WARNING: This story includes graphic sexual content.
Prosecutors say the sexual encounters in hotel rooms were coercive and abusive and are the heart of their sex trafficking case. The music mogul’s lawyers call them consensual.
A woman and a male prostitute meet for sex in a luxury hotel suite that, in the US Government’s telling, has been lit for filming and stocked with baby oil and drugs. Another man watches and sometimes captures the events on video. These sexual marathons, complete with a cleanup staff, sometimes went on for days.
To the people involved, they were known as “freak-offs”.
The 14-page federal criminal indictment of Sean Combs, the music mogul known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, accuses him of participating in many crimes including arson, bribery, kidnapping and obstruction of justice. But the heart of the Government’s case is the premise that the criminal “enterprise” he ran as an alleged racketeer was responsible for coordinating these “freak-offs” and then covering up any damage to hotel rooms, or people, when they were over.
In the Government’s portrayal, they were horror shows — “elaborate and produced sex performances”, according to the indictment — that involved copious drug use and coerced sex, leaving participants so exhausted and drained that they were given fluids intravenously to recover. Then, the Government said, Combs weaponised the videos he had shot to keep any participants from complaining.
“Freak-off activity is the core of this case, and freak-offs are inherently dangerous,” Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors, said at a hearing last week.
The Government’s depiction closely mirrors allegations made by singer Cassie in a bombshell civil suit she filed last year against Combs, her former boyfriend. The indictment attaches no name to its account of the freak-offs, instead referring only anonymously to a “Victim-1″.
Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, said in her lawsuit that Combs directed frequent “freak-offs” at high-end hotels around the country, directing her at the events to pour “excessive” amounts of oil on herself and telling her where to touch the prostitutes while he filmed and masturbated.
“He treated the forced encounter as a personal art project, adjusting the candles he used for lighting to frame the videos he took,” the lawsuit said.
Lawyers for Combs, who has pleaded not guilty to the sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges he faces, have presented an entirely different view of the “freak-offs” in court.
They cast them as consensual encounters between Combs and Ventura, longtime partners in a troubled and complex relationship. These trysts, they argued, may shock some people, but they did not involve sexual assault and did not involve “force, fraud or coercion”, as the main federal sex trafficking statute requires.
“Does everybody have experience with being intimate this way? No,” Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Combs, said at a court hearing Tuesday. “Is it sex trafficking? No, not if everybody wants to be there.”
Agnifilo said, in fact, that he had interviewed six of the men the Government describes as sex workers. They told him, he said, that they did not view any of the events as coercive or themselves as prostitutes, only escorts compensated for their time.
“Did anything ever, ever seem remotely nonconsensual?” Agnifilo said he asked them. “Was anybody too drunk? Was anybody too high? Did anyone express any hesitation? Was there the slightest inkling that possibly, possibly the woman wasn’t consenting?”
Agnifilo said their answers had been: “No. No. No. No.”
The Government, in contending that Combs ran a criminal racketeering enterprise, has sought to emphasise that the freak-offs were events coordinated by a team of enablers who worked for him. Prosecutors underscored that witnesses saw violence “during and in connection with” freak-offs, which the defence has denied.
None are named or charged in the indictment, but they are characterised as a team that was deployed to find the sex workers and the hotel rooms, deliver supplies and then fix any damage to the rooms after sessions. “These occasions included instances in which a victim was required to remain in hiding — sometimes for several days at a time — to recover from injuries Combs inflicted,” the indictment said.
Citing the racketeering law long used against mobsters and drug kingpins, prosecutors have argued that Combs used the underlings to carry out his commands, expected “absolute loyalty” and ruled with threats of violence.
“Combs did not do this all on his own,” Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a news conference last week. “He used his business and employees of that business and other close associates to get his way. Those individuals allegedly included high-ranking supervisors in the business, personal assistants, security staff and household staff.”
Asked why those people had not been charged, Williams described the investigation as ongoing.
Anthony Capozzolo, a former federal prosecutor in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, said it was possible that some of Combs’ staff were not named as defendants because they were already cooperating witnesses, or that the Government hoped they would be convinced by the indictment to join others in testifying against their boss.
“It will be interesting to see if any people, now that this has started, come in to plead guilty,” Capozzolo said.
In several months, a jury sitting in Manhattan will have to decide which of these competing views of the hotel room sessions is more credible. Until then Combs likely will be housed at a federal jail in Brooklyn because he has been denied bail.
Johnson has expressed confidence in the case prosecutors are bringing, relating in court last week that the Government has a “massive amount” of evidence, including many witnesses, photos, videos and text messages.
Perhaps most compelling is a video that was discussed during a bail hearing last week in which Combs is seen brutally assaulting Ventura at an InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in 2016. Presented as evidence that force, fraud or coercion were rampant in Combs’ orchestrated sexual encounters, the surveillance video shows him striking her, hurling a vase at her and dragging her through a hallway by her sweatshirt.
Johnson described the video in court as one that depicts Ventura attempting to leave the site of a freak-off. She said there was evidence that at least one sex worker was inside the hotel room during the assault.
“It’s a bad video for Mr Combs,” Agnifilo acknowledged on CNN last week.
But Combs, who apologised in May after the footage leaked, calling his behaviour inexcusable, has provided a different version of the encounter to his lawyers. They say the video is not evidence of their client using violence to control participants in a sex act. Rather, they argue, the altercation was prompted by Ventura finding proof on Combs’ phone that he had “more than one girlfriend”. Agnifilo said that Combs had been sleeping when Ventura hit him in the head with his phone and left the hotel room with all of his clothes. (The surveillance footage shows Combs assaulting Ventura while wearing a towel.)
Prosecutors dispute that the argument was just about getting clothes back. If it had been, they say, Combs could have just retrieved the clothes without dragging her back to the hotel room.
The Government has also asserted Combs and his employees sought to cover up evidence of the attack on Ventura. Johnson said Combs tried to get a hotel security officer to stay quiet by offering him a “handful of cash”, and that three days after the assault, “the surveillance video disappeared”.
Although the indictment mentions only one specific victim, prosecutors have said there were multiple. In a court hearing, they offered snippets of further evidence of women accusing Combs of using video footage from freak-offs to blackmail them. One said: “He just threatened me about my sex tapes that he has of me on two phones. He said he would expose me, mind you these sex tapes where I am heavily drugged.”
Though Ventura’s lawsuit was settled a day after its filing, and Combs denied its claims, it spurred a cascade of other civil suits against him. Several of the suits, all of which are being challenged by Combs in court, were filed by women whose accounts carry some similarities to Ventura’s, with descriptions of coerced, drug-fueled sexual encounters.
One plaintiff, Adria English, accused Combs of demanding she have sex with guests while working at Combs’ famous “white parties” in the Hamptons and Miami Beach, where she said she was given ecstasy-laced liquor. Combs’ lawyers have characterised the suits as plaintiffs jumping on a “bandwagon” with false claims to try to extract a settlement.
In denying Combs’ bail on Wednesday (Thursday NZT), Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr stressed his concern that Combs would obstruct justice by tampering with witnesses. Prosecutors said that for months Combs had been “feeding victims and witnesses false narratives”, while sometimes having accomplices record the conversations. His lawyers contend that he was merely informing contacts that his counsel would be reaching out to them.
But in court, prosecutors told a chilling story of an unnamed woman who texted Combs three days after Ventura’s suit was filed in November, with its depictions of the freak-offs.
“I feel like I’m reading my own sexual trauma,” she wrote. “It makes me sick how three solid pages, word for word, is exactly my experiences and my anguish.”
Combs then called her twice, the prosecutors said, while an accomplice recorded the conversation on another phone. “He gaslit her and he attempted to convince her that she had willingly engaged in sex acts with him,” Johnson said. “But she pushed back.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ben Sisario and Julia Jacobs
Photographs by: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet, Jenna Schoenefeld, Getty Images, Hunter Kerhart
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