NEW YORK — The R&B singer Cassie testified Wednesday that her ex-boyfriend Sean “Diddy” Combs kept her in a cycle of abuse and exploitation by threatening to release videos of her encounters with male sex workers that he orchestrated.
Addressing the Manhattan courtroom for a second day in Combs’ federal sex trafficking trial, Cassie said that even though she loathed having drugged-up sex with strangers, she couldn’t reject Combs’ demands because he would make her “look like a slut.”
“I feared for my career. I feared for my family. It’s just embarrassing. It’s horrible and disgusting. No one should do that to anyone,” said Cassie, whose legal name is Casandra Ventura. She sued Combs in 2023, accusing him of years of physical and sexual abuse. The suit was settled within hours, but dozens of similar legal claims followed from other women, sparking the criminal investigation against him.
Prosecutors showed the jury five still images from the sex videos, recovered from electronic devices that Cassie provided to investigators. Cassie said the images showed her with male sex workers and at various stages of the encounters, which Combs called “freak-offs,” that sometimes lasted days. One juror’s eyes widened, and another shook his head from side to side.
Prosecutors have accused Combs of exploiting his status as a powerful music executive to violently force Cassie and other women to take part in sexual encounters. He is charged with five counts, including sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion.
Combs denies all of the allegations and has pleaded not guilty. His attorneys acknowledge he could be violent, but say the sex he and others engaged in was consensual and that nothing he did amounted to sex trafficking or racketeering.
Combs’ lawyers were expected to begin cross-examining Cassie later Wednesday, when they would get the chance to challenge her credibility or poke holes in her account of what happened.
During her first day of testimony, she spent hours recounting details of her decade-long relationship with Combs, including the freak-offs, which she said ended in 2017 or 2018. She also said Combs beat her numerous times. The encounters took place in private, often in dark hotel rooms, unlike Combs’ very public parties that attracted A-list celebrities.
Cassie exposes the dark side of a celebrity relationship
Cassie’s testimony exposes the dark underside of a relationship that, for years, played out publicly in pictures of the couple smiling on red carpets and celebrity events. She said she met Combs in 2005, when she was 19 and he was 37. Combs signed her to a 10-year contract with his Bad Boy Records label. Within a few years, they started dating, Cassie said.
They were photographed in 2016 attending the premiere of the film “The Perfect Match,” only two days after Combs beat and kicked Cassie at a Los Angeles hotel after a freak-off — an attack captured on security camera footage played on TV and in court. After the footage was leaked last year, Combs apologized. Jurors were shown photos of them at the premiere.
Cassie, now 38, calm and poised after an emotional first day of testimony, said she used makeup to cover up her bruises and wore sunglasses to hide a black eye for the premiere. She said she sneaked into a popcorn closet at the movie theater to switch dresses for an afterparty so that bruises on her legs wouldn’t be visible.
On another occasion in 2013, while she was packing to go to Drake’s music festival in Canada, Cassie said Combs scuffled with her friends and threw her into a bed frame. She sustained a “pretty significant gash” above her left eye. Combs’ security personnel brought her to a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills to get the wound stitched up, she said.
Afterward, she said she texted Combs a photo of her injured face and wrote: “So you can remember.” Combs replied, “You don’t know when to stop. You pushed it too far. And continued to push. Sad.”
Her 2006 song “Me & U” went platinum, but when prosecutors asked on Tuesday what happened to her music career, Cassie testified that eventually much of her week went toward engaging in and recovering from the freak-offs, until they “became a job.” She left Combs’ record label in 2019.
Cassie says Combs routinely threatened to release her sex videos
She said Combs would routinely threaten to embarrass her by releasing videos of her engaging in sex acts. She said he’d do it when he was angry or to instill fear in her, like when she started dating someone else.
After a trip to the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, Combs began playing a recording of a freak-off on his laptop computer as he and Cassie sat together on a commercial flight. Cassie said Combs told her that he was “going to embarrass me and release them.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson asked if there were “people around you” when Combs was playing the videos on the phone. Cassie said there were. After landing in New York, they went to dinner and then had another freak-off right afterward.
She felt ‘empty’ and took drugs to cope
Also Wednesday, prosecutors showed Cassie a binder of photos, and she identified 13 as male sex workers she said she recruited at Combs’ behest for encounters in Las Vegas, Miami and Los Angeles. She said she had sex with all of them, though she couldn’t remember all of their names. She identified a half-dozen other sex workers in court on Tuesday.
She testified Tuesday that Combs would pay the men thousands of dollars to have sex with her for 36 or 48 hours, and the longest lasted four days. The encounters left her feeling emotionally “just really empty, and I felt just gross.”
“It was something I hated doing,” she said, but she endured them because she was in love with Combs and “felt like I did my job.”
Cassie testified Wednesday she would recover by getting IV fluids, massages and having a chef cook meals. She said she developed an opioid addiction from using them after the encounters as a coping mechanism.
Combs, 55, has been jailed since September. He faces at least 15 years in prison if convicted. The trial is expected to last about two months.
