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The fifth week of the sex-trafficking case against Sean “Diddy” Combs introduced testimony from a third anonymous victim: “Jane,” a single mother who dated Combs between 2020 and 2024. Jane alleged that Combs used financial control over her life to secure her continued participation in the Freak Offs at the center of the trial.
Prosecutors allege that Combs coerced women — including his ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura — into prolonged sexual encounters with male escorts, which often lasted for days thanks to the drugs he allegedly used to keep participants compliant and awake. The government claims that Combs engaged in physical, financial, and psychological abuse to make sure the women obeyed, and that he would film Freak Offs to blackmail them into silence. (Combs denies these allegations and has pleaded not guilty to the sex-trafficking and racketeering charges against him.) So far, Jane’s testimony appears to support their argument. Jane told the court that, after she agreed to one third-party sexual scenario with Combs, she felt she had opened “a Pandora’s box” that she was “unable to shut for the remainder of [the] relationship.”
Additionally, jurors heard from several other witnesses for the prosecution whose testimony is intended to show that Combs’s alleged transgressions stretched beyond his sexual partners. A Beverly Hills Hotel employee recalled Combs booking rooms under the name of an assistant, Phillip Pines, and accruing hefty cleaning fees for “oil damage” and drapes that were “soiled beyond what is normal.” A forensic video investigator testified that security footage from the InterContinental Century City Hotel in Los Angeles — which shows Combs beating Ventura in 2016 — had not been tampered with or edited, as the defense has repeatedly claimed. Bad Boy’s former CFO went over financial records confirming a $20,000 transfer from Ventura’s parents to Combs, which previous witnesses said was made to keep the rapper from releasing sex tapes of their daughter. And at one point, presiding judge Arun Subramanian threatened to eject Combs from the courtroom after catching him repeatedly making faces at jurors in an apparent bid for interaction.
Here are the key takeaways from this week’s testimony.
The defense accused Mia of a “Me Too money grab.”
On Monday, “Mia,” a pseudonymous former personal assistant to Combs who accused the mogul of raping and sexually assaulting her multiple times over the course of her employment, got back on the stand to resume cross-examination. Last week, Combs’s lawyers zoomed in on Mia’s digital footprint, drilling her about social-media posts that showed her boss in a positive light and affectionate text messages she sent after the death of his longtime girlfriend, Kim Porter. The defense seemed to suggest that being effusive on Instagram meant she couldn’t have been abused in real life. But glowing posts — particularly for Combs’s birthday — were a job requirement, Mia told the court. If she didn’t share them, “I would be screamed at, humiliated, made fun of, and my job would be threatened,” she said, per CNN.
Defense attorney Brian Steel also asked Mia if she ever filmed Combs in a “moment of rage,” as taking BTS footage was one of her jobs. She replied: “No, I would not have been allowed to film that.” Noting that Mia never told friends or family what was going on, Steel went so far as to ask Mia if she actually had been sexually assaulted by Combs. According to NBC, she replied, “I would not lie in this courtroom. I never lied in this courtroom; everything I have said is true.” She also added that she was “terrified and brainwashed” during her time working for Combs.
“Nobody acted like what was happening to me was wrong,” she said, according to CNN. “He threatened to tell Cassie quote, unquote ‘everything,’ which made me feel like I had done something wrong. I don’t know how to explain what that does to a person.”
Part of Steel’s questioning seemed designed to suggest a “Me Too money grab”: Mia did not initially tell prosecutors that Combs had assaulted her. It took her months to come forward with those claims, and on the stand, she explained that she did not want to raise them until she had retained counsel. (Per the Washington Post, Mia hired the attorney who successfully represented writer E. Jean Carroll in her sexual assault and defamation suit against Donald Trump.) Mia insisted she had no intention of suing Combs, and she held her ground despite the weight of Steel’s skepticism. Affirming each of the allegations of abuse she’d made, she reminded the jury why victims sometimes speak positively about the people who’ve harmed them: “It’s called psychological abuse.”
Combs paid $100,000 for footage of the InterContinental Hotel assault.
According to CNN, security guard Eddy Garcia was on duty on March 5 when the InterContinental’s security desk received a call from Kristina Khorram, Combs’s chief of staff, asking “if there was any possible way to get a copy of the video or see the video” of an incident involving her boss earlier that day. “I told her that she would have to reach out to hotel management or get a subpoena,” Garcia testified. Khorram then showed up in person, and Garcia warned her that, while he wasn’t authorized to show her the tape, “off the record, it’s bad.” Combs’s side continued to push, and Garcia said Khorram and the mogul ultimately called him on his personal cell — a number he hadn’t given to either of them — to make their case. Combs, Garcia testified, said “that something like this could ruin him,” according to CNN. Combs also told Garcia that “he would take care of me,” Garcia alleged. Garcia then called his boss, who agreed to sell the tape for $50,000.
A few days later, Garcia delivered the footage to Combs on a USB drive. While Garcia assured the mogul that the original had been erased from the hotel’s servers, Garcia also expressed concern about what might happen to him if Ventura changed her mind about reporting the assault. Garcia testified that Combs then got Ventura on FaceTime and instructed her to “let him know that you want this to go away, too,” which she did. Garcia signed an NDA with a $1 million break clause and texted Combs photos of his ID, his manager’s, and another on-duty security guard’s — to ensure they were “all on the same page,” Combs told Garcia, according to the Washington Post. Garcia said Combs produced stacks of cash from a paper bag and fed them through a counter until he reached $100,000. Garcia’s cut came to $30,000. A few weeks later, Combs texted him, writing “Happy Easter my angel, God is good,” and then proceeded to ask if anyone had asked about the incident or the video, Garcia testified.
Bryana Bongolan recalled Combs dangling her over a balcony.
On Wednesday, fashion designer Bryana “Bana” Bongolan took the stand and recounted complaints she’d lodged in a December 2024 lawsuit against Combs — namely that, in 2016, he barged into Ventura’s apartment, grabbed Bongolan, and held her over a balcony.
Bongolan testified that she became friends with Ventura at some point in 2014 or 2015, but held off on meeting Combs for about a year. “I wasn’t really fond of what I was seeing,” she said, per CNN, citing a black eye Combs had given Ventura. Bongolan said she witnessed Combs’s controlling behavior firsthand: The mogul would often show up at Ventura’s door late at night and start banging on the door, Bongolan said, and once, he threw a knife at Ventura when she answered. On another occasion, Bongolan said she and Ventura were on a photo shoot when Combs allegedly “came up really close to my face and said something around the lines of, ‘I’m the devil and I could kill you.’” She testified that she had no idea what made him say that.
She also claimed to have no idea what prompted him to hold her over a balcony in September 2016. Bongolan testified that she and her ex-girlfriend had been asleep on Ventura’s couch that night when Combs showed up. Telling her partner to hide in the bathroom, Bongolan said she went out to the balcony and tried to act casual. She was about to start smoking a blunt when Combs came up behind her: Grabbing her under the armpits, “he lifted me up and then had me on top of the rail,” she recalled. Bongolan is under five feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds at the time, according to her lawsuit. She testified that, as he dangled her midair, Combs was yelling at her, “Do you know what the fuck you did?” After about 15 seconds, he hauled her back over the railing and tossed her onto the patio furniture. From that collision, Bongolan sustained a large bruise on her leg and also hurt her neck and back badly enough that she needed a neck brace, per the Washington Post. She said she was too scared to involve the police, and that when she spoke to Combs on the phone a few days later, she told him repeatedly, “‘I don’t want any problems with you.’”
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In cross-examination, the defense focused on Bongolan and Ventura’s drug habit, which Bongolan agreed was “serious.” Combs’s attorneys leveraged her party history to suggest she may not have correctly remembered the situations she described, according to NBC. The knife incident, for example: Bongolan couldn’t explain why Combs had a knife or where it came from. “I don’t know how it happened. I just saw what I saw,” she told the defense, per the Post. The defense also pressed her on a detail that appeared in her lawsuit, but which she didn’t mention on the witness stand: That in the process of lifting her over the balcony, Combs had groped her breast hard enough to leave a bruise. Bongolan admitted that an attorney she’d hired included the claim in a demand letter to Combs, but clarified that she had fired him because the information was incorrect. But the defense kept pushing, bringing out hotel receipts that seemed to suggest Combs was in New York City during the time frame the assault allegedly occurred. “You came in here and lied to the jury, isn’t that true?” defense attorney Nicole Westmoreland challenged Bongolan, according to NBC. “I can’t agree with you,” the witness replied. “I will never forget him holding me on that balcony.”
Jane explained how her relationship with Diddy became “90 percent” Freak Offs.
Testifying under the pseudonym “Jane,” another of Combs’s former girlfriends took the stand on Thursday, kicking off what is expected to be days of questioning. Jane said she met Combs at a Miami yacht party in 2020 and continued dating him right up until his arrest in September 2024. Like Ventura, Jane — an influencer and a single mother — described the mogul as “larger than life” and said she fell “head over heels” for him quickly. Their first date, according to CNN, lasted five days. Shortly thereafter, Combs took her to Turks and Caicos, followed by the Bahamas, for her birthday. Whereas Jane had only taken drugs on two other occasions, she said she took ecstasy nine times during the Turks and Caicos leg of their trip alone. And at the end of their vacation, Combs offered to pay her $10,000 to make up for lost income. Although Combs told Jane he was seeing other people, “In my heart, I just wanted to see Sean, so I was monogamous,” she testified.
The pair kept their relationship private, but between February and May 2021, Jane said Combs paid to fly her to Miami on a biweekly basis. The couple did a lot of drugs — ketamine, cocaine, molly, and ecstasy — and Jane testified they would have sex for 12 to 24 hours at a time. In May, Combs asked her how she might feel about bringing another man into the equation. Thinking she was “playing into the fantasy,” she said, “okay.” A few hours later, Jane said she found herself in a hotel room where Combs informed her that “Don,” a man from an escort service, was coming up to meet them. Still high and “super-nervous,” Jane said she’d gone along with the situation so far “because my partner was excited and it was already happening.” Vulture reports that, when Jane asked that Don wear a condom, Combs said he didn’t want that. This refusal turned out to be a recurring theme: On several future occasions when Jane asked for a condom, she said that Combs became “almost incensed,” according to NBC: “He said he didn’t want to see a rubber while he was watching.”
Still, that first night, Jane testified, “it was taboo, it was fun, I had a good time with my partner.” She also assumed it would be a one-time thing. Instead, she said, it “opened like a Pandora’s box.” Combs’s interests increasingly shifted to these third-party scenarios, Jane said, until about 90 percent of their sex life involved male escorts. According to CNN, Jane testified that she only agreed because she “feared losing him.” But as time went on and she voiced her discomfort with his demands, Combs was “dismissive,” insinuating that he would break up with her and stop paying her rent if she declined. Between May 2021 and October 2023, Jane said she and Combs had “hotel nights” every time they saw each other.
Like Cassie, Jane said she had to keep herself groomed in a specific way in anticipation of these encounters: Straight hair, light nail polish, tanned skin. The hotel nights themselves also followed a similar pattern: The room would be set up with red lights and sheets draped over everything, Jane said, to help guard against damage from the more than two-dozen bottles of baby oil they typically used during the encounter. Combs would direct Jane and her partner through a period of “prolonged foreplay,” per CNN, which progressed to oral sex and, eventually, intercourse. Hotel nights could stretch between 24 and 30 hours, according to NBC, during which Jane didn’t get to sleep and often had sex with more than one man. Crying on the stand, she recalled Combs feeding her “multiple doses” of ecstasy in a single night to make sure she stayed awake, and refusing her requests for a break. Jane told the court that, when the drugs ran out, Combs would send his employees to buy more. On two occasions, he instructed Jane to fly with drugs, according to CNN. When Jane asked Khorram, the chief of staff, about the risks, she said Khorram assured Jane she “did it all the time” and it wasn’t a big deal.
Jane said that, on a few occasions, she tried to get through hotel nights without any substances, but found that “it was too real.” On one occasion when she forwent drugs, she went to the bathroom and threw up after having sex with two different escorts, NBC reports. “Sean came in and he was like, ‘That’s good, you’ll feel better. Let’s go, the third guy is here,’” Jane testified. Without the drugs, she said, she felt “repulsed” by herself.
As she continued seeing Combs, Jane said she devoted less and less time to her career. She felt she needed to be ready if Combs decided he wanted to see her. Combs would give her money, lump sums ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 at a time, to cover her bills, her housing, and her expenses, according to the Post. At some point, Combs proposed a contract: He would cover her monthly rent — the equivalent of about $10,000 per month, according to CNN. Although she felt like she had no choice but to go along with his demands, Jane told Combs she didn’t enjoy his hotel nights.
“I wish we could take this back to when we first started dating,” she texted him, according to NBC. “Ever since I opened Pandora’s box, I haven’t been able to close it.” Participating in the marathon sex sessions was “dark, sleazy,and makes me feel disgusted with myself,” she continued. “It’s the only reason you have me around and why you pay for my house. I don’t want to feel obligated to perform and fear losing you. I don’t want to feel like that anymore,. I just want to talk like adults and figure where we go from here.” He reportedly responded: “Girl stop.”
