What We’ve Learned From Diddy’s Sex-Trafficking Trial So Far
As the second week of Sean “Diddy” Combs’s sex-trafficking trial nears its close, his ex-girlfriend, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, has been on the stand for four days, fielding questioning that has been equal parts emotional and tedious. Prosecutors got Ventura to establish a pattern of alleged abuse: She fell in love with Combs as a 19-year-old, but was unprepared for his lifestyle and sexual demands. Ventura said she first agreed to participate in Freak Offs — days-long sex sessions with male escorts, during which she took a huge volume of drugs to stay awake and dissociate — to please Combs. Eventually, she testified, she did it because he leveraged the video footage of these orgies as blackmail and beat her if she failed to do what he told her.
Ventura spoke in detail about the Freak Offs themselves, as well as about the 2016 incident at a Los Angeles hotel in which security cameras captured Combs brutally assaulting her. The defense, meanwhile, focused much of its cross-examination on a mountain of text messages fired back and forth between the couple for over ten years. Their broader goal seems to be establishing that Ventura consented to the sexual situations Combs orchestrated and even set them up herself. Combs’s defense emphasized that, during his relationship with Ventura, Combs was a drug addict, suggesting his explosive moments were fueled by either substances or jealousy. In doing so, they may be trying to move away from the idea that Combs’s alleged abuse helped prop up what prosecutors are calling his “criminal enterprise,” painting it instead as the result of a drug problem and toxic relationship patterns.
Here’s everything you need to know about what happened during week two of the trial.
A jury was finally seated.
The process of whittling down the jurors to the final panel was not without sparring. Combs’s team accused prosecutors of racial profiling, complaining that they’d dismissed seven Black candidates. U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian sided with the prosecution, agreeing that there were sound reasons — prospective jurors’ attitudes toward the police, lack of English fluency, apparent harboring of an “agenda” — to let them go. Ultimately, a jury of eight men and four women, alongside four men and two women serving as alternates, was seated.
Attorneys on both sides laid out their opening arguments.
The prosecutors’ side will be familiar: Combs, a “larger-than-life” celebrity, systematically subjected the women he dated — and Ventura in particular — to violence and sexual abuse. As NBC News reports, prosecutor Emily Johnson gestured to alleged incidents in which Combs beat Ventura brutally, then “threatened her and said if she defies her again, he will release video of her having sex with male escorts.” Pointing to the attack displayed on the hotel security footage, Johnson emphasized that Ventura’s “life and safety depended on keeping [Combs] happy.”
“He sometimes called himself the king and expected to be treated like one,” Johnson said. “He used his companies to manipulate women, forcing them to have sex with male escorts while he watched. He and his inner circle made sure he got everything he wanted.”
Opening for the defense, Teny Geragos said, “This case is about Sean Combs’s private, personal sex life,” something the government has no business involving itself in.
“Combs is a complicated man, but this is not a complicated case,” Geragos said. “He has a bad temper and sometimes he is so angry and jealous that he gets out of control.” Still, while she acknowledged that Combs was responsible for domestic violence, she stressed that his transgressions did not amount to sex trafficking, nor to racketeering.
Geragos claimed Ventura left Combs of her own volition; that she was jealous; that she, like all the other “capable, strong adult” women involved in the case, was a “willing participant” in their sexual dynamic. Every day for over a decade, Ventura made “a choice to stay,” Geragos said, per the New York Times. The reason she and the other alleged victims have now changed their tune, Geragos suggested, “is simple: money.”
Witnesses, including a hotel security guard and a sex worker involved in Freak Offs, testified.
Israel Florez worked as a security guard at Los Angeles’ InterContinental Century City Hotel when Ventura and Combs visited in March 2016. He testified that he fielded the call about a “woman in distress on the sixth floor.” When he went up to see what was going on, per the Times, he found Combs in a towel with “a devilish stare” and Ventura curled up in a corner, “hood on, covered up.”
“She was scared,” Florez recalled. Florez said Combs offered him a thick wad of cash, which he understood as a bribe, and that later, he saw Ventura leave the hotel with a black eye. Florez told jurors he didn’t call police because Ventura wouldn’t talk to him beyond insisting that she wanted to leave.
Jurors also heard from male escort Daniel Phillip, who first met Combs and Ventura at the Gramercy Hotel in 2012. Per the Times, he said Ventura paid him several thousand dollars to have sex with her in front of Combs, who kept his face covered as he sat in the corner masturbating. As the couple continued to hire Phillip in the coming years, Combs took a more active role in directing their sex acts: pouring baby oil onto the pair, telling them how to move, inventing role-playing scenarios for them, Phillip testified.
On one occasion, Phillip recalled, he saw Combs throw a glass bottle at Ventura after she didn’t respond quickly enough when he called. Phillip said Combs then dragged her into another room and hit her, telling her, “‘Bitch, when I tell you to come here, you come here now, not later,’” per the Times. Phillip said he never went to the police because he was afraid of what Combs, a very powerful man, could do. In cross-examination, Phillip said that — at least during their first encounter — Ventura seemed to be “enjoying herself,” as the defense put it.
Ventura accused Diddy of repeatedly blackmailing her, trapping her in a cycle of physical abuse.
On the stand, Ventura recounted multiple instances of Combs’s alleged violence. Once, in 2013, Ventura says Combs came to her apartment and attacked her in front of two friends, throwing her into the side of her bed and splitting her eyebrow. Ventura says she later sent Combs a photo of the cut, writing, “So you can remember.” Per the New York Times, he replied, “You. Don’t know. When to. Stop. You ave [sic] pushed IT Too far. And continue to push. Sad.”
While she said that she sometimes picked physical fights with Combs, Ventura testified that she didn’t physically injure him like he did her. She recalled one incident, in which she punched Combs because he called her a derogatory name, and he beat her severely — stomping on her head inside an SUV — then made her spend a week in a hotel while she healed. She didn’t try to leave, she said, because she “understood Sean’s capabilities, his access to guns, the threats he made prior to that,” per the Times.
Sometimes, she said, Combs would “put his hands on her” during Freak Offs. “He would grab me up,” she said, according to the Times. “Push me down. Hit me in the side of the head. Kick me. You name it.” As to why she kept agreeing to participate, Ventura said she “felt trapped,” per the Guardian. “Whatever was going to not make him angry or threaten me, I was going to do.” She said Combs dangled the videos he filmed during Freak Offs over her head, continually reminding her that he could release them if she didn’t do what he said. Because of his cache of “blackmail materials,” she testified, “I feared for my career, my family.” The videos “could ruin everything I worked for, make me look like a slut,” she added. “I wasn’t supposed to be on those videos. I didn’t want to be in them.”
Diddy threatened to blow up Kid Cudi’s car, Ventura testified.
During a low point in her relationship with Combs in 2011, Ventura began seeing the rapper Kid Cudi, whose given name is Scott Mescudi. Per Variety, she testified that Combs went through her phone during a Freak Off and found messages with Mescudi’s assistant. At that point, she recalled, he flew into a rage: “His eyes blacked out,” she told the court, and he “lunged” at her with a corkscrew in his hand. Ventura left Combs’s house, and when she returned later on, she said he told her he was “going to hurt” her and Mescudi. She also alleged that he threatened to release two of the Freak Off videos and kicked her hard in her lower back, leaving a bruise. (Photos of the injury taken by Ventura’s mother were displayed in court.)
Some time after this incident, Ventura was on a trip with Combs when he allegedly mentioned that he was having Mescudi’s car “blown up.” In a subsequent meeting with the rapper, Ventura told the court that Mescudi asked Combs, “What about my vehicle?” Combs acted like he didn’t know anything about it. But around this time, Mescudi’s car exploded in his driveway.
Ventura detailed how her health suffered because of the Freak Offs.
In addition to physical injuries, Ventura told the court that she developed multiple health conditions from participating so frequently in Combs’s Freak Offs. She said she became addicted to opioids, which she took to “numb” herself after the encounters, on and off for years. “Occasionally, I would get sores on my tongue from the Freak Offs, [from] taking drugs, substances, friction in my mouth,” she testified, according to Vulture’s Victoria Bekiempis. She said she suffered digestive problems and chronic urinary tract infections. “It got to the point where Cipro didn’t work anymore,” she said, referring to the antibiotic. “When we were having frequent Freak Offs,” she explained, “sometimes they were back-to-back. I was actually doing the Freak Offs with the infection.”
Ventura said Diddy raped her in her apartment after they broke up.
Ventura also recalled an evening in 2018, when the couple had a “closure” dinner together after they broke up. As Bekiempis reports, they had a “really nice, playful” rapport going during the meal. But when Combs brought her back to her apartment, “he raped me in my living room,” Ventura alleged. “I just remember crying and saying ‘no.’” Nonetheless, she said, “He continued and finished,” then “got up and left.” They had sex once more after that night — consensually, she said — before finally parting ways. Questioned about why she agreed, Ventura said, “You don’t just turn feelings off that way,” according to the Times.
Ventura felt suicidal after years of alleged abuse.
In 2023, Ventura went to rehab and underwent trauma therapy. “I was spinning out,” she testified, citing intense flashbacks from her relationship with Combs. “I didn’t want to be alive anymore at that point.” Ventura recalled one night after she’d put her kids to bed. “I couldn’t take the pain I was in anymore and just tried to walk out the front door into traffic,” she remembered. Although her husband, Alex Fine, ultimately stopped her, she recalled telling him, “You can do this without me, you don’t need me anymore.”
The defense cross-examined Ventura.
Combs’s team began its cross-examination on Thursday, focusing first on effusive, loving text messages the pair exchanged early in their relationship. Combs’s attorneys seemed intent on highlighting messages in which Ventura expressed eagerness to participate in Freak Offs, homing in on several from 2017 in which Combs texted her, “I want an FO right now,” and she replied, “lol me too,” then, “Well I want to have fun with you.”
Questioned about her apparent agreement with Combs’s feelings about the encounters, Ventura said, “I would say that loving FOs were just words at that point.” Per the Times, the defense pored over text after text, seeming to exhaust Ventura into one-word answers. Revisiting text messages from before the 2016 incident at the InterContinental, for example, the Times reports that Combs’s lawyers pointed to a Freak Off–planning text in which Ventura wrote, “I don’t want you thinking I don’t want to.” While Ventura had already indicated that she agreed to the encounter in an effort to placate Combs, the defense appeared to be suggesting that he texted her so many times about the Freak Off because he wanted to know her preferences.
The defense also underscored Ventura’s jealousy — of other women Combs slept with and, in particular, of his ex-partner Kim Porter, who died in 2018. They seemed to be trying to establish that Combs was an addict with an opioid dependency, and that his violent moments stemmed from jealousy and a drug habit, according to the Times. Answering the defense’s questions about the impact comedowns had on Combs’s mood, Ventura said they played a role. “I’m not a doctor,” she said, per NBC News, but “coming off of certain pills, he would be pretty irritated.”
As Thursday’s cross-examination wound down, the defense seemed to be floating the possibility that a “bad batch” of MDMA may have been involved in the InterContinental Freak Off and potentially spurred the assault captured on security footage. Ventura said she didn’t know anything about that, but did dispel a claim mentioned in multiple civil sexual-abuse lawsuits that have been filed against Combs in recent months: According to the Times, Ventura testified that the lubricant and baby oil used in her Freak Offs with Diddy were never laced with drugs (at least not that she knew of).
On Friday, the defense returned to the former couple’s texts, showing one from the aftermath of the InterContinental hotel assault in which Ventura informed Combs: “you always want to show me you have the power to knock me around, i am not a rag doll, i am someones child.” According to NBC News, the defense also raised audio of Ventura confronting a man over his possible possession of footage from a Freak Off, threatening him: “If you have it pull it up or I will kill you and he will kill you again.”
Several times, Subramanian voiced his displeasure with the meandering fashion in which the defense questioned Ventura, and the frequency with which prosecutors interjected their objections. Ventura is eight-and-a-half months pregnant, and prosecutors have already accused the defense of intentionally dragging out their cross-examination in hopes that Ventura will go into labor before they finish, triggering a mistrial. The judge got his wish, and the defense ended their cross-examination on Friday afternoon, redirecting to the prosecution for final questions. Ventura reiterated that, despite having been in love with Combs, she felt very much under his control. His “moods,” she testified, according to the Times, dictated “my whole life, my career, how I felt about myself, my self-worth.”
“If he was in the mood to have a Freak Off, my work would take a back seat,” she said, adding: “I had a whole other job, basically a sex worker.” Subramanian asked jurors to disregard that statement.
Two Danity Kane members may testify next.
After Ventura’s testimony wraps, the court is expected to hear from Dawn Richard, formerly a member of two bands Combs created: Danity Kane, a girl group that came together on MTV’s Making the Band, and Diddy–Dirty Money. In September 2024, Richard accused Combs of sexual battery, harassment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and unlawful imprisonment in a federal lawsuit. Among Richard’s allegations are that she witnessed Combs abuse Ventura, throwing a hot frying pan at her and throttling her over the breakfast she made him. Combs’s attorney denied her allegations when the lawsuit was filed, asserting that Richard was lying in “hopes of trying to get a pay day.”
But another Danity Kane member, Aubrey O’Day, has been vocal about Combs’s alleged misconduct since before his legal troubles began. O’Day has publicly accused Combs of “grooming” and suggested that he fired her from the group because she would not acquiesce to his demands “in other areas” of her life unrelated to her career. According to Us Weekly, she may take the stand as soon as next week.