- Sean Combs faces federal charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution.
- Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty, denying accusations of running a “criminal enterprise” involving coerced sexual activities.
- In addition to criminal charges, Combs faces over 50 civil suits alleging sexual abuse.
As Puffy, Diddy or Love, the mogul found success and trouble. After years of accusations with few consequences, he’ll stand trial next month.
Jason Swain was on his way home to the Bronx when friends told him that something had happened to his brother at a charity basketball game in Harlem. Nine young people at a City College of New York gymnasium were crushed to death in an overcrowded stairwell. Dirk Swain, 21, was lying on the gym floor with a sheet draped over his body.
The promoter of the December 1991 event was a 22-year-old novice music producer named Sean Combs.
For more than six years, the Swains and other families pursued wrongful death suits, saying Combs had oversold the game, and that bad planning and inadequate security had led to the tragedy. By the time their cases were settled, Combs had skyrocketed to global superstardom; the $750,000 that he contributed to the $3.8 million in settlements represented a fraction of his wealth as hip-hop’s newest, flashiest mogul.
Combs never accepted full responsibility for the deaths.
The City College incident was Combs’ first moment of notoriety, but far from his last. In the ensuing three decades, he has repeatedly faced allegations of violence or serious misconduct. The beating of a rival music executive. Gunshots fired in a nightclub. The threatening of a reality-TV cast member. An assault of a college football coach.
Some of the cases ended with criminal charges being modified or dismissed. One trial concluded in an acquittal. Some incidents resulted in sealed settlements.
But now things are different as Combs, 55, faces the most serious challenge to what has been largely a charmed life. In May, he will stand trial in New York on federal charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Prosecutors accuse him of running a “criminal enterprise” that coerced women – including his longtime former girlfriend, the singer Cassie – into participating in marathon sexual escapades he called “freak-offs,” which involved male prostitutes and copious drug use. If found guilty of all charges, Combs, who has spent the last seven months in a Brooklyn jail, could spend the rest of his life in prison.
In addition to the criminal charges, Combs faces more than 50 civil suits accusing him of sexual abuse.
Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and strenuously denied the accusations against him in both the criminal case and the civil suits. In a recent statement about the Government’s indictment, Combs’ legal team said that the alleged victims in the case were “former long-term girlfriends, who were involved in consensual relationships. This was their private sex life, defined by consent, not coercion”.
When the criminal trial begins, the US District Court in lower Manhattan will be awash with camera trucks and commentators. The spotlight shines so brightly now because, while escaping so many legal entanglements that might have upended his career, Combs became a hit-minting, zeitgeist-dominating colossus.
A Suburban Childhood, With Harlem Dreams
Sean Combs spent much of his childhood in a version of white-picket safety in Mt Vernon, New York, a working-class suburb just north of New York City.
Combs has said his mother relocated the family there from Harlem, where he was born and where his father had been gunned down in 1972, shortly after Sean’s second birthday.
Months after Melvin’s death, Sean’s mother, Janice, bought property in Mt Vernon. To support her children – Sean and a younger daughter, Keisha – Janice Combs rented out the extra unit in their modest two-family home and juggled multiple jobs. “I wasn’t going to be on welfare, if I had to work all day and all night,” she told The New York Times in 2001, while her son was on trial for gun possession and bribery. “Never, never.”
As a child, Sean Combs spent part of his time in Harlem, where his grandmother lived. But he attended a Montessori school in Mt Vernon, homered in the Little League there and went to Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx, a Catholic prep school for boys. He left a mixed review in his graduation yearbook: “It was a great experience, but it could have been better!”
By then, Combs had acquired a nickname: Puffy. He has said it was because he would “huff and puff” when angry. Acquaintances from his Mount Vernon days have suggested other provenances, such as Combs puffing out his chest to enhance his girth.
Sean Combs immersed himself in New York’s hip-hop scene, regularly heading into the city to dance and mingle at Harlem nightclubs. After graduating from Mount Saint Michael in 1987, he enrolled at Howard University in Washington, DC, where he built social capital throwing huge parties.
But New York, and specifically Harlem, became his destiny, and he focused his attentions there as if swimming back upstream toward his source. He made himself a bit player on the fringes of the music business, appearing as a backup dancer in music videos for Fine Young Cannibals and other acts.
Over the years, old friends and schoolmates noticed that Mount Vernon had been downgraded, with Combs emphasising his Harlem roots above all else. “From Harlem to Hollywood!” he proclaimed when accepting a film prize in 2017.
A Foot in the Door, Followed by Tragedy
There was one thing that Combs still needed in Mount Vernon: a way into the music business.
Combs beseeched Heavy D, the suburb’s rap pride and joy (“Moneyearnin’ Mount Vernon” was a signature tune), for an introduction to Andre Harrell, the head of his Manhattan-based label, Uptown Records. It worked. Combs became an intern at Uptown.
Combs became Harrell’s all-purpose factotum, rounding up office supplies and fetching cheesecake from Junior’s in Brooklyn.
At the same time, Combs – who had dropped out of Howard – was learning the ropes in the studio and throwing wildly popular weekly dance parties that he called Daddy’s House, making himself an indispensable part of the scene.
Then Combs and Heavy D signed on to promote the ill-fated basketball game at City College.
The event was advertised as a benefit for an Aeducation programme, with celebrity attendees including Mike Tyson, Run-DMC and LL Cool J. Hyped on local radio, it drew more than 5000 people to a venue with a capacity of 2730.
A city investigation found that the crowd outside grew unruly once the first celebrity guests arrived. Fans toppled barricades, shattered glass and rushed down a stairwell, crushing people against a set of closed doors.
Eight people died that night, and another was pronounced dead at a hospital four days later.
No criminal charges were filed.
Civil proceedings were complex and time-consuming, in part because City College, which is run by New York state, was named as a defendant. But some families felt Combs had deliberately dragged the process out.
At a trial in 1998, the judge ruled that City College and New York state bore 50% of the responsibility for the incident, and Combs and Heavy D the other 50%.
Blazing a Trail in Rap and R&B
In the aftermath of the City College incident, people close to Combs said, he was distraught.
But within months, he made a spectacular comeback.
In the summer of 1992, Uptown released “What’s the 411?,” the debut album by singer Mary J. Blige; Combs was one of the executive producers. “You Remind Me,” the first single, was a hit at New York clubs and on Black radio, and embodied Combs’ ambition.
Harrell increasingly clashed with Combs, and in 1993 fired him. But his protege quickly rebounded, bringing his Bad Boy imprint to Clive Davis of Arista Records for a multimillion-dollar distribution deal.
Combs’ next big act was the Notorious B.I.G., a Brooklyn rapper who was a captivating raconteur of the drug trade’s harsh realities.
With his debut album, “Ready to Die” (1994), B.I.G. became an instant star, and Combs came into his own as a new kind of hip-hop impresario, part Berry Gordy and part P.T. Barnum. He was as much the architect of the sound, laden with R&B harmonies and radio-ready pop hooks, as of its branding. Combs splurged on over-the-top music videos and turned his label roster into a mutually reinforcing product line – a “family” – in which artists made guest spots in each other’s songs and, with every appearance, amplified Bad Boy’s overall image.
Combs placed himself, as Puff Daddy, in the centre of it all.
When B.I.G. was killed in 1997, Combs grieved in public. Just two months after B.I.G.’s death, Puff Daddy released his song “I’ll Be Missing You,” featuring Faith Evans, B.I.G.’s widow, and 112, a Bad Boy R&B act.
In the song, Combs rapped over an uncleared sample of the Police’s 1983 hit “Every Breath You Take”. By utilising a highly recognisable hook from a 1980s white pop classic, the track seemed to mark a strategic shift in hip-hop’s evolution into global pop culture. Inescapable in the summer of ’97, “I’ll Be Missing You” held at No 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for 11 weeks and demonstrated how, in Combs’ hands, hip-hop had reached a new peak in the American pop mainstream, infiltrating every demographic.
An Undercurrent of Violence
As Combs rose, violence was always part of the backbeat.
In 1996, he was found guilty of criminal mischief for threatening a tabloid photographer with a gun, and paid a $1000 fine. He exploded in anger at journalists he viewed as insufficiently deferential. Of the many lawsuits that have been filed against Combs since late 2023, at least five involve accusations of violence alleged to have taken place before 2000.
The most publicised of Combs’ close calls came in late 1999.
Just after midnight on December 27 that year, Combs and his then-girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, were at Club New York on West 43rd St with a rap protégé, Shyne, when gunshots rang out. Three people were injured, and Combs and Lopez fled in a Lincoln Navigator, running 11 red lights up Eighth Ave before being pulled over.
Charged with gun possession and bribing a witness, Combs stood trial for seven weeks in early 2001, facing the possibility of 15 years in prison – and, possibly, the ruination of his career.
But witnesses were split over who had fired the guns.
The jury acquitted Combs on all counts. Shyne, who was born Jamal Barrow in Belize, was found guilty of five of the eight charges against him, and he served nearly nine years in prison.
The Endless Party Rages On
During the Club New York trial, Combs would meet with his team to work on his latest big project: designs for Sean John, his fashion line, which he had started in 1998. Its sales grew from $250 million in 2001 to $325m two years later.
Leveraging his fame, Combs went on television, playing a demanding, foul-mouthed label boss on MTV’s “Making the Band”. He starred in a Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun”. He created a cable and online media platform, Revolt. And he became the face of Ciroc vodka through a lucrative deal with the spirit conglomerate Diageo – though in a lawsuit, he later accused the company of racism in not promoting his products to his satisfaction. (The case was settled last year, when Diageo paid Combs about $200m for his half of a jointly owned tequila brand.)
Starting in the late 1990s, Combs’ White Parties, held at his Hamptons estate and exotic locales like St.-Tropez in France, were the apotheosis of everything he had come to represent: Black culture kicking in the doors of white high society, unapologetically revelling in luxury, hedonistic pleasure and spectacle for its own sake. In some ways, Combs was still carrying out his first breakout talent, promoting buzzy parties – this time with the hip-hop version of a Roman bacchanal.
Even Combs’ personal brand, Puff Daddy, had evolved. Less than two weeks after his acquittal in the Club New York shooting, he announced, regally, that he would thenceforth be known as P. Diddy, an appellation eventually truncated to Diddy.
In 2017, he made still another rebranding attempt, calling himself Love with no apparent sense of irony.
Federal prosecutors of the Southern District of New York nodded at this history in their indictment of him last September, which was captioned “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. SEAN COMBS, a.k.a. ‘Puff Daddy,’ a.k.a. ‘P. Diddy,’ a.k.a. ‘Diddy,’ a.k.a. ‘P.D.,’ a.k.a. ‘Love.’”
A Bombshell Lawsuit, and a Mogul in Handcuffs
The investigation that led to the indictment was triggered by a bombshell lawsuit Cassandra Ventura – Combs’ former girlfriend who goes by the stage name Cassie – filed in November 2023.
In wrenching detail, Ventura alleged years of violence and sexual abuse, including “freak-offs”: drug-fuelled episodes of coerced sex. Her suit was settled in just one day, with what Combs’ lawyers have said included an eight-figure payment to her (though no admission of wrongdoing).
One episode detailed in Ventura‘s complaint was caught on video.
Ventura and Combs were at an InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles, where, she said, a “freak-off” was under way. According to Ventura‘s court papers, an intoxicated Combs punched her in the face, then followed her into the hotel hallway, where he yelled at her, grabbed her and threw glass vases at her.
Overhead, a security camera was recording.
Last May, CNN broadcast excerpts from that security footage, showing Combs beating, kicking and dragging Ventura in the hallway. Two days later, Combs apologised, calling his behaviour “inexcusable” and saying he took “full responsibility” for it.
By then, two of Combs’ homes had been raided by heavily armed federal agents, in scenes that were captured on live television.
Last summer, Combs’ legal team began to prepare for his arrest. On September 5, Combs flew to New York, intending to turn himself in. It was part of a plan to present Combs as co-operative and well-behaved, laying the groundwork to argue that he should be released on bail after his arrest.
But on September 16, the night before his indictment was set to be unsealed, federal agents approached Combs in the lobby of the Park Hyatt New York, where he was staying. They led the mogul out of the luxurious hotel with his hands cuffed behind his back.
At his arraignment, Combs’ lawyers argued that he was not a flight risk or a danger to the community, and offered a $50 million bond. But prosecutors said the InterContinental hotel video showed the danger he posed, and noted that when agents arrested him, they found bags of pink powder in his room.
The magistrate judge denied the bail request, and Combs was remanded to the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he has remained since.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ben Sisario
Photographs by: Tony Cenicola, Jenna Schoenefeld, and Sara Krulwich
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
