mother, pleading with her: “He’s beating the shit out of your daughter. I’m in over my head. Please help her. I can’t call the police, but you can.”

Clark said Combs fired her shortly thereafter, ostensibly because she hadn’t submitted her vacation days correctly. According to the Washington Post, she believes the real reason Combs let her go is that she told Bad Boy Entertainment executive Harve Pierre what happened. Combs “said I would never work again and all these people weren’t my friends and he would make me kill myself,” she testified, according to NBC.

In 2016, however, Clark came back as Ventura’s creative director. She left that position in 2018, testifying that, by then, Ventura’s drug use was getting in the way of professional obligations. Still, she affirmed that Combs had final say over Ventura’s career, from her appearance to her music to her event appearances, according to CNN. And despite the kidnapping and alleged physical abuse she suffered in Combs’s employment, Clark kept trying to work with him — most recently discussing a role as Combs’s chief of staff in 2024, after federal agents raided his homes. She testified in redirect that she believed Combs “blacklisted” her after her 2012 firing, that he refused to sign the letter of recommendation they’d agreed on, and so she found it impossible to get other jobs in the industry. In one meeting with Interscope Records, she says an executive warned her to “leave Combs alone.” “At this level of business,” she said, “he holds all the power as it relates to me.”

Two LAPD officers offered more insight into the Kid Cudi incidents.

Christopher Ignacio was the responding LAPD officer when Mescudi reported the 2011 break-in to police. According to the Washington Post, he testified to seeing an Escalade with blackout windows, and per CNN, a license plate registered to Bad Boy Productions outside Mescudi’s house when he arrived. The Escalade quickly drove away, but allegedly took another pass 15 to 20 minutes later. Ignacio said that while Mescudi was very “flustered,” he found nothing disturbed when he investigated Mescudi’s home.

Next, Los Angeles Fire Department investigator Lance Jimenez told the court that the Molotov cocktail thrown into Mescudi’s Porsche could’ve been more destructive if the person who made it hadn’t used such high-end materials. They stuffed a “designer-type” handkerchief into an Olde English bottle, and because it was made of a “silky-type material,” Jimenez explained, it slipped out. Had it been a more low-budget bomb, Jimenez believed the bottle would likely have exploded — potentially destroying not only the car but also setting fire to Mescudi’s house. While fingerprints were taken from both the Molotov cocktail and the Porsche, Jimenez noted that an LAPD officer who wasn’t involved with the case had that evidence destroyed, along with fingerprints from the break-in. The defense quickly objected to this line of questioning and called for a mistrial over the purported insinuation that Combs tampered with incriminating evidence. Judge Arun Subramanian denied its motion, but ordered that part of Jimenez’s testimony stricken from the record.

Celebrity stylist Deonte Nash detailed examples of Combs’s violent abuse.

According to the Post, Deonte Nash regularly worked with Ventura between 2008 and 2009. The stylist said Combs had final approval over Ventura’s outfits: They would send him options, he would pick his favorite, and “that was usually the one we went with,” according to CNN. While record labels do sometimes get final say over artists’ looks, in Nash’s telling, Combs exercised an obsessive level of control over Ventura’s styling. He testified that Combs once approached him at a Vanity Fair party, grabbed him by his jacket, and lifted him off his feet because Ventura arrived with her hair down, whereas the mogul wanted to see it up. Nash said he spent part of the evening running around the event, asking people for spare bobby pins.

Nash also said he heard Combs call Ventura names ranging from “baby girl” and “Cass” to “slut,” “ho,” and his alleged favorite, “bitch.” If Ventura failed to follow Combs’s orders or “did something he didn’t like,” Nash said, he would threaten to release sex tapes, get Ventura’s parents fired from their jobs, or block the release of her music. He recalled one incident in which Combs barged into Ventura’s apartment, saying, “Bitch, didn’t I tell you to answer the phone?” Combs then grabbed her hair and hauled her off the couch where she had been sleeping, punching and kicking her repeatedly, according to Vulture. Nash said he and Combs’s then-assistant — who testified later in the week under the pseudonym Mia — jumped on Combs’s back in an effort to pull him off Ventura, but he threw them off and then smacked Ventura into her bed frame, where she cut open her head and began bleeding heavily. “Look what y’all made me do,” Nash recalls Combs telling them, according to the Post. (Ventura also recounted this incident in her testimony.)

In another incident, Nash said Combs attacked the pair of them, storming into Ventura’s apartment and pushing her out the door. He then came back for Nash, the stylist said, “popping me in the back of the head ’cause I don’t have hair, and grabbing me by my shirt.” Outside the apartment, Combs allegedly berated the pair, telling Ventura she had “fucked up” and that he was going to post sex tapes online after sending them to her parents. Nash subsequently asked Ventura why she didn’t just let Combs release the tapes; he remembered Ventura telling him that the tapes showed her “having sex with other guys” when “she didn’t want to.” Nash eventually found out about the Freak Offs, which he didn’t believe Ventura enjoyed. On her 29th birthday, for example, Nash heard Combs haranguing Ventura about how she couldn’t “do this one thing for him,” and when Nash asked her what was going on, she said, “He’s just mad because I don’t want to go to the hotel and Freak Off with him.” By the end of the night, she allegedly relented, telling Nash that Combs was “making her do that shit.”

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Who is Diddy’s former assistant “Mia?”

The prosecution’s “Victim 4” is a woman testifying under the name Mia, who formerly worked for Combs between 2009 and 2017. She started as a personal assistant, and described the job as “chaotic,” “toxic,” and sometimes also “exciting.”

“The highs were really high and the lows really low. Puff’s mood determined the environment. He threw things at me, threw me against the wall, threw me in the pool, he threw something against my head. Sexually assaulted me,” she testified, according to NBC News. She said she worked around the clock — on one occasion, for five days straight without sleep, until she had a “physical breakdown” — for $50,000 per year. According to CNN, Mia’s daily tasks included running Combs’s social-media accounts, being his “main liaison” with Hollywood, keeping him on schedule “from the minute he wakes up in the morning until the moment he falls asleep at night,” “PROTECT[ING] HIM AT ALL TIMES,” “STAYING WITHIN [HIS] EYESIGHT (unless he advises otherwise) ALWAYS WHILE ON DUTY,” and “anticipating his needs, whims, and moods.” When she stayed in one of Combs’s homes, Mia testified that she wasn’t allowed to lock her door at night.

From her assistantship, Mia transitioned to helping Combs launch Revolt Films. While she worked for Combs, she and Ventura also became “like sisters, best friends,” she testified. Mia described Ventura’s relationship with Combs as “unequal” and “toxic,” with Combs retaining control over every aspect of Ventura’s career. When he got upset with Ventura, he would confiscate things, like her car, and if she and Mia went somewhere without Combs’s approval, “punishment was typically unpredictable but typically pretty terrifying.” If Combs tried to get ahold of Ventura and she didn’t answer her phone quickly, “there would be multiple people calling, texting, emailing her trying to find her, or security would show up,” Mia testified.

Mia said she frequently saw Combs get violent with Ventura. During the incident where she and Nash tried to pull Combs off Ventura, Mia said she thought Combs might kill Nash. “He threw me against the wall so quick and so easily, and I realized we were in real, real danger,” she testified, according to CNN. When she pleaded with Combs to stop beating Ventura, she recalled, “His eyes turned, like, black and there was like no getting through … like he was looking through me.” When she and Ventura snuck out of a hotel room Combs had ordered them to stay in to attend a 2010 party at Prince’s L.A. estate, she testified that Combs showed up and spotted them, at which point Ventura took off. “He caught up to her and had her on the ground,” Mia said. “He started attacking her, but Prince’s security swiftly intervened.” Mia said she was notified the next day that she was suspended from work for insubordination. And during a trip to Turks and Caicos, Mia testified that she woke up to Ventura running into the room. “She was screaming for help and saying, ‘You gotta help me, he’s gonna kill me,’” she recalled. She and Ventura ran out of the room, grabbed paddleboards, and swam out into the ocean to escape Combs.

In their working relationship, Mia said Combs vacillated between treating her like a friend and “like a worthless piece of crap,” according to CNN. “He would humiliate me, he would curse at me, he would go on really long, extended rants about how incompetent and stupid I was, threaten my job.” On one occasion, she said, he threw a computer at her head because the Wi-Fi in his trailer didn’t work; on another, he slammed her arm in a door repeatedly after stealing her phone.

Combs was a difficult boss in other ways, too. As NBC reports, Mia recalled one blowup between him and Ventura when she was in South Africa filming and discovered Combs cheating. When Ventura stopped answering Combs’s calls, he allegedly redirected his ire at Mia and she woke up to 48 missed calls from him and his staff. Combs also pestered her via text, threatening to tell Ventura about the assaults as if they were consensual and instigated by Mia. “If you dont call me now fuck it all. And imma tell everything. And dont ever speak me again,” he wrote, according to CNN. “You have 2 min. Fuckk her. Call my [house] now or never speak to me again.” He also insinuated that he would ruin a deal for a comedy series she’d made with ABC. Mia pleaded with him to wait, that Ventura was busy, but he wouldn’t let up: “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best that we no longer have any dealings,” he wrote to her. Mia actually stopped working for Combs in 2017, when he decided he was no longer interested in Revolt Films. She hasn’t been able to return to work since, she said, because of the PTSD she suffers from working for Combs.

Mia alleged that Diddy sexually assaulted her on several occasions.

The first alleged assault occurred shortly after Combs hired Mia, she testified. She said they were in a penthouse suite at a hotel to celebrate the mogul’s 40th birthday, where he served her two shots — which Mia said affected her more than usual — and then kissed her and stuck his hand under her dress. “I was shocked and I froze. I couldn’t even process what was happening,” she said, according to CNN. In 2009 or 2010, she recalled being asleep at Combs’s Los Angeles home when she awoke to “the weight of a person on top of me,” according to Vulture. Mia said Combs told her to stay quiet, then “put himself inside of me” while she “just froze.” The rape left Mia feeling “terrified and confused and ashamed and scared,” she said, according to CNN. “It was very quick, but it felt like forever.”

On another occasion at Combs’s L.A. home, Mia said that the mogul ambushed her into performing oral sex on him. She testified that he surprised her as she was walking out of a closet: “He was standing right in front of me. He had his penis out,” Mia said, per Vulture, and Combs forced her to fellate him. She testified that although she knows Combs assaulted her on several other occasions, she struggles to remember the details: “I just remember feeling like a specific, horrible, dark feeling in my stomach,” she said, according to NBC. And after each new attack, “I always thought this was the last time. Next time, I would somehow be more prepared. I had to get right back to work, there was so much going on.”

As the assaults continued, Mia said, she blamed herself. She “felt so desperate and terrified and trapped,” she said, but never intended to tell anyone. She said she “didn’t want anyone to know ever,” because the assaults were “the most traumatizing, worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” Asked if she ever explicitly told Combs “no,” Mia said she only ever tried to wriggle away from him. “I couldn’t tell him ‘no,’ like, about a sandwich. I couldn’t tell him ‘no’ about anything,” she testified, according to CNN. “He would fire me and ruin my future and somehow twist the story into making me look like a threat.” She added: “I didn’t want to die or get hurt.”

As to why she never went to the police about the myriad instances of abuse she witnessed, Mia reiterated that a big part of her job was protecting Combs’s reputation and testified that she “believed that Puff’s authority was above the police.” In her testimony, she recalled getting pulled over while Combs was in the car, and the officer’s attitude shifting from aggressive and punitive to immediately deferential when he saw Combs. “This was a period,” Mia testified, “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.”

In cross-examination, Combs’s attorneys displayed photos from Mia’s social-media accounts, in which she seemed to be having a good time with the mogul. Showing her a photo of herself, Combs, Ventura, and others at Burning Man one year — a post she captioned “take me back” — one of Combs’s attorneys asked, “You’re standing right next to and leaning toward him, the man who terrorized you?” Mia replied that she was, according to NBC, and explained why she was effusive with him over text. “When things are good I felt really safe, you almost forget about those things,” she explained. Mia went on to say that the conflict she felt “was psychological. I felt responsible for helping him. I felt bad for him. I don’t know how to describe it.”