Diddy’s Defense Pushes Back on Cassie’s Blackmail Claims

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Sean “Diddy” Combs’s team pushed back on notions that he controlled Casandra “Cassie” Ventura with blackmail material from “Freak Offs,” suggesting at his sex-trafficking trial that the rapper had just as much to lose if intimate videos of their encounters with male escorts got released. The defense also intimated on cross that Cassie had a temper herself and that she had threatened to kill an associate over a perceived leak.

“I will kill you, and I will hide you, and I will cut you up, and I will put you in the fucking dirty right now,” Cassie said in evidence presented by the defense. The sharp-tongued comment emerged during her second day of cross-examination. Diddy attorney Anna Estevao played an audio recording of Cassie and an associate from 2014 following a party she hosted in Atlantic City. This associate said he had seen a compromising video of Cassie, but then backtracked. “You’re fucking with me. I’m going to fuck you up,” Cassie also said in the recording. “It’s not going to be blood on my hands — someone else is going to do it.”

Estevao tried to establish that Diddy didn’t want sex tapes to get out. She asked Cassie: What happened when you told him about concerns someone was recording them? “He said I’ll take care of it,” Cassie said. “These would have been embarrassing to him if they had been released?” Estevao asked. Cassie answered in the affirmative.

Estevao suggested that Diddy’s concerns were all the more heightened because of his celebrity — and notoriety of an escort they had used. She asked about Cowboys4Angels, an agency that provided them male escorts and some of whom wound up participating in a reality-TV show on Showtime called Gigolos. Did an escort they had invited to a Freak Off appear on the show? “I’ve never seen the show, so I don’t know,” Cassie said. But she and Diddy wanted to keep their activities private? “Yes.”

Casandra “Cassie” Ventura enters her fourth day of testimony in Sean “Diddy” Combs Manhattan federal court sex-trafficking trial on Friday — with an expectation his defense will continue to claim that she was a more than willing participant in his sexual demands. On Thursday, defense attorney Anna Estevao showed jurors numerous written exchanges between Diddy and Cassie to undermine the singer’s claims that he forced her into Freak Offs. One message from Cassie, for example, read: “I’m always ready to freak off. LOLOL.”

Estevao also asked Cassie about her relationship with Kid Cudi. Prosecutors have contended that Diddy’s threat to blow up Kid Cudi’s car was among many acts of violence bolstering their racketeering case against him. Diddy’s defense tried to reframe the dispute with Kid Cudi as romance-related beef and not a RICO matter.

“To your knowledge, this was particularly offensive to Mr. Combs because of Kid Cudi’s stature in the industry, right?” Estevao asked. “To my knowledge, yeah,” Cassie said.

Prosecutors have argued that “Freak Offs,” drug-fueled encounters with male escorts that Diddy directed, were the point of his alleged racketeering scheme. Cassie’s cross came after two days of direct testimony where she described enduring Diddy’s abuse for a decade. On Wednesday, Cassie alleged that Diddy raped her in 2018 after they split up.