The ex-girlfriend of rapper Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs took part in his days-long s£x parties because she feared he would blackmail her if she refused, jurors heard yesterday.
Cassie Ventura, 38, faced the hip-hop mogul in court as she revealed intimate details of their relationship on the second day of his trial.
She said Combs, 55, forced her to participate in the parties, known as ‘Freak Offs’, where she would have s£x with male escorts while he watched.
They became her ‘job’ and she carried on taking part because she feared Combs would release videos he had filmed of the parties, the court heard.
The R&B singer said Combs, who signed her to his Bad Boy Records label, controlled every aspect of her life during their decade-long relationship and kept her in check through violence, and left guns lying around to ‘scare’ her.
Ms Ventura described how he would ‘stomp me in the head if I was down’ and beat her so badly that the whites of her eyes would turn red.
Prosecutors claim that Combs, who won three Grammys during a music career spanning four decades, ran a ‘criminal enterprise’ built around coercing women into sex and threatening them if they went public.
His lawyers claim that all the sex acts were consensual and that his appetites were ‘kinky’ but did not amount to s£x trafficking.
Ms Ventura gave evidence to the trial in New York despite being eight-and-a-half months pregnant with her third child. Her husband, Alex Fine, 32, is a personal trainer who was hired by Combs to work with her.
Combs’s lawyers sought to have Ms Ventura seated in the witness box before the jury came in on the grounds that her being so heavily pregnant might influence them.
But the judge disagreed, and she was allowed to walk into court wearing a brown, tight-fitting bodysuit which showed off her baby bump.
Her testimony came a day after prosecutors showed jurors a video of him beating her in a hotel in 2016.
Ms Ventura detailed the arguments she had with Combs, who she began dating in 2006 when she was 19 and he was 17 years older.
She said: ‘He would bash me on my head, knock me over, drag me, kick me, stomp me in the head if I was down.’ Prosecutor Emily Anne Johnson asked how frequently this happened. ‘Too frequently,’ she replied.
Ms. Ventura said she remembered ‘my stomach falling to my butt’ when Combs suggested the idea of ‘Freak Offs’. She told the court: ‘Within the first year of our relationship Sean proposed to me this idea, this s£xual encounter that he called voyeurism where he’d watch me in sexual activity with a third party, specifically another man.’
She added: ‘Pretty quickly I knew that it wasn’t something I wanted to be doing. Especially as regularly as it became but I was in love and wanted to make him happy. It got to a point I didn’t feel I had much of a choice.’
Ms Ventura said she did not want to make Combs ‘angry’ because he ‘controlled a lot of my life’ and she feared he would put the explicit videos of her online. She told jurors: ‘Over time it turned into the fact there were blackmail materials to make me feel if I didn’t do it, it would be hung over my head or these things would become public.’
Ms. Ventura said that before she met Combs, she thought he was a ‘larger-than-life’ figure in the music industry, while she was ‘completely sexually inexperienced’. She repeatedly called herself ‘naive’ and said: ‘I was insanely jealous but also super young, didn’t get it at all, I didn’t get that he was him.
‘As he would say, I’m Puff Daddy and Puff Daddy has many women, he likes the company of women. I had to learn that over time. He made me feel like we were in a monogamous relationship.’
Ms Ventura wept as she spoke about her first ‘Freak Off’ party and how she did not want to engage in any of them. ‘I just felt it was all I was good for,’ she said.
‘I felt pretty horrible about myself. I felt disgusted. I was humiliated, I didn’t have those words to put together at the time, how horrible I felt. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it so.’
Ms Ventura said the only part of the ‘Freak Offs’ she enjoyed was the ‘time’ she spent with Combs during them.
She told the court: ‘Plainly the Freak Offs became a job where there was no space to do anything else but to recover and try to feel normal again. Staying up for days on end, taking drugs and other substances, drinking. Having s£x with a stranger for days.’
Asked how long the ‘Freak Offs’ lasted, Ms Ventura replied: ‘They ranged anywhere from 36, 48 to 72 hours. The longest one ever was four days. Maybe even more on and off with breaks.’ She said about 10 large bottles of baby oil were used at each party.
Ms Ventura also claimed that Combs would leave guns lying around his homes to scare her.
‘The guns came out here and there – I always felt it was a little bit of a scare tactic,’ she said.
Earlier, Judge Arun Subramanian indicated he could make the ‘Freak Off’ videos and photos public despite pleas from Ms Ventura to keep them sealed.
Combs denies racketeering conspiracy, two charges of sex trafficking, and two charges of transportation to engage in prostitution. He faces life in jail if convicted.
The trial continues.
