Sean Combs at the 2022 Billboard Music Awards. Combs faces multiple lawsuits accusing him of sexual assault and misconduct. Photo / Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/NurPhoto via AFP
The music mogul, who fuelled the commercial success of rap over a 30-year career, is facing multiple lawsuits accusing him of sexual assault and misconduct. He was arrested on new charges this week.
Sean Combs, the hitmaking hip-hop mogul also known as Puff Daddy or Diddy, is facing multiple accusations of sexual assault. In late 2023, he reached a settlement in an explosive lawsuit with Casandra Ventura, who had alleged that Combs, 54, raped and physically abused her over about a decade. Combs was arrested Monday (Tuesday NZ time) at a hotel in Manhattan on new federal charges. A key driver of hip-hop’s takeover of mainstream pop, Combs has had a career in music, fashion and TV for more than 30 years that has been periodically interrupted by run-ins with the law.
Combs, a relatively unknown 22-year-old radio station intern, co-hosted a celebrity basketball game with rapper Heavy D. A stampede erupted among the jammed crowd inside the oversold City College of New York gymnasium, killing nine people.
A report commissioned by Mayor David Dinkins criticised Combs for allowing inexperienced underlings to plan the event and for tricking ticket buyers about the event’s charitable intentions.
“City College is something I deal with every day of my life,” Combs said in 1998. “But the things that I deal with can in no way measure up to the pain that the families deal with. I just pray for the families and pray for the children who lost their lives every day.”
A year later, as an intern at Uptown Records, Combs’ production on the remix of Jodeci’s Come and Talk to Me helped the single to sell 3 million copies, announcing him as a rising talent. He went on to help produce remixes for Heavy D, reggae artist Super Cat, and Real Love by R&B singer Mary J. Blige, which introduced rapper the Notorious B.I.G.
Combs’ Bad Boy Records, founded a year earlier after his termination from Uptown, scored its first major success, as the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die album peaked at No 15 on the Billboard 200. The debut drew critical acclaim for its portrayal of “both the excitement of drug dealing and the stress caused by threats from other dealers, robbers, the police and parents,” as The New York Times wrote at the time, and spawned the hit records Juicy, One More Chance and Big Poppa. To date, the album has been certified six-times platinum.
His work on Blige’s My Life album that year garnered his first Grammy nomination (for best R&B album).
Combs charted some of the most notable accolades of his career before and after the death of B.I.G., born Christopher Wallace, who was killed in a drive-by shooting on March 9, six months after the killing of his rival Tupac Shakur.
Opening the year with the release of Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down, Combs’ first single as the artist Puff Daddy, the song spent six weeks at No 1 before the anticipated release of a full-length album. Four months after Wallace’s death, No Way Out, credited to Puff Daddy & the Family, debuted at No 1 on the Billboard 200, selling 561,000 copies in its first week and spawning multiple chart-topping singles. The biggest of those, I’ll Be Missing You, featured Wallace’s widow, Faith Evans, and the R&B group 112. The requiem, which samples the Police’s Every Breath You Take, spent 11 weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. The LP earned Combs Grammy wins for best rap album and best rap performance by a duo or group.
That year, four of the 10 songs that reached No 1 on the Hot 100 belonged to Bad Boy Records.
After a dispute over the use of footage in a music video, record producer Steve Stoute claimed Combs and his bodyguards beat him with a Champagne bottle, a telephone, a chair and their fists during an April incident.
Combs faced up to seven years in prison had he been convicted of felony assault. Instead, Stoute asked the Manhattan district attorney to drop the charges after Combs publicly apologised. Combs had said he was upset that Stoute, an Interscope Records executive, used footage of him being crucified on a cross in the video for the rapper Nas’ Hate Me Now.
“Puff soaked Interscope offices with champagne bottles on Steve/And Steve thought the drama is on me,” Nas wrote in a 2002 song that immortalised the altercation.
That December, an argument broke out at a Manhattan nightclub where Combs was spending a night out with actress and singer Jennifer Lopez, his girlfriend at the time.
At least two people were injured by gunfire. The details and timeline of the interaction remained muddled throughout a highly publicised trial. Famed attorney Johnnie Cochran defended Combs, and multiple witnesses testified that the music executive had held a gun. Combs was charged with gun possession and bribery but found not guilty. His one-time protege, rapper Shyne, born Jamal Barrow, received a 10-year prison sentence for assault, gun possession and reckless endangerment.
In 2002, Combs took over MTV’s Making the Band, a reality show aimed at assembling budding rappers and singers into performing groups. The seasons produced the ensemble acts Da Band and Danity Kane, and portrayed Combs as a demanding boss, who famously made members walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn to secure him cheesecake.
In recent years, multiple band members have spoken out against what they described as mistreatment from Combs and bad contracts. Da Band’s Freddy P described Combs as the reason he “hates” life in an Instagram post last year.
That summer, Combs terminated the label’s joint venture with Arista, leaving the deal with full ownership of Bad Boy Records and its back catalogue. Despite the label’s run of R&B hits and attempts to find a rap act of the magnitude of the Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy remained its most reliable star.
Shake Ya Tailfeather, a single from the Bad Boys II soundtrack performed by Nelly, Murphy Lee and P. Diddy, as Combs was then known, hit No 1 on the Billboard 100 and garnered Combs’ second Grammy Award for best rap performance by a duo or group (and third overall).
Combs expanded his business empire beyond the record industry, earning top menswear designer honours from the Council of Fashion Designers of America for his Sean John clothing brand (2004), forging a partnership to release Ciroc vodka (2009) and founding Revolt TV (2013). His portfolio in 2022 is estimated by Forbes to be worth US$1 billion ($1.6b).
In 2015, Combs was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon, making terrorist threats and battery after an altercation with a UCLA football coach. In a news release, the university described the weapon as a kettlebell. Justin Combs, Combs’ son, began playing football at the university in 2012.
The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said that prosecutors decided against pursuing felony charges after the incident, according to The Washington Post.
Amid the commemorations of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, Combs was honoured for his pioneering role in the expansion of the genre with a citation as a global icon at the MTV Video Music Awards in September, on the heels of being recognised with a lifetime achievement honour at the BET Awards in 2022.
In November, Combs’ The Love Album: Off the Grid was nominated for a Grammy for best progressive R&B album.
Later that month, the R&B singer Cassie, who was once signed to Bad Boy and who had a lengthy romantic partnership with Combs, filed a lawsuit in federal court that accused him of rape, and of repeated physical abuse over about a decade.
Cassie, whose full name is Casandra Ventura, said in the suit that not long after she met Combs in 2005, when she was 19, he began a pattern of control and abuse that included plying her with drugs, beating her and forcing her to have sex with a succession of male sex workers while he filmed the encounters. In 2018, the suit said, near the end of their relationship, Combs forced his way into her home and raped her.
Through a lawyer, Combs said that he “vehemently denies these offensive and outrageous allegations”.
One day after Ventura filed the suit, the two parties reached an agreement to resolve the case, though they disclosed no details about the terms of the settlement. “I have decided to resolve this matter amicably on terms that I have some level of control,” Ventura said in a statement. Combs said in a statement: “We have decided to resolve this matter amicably. I wish Cassie and her family all the best. Love.”
One week after he settled the suit with Ventura, Combs was accused in a second lawsuit of sexually assaulting another woman, Joi Dickerson-Neal, in 1991.
In her suit, Dickerson-Neal accused Combs of drugging her during an evening out in New York when she was on a break from Syracuse University, where she was a student. She was eventually driven to a place Combs was staying, where according to the lawsuit, she accused him of raping her and recording the encounter on video.
A spokesperson for Combs said he “completely denied and rejected” the claims of misconduct.
The lawsuit was filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan shortly before the deadline for the Adult Survivors Act, a state law that allowed people who said they were sexually abused to file claims even after the statute of limitations had expired.
Less than two weeks later, a third woman accused Combs in a lawsuit that said he and two other men raped her inside a New York recording studio when she was 17 years old.
The woman, who is not named in court papers, said she met two associates of Combs at a lounge in the Detroit area in 2003, when she was in the 11th grade. In the complaint, she alleged that they took her on a private plane to New York, where the three men gave her copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, and took turns raping her in the studio’s bathroom as she drifted in and out of consciousness.
When they were done, the suit said, the woman fell into a fetal position in a bathroom, lying on the floor in pain. She said she was soon driven to an airport and put on a plane back to Michigan.
Combs again denied wrongdoing: “Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged,” he said in a statement. “I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”
Producer Rodney Jones Jr., known as Lil Rod, accused Combs in a lawsuit of making unwanted sexual contact and of forcing him to hire prostitutes and participate in sex acts as they worked on Combs’ 2023 album, The Love Album: Off the Grid.
In his complaint, filed in US District Court in Manhattan, Jones said that Combs grabbed his genitals without consent, and that he also tried to “groom” Jones into having sex with another man, telling him it was “a normal practice in the music industry”.
Combs, through his attorney, denied the allegations. In a statement, Shawn Holley called the suit “a transparent attempt to garner headlines”. He added: “We have overwhelming, indisputable proof that his claims are complete lies.”
Federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security on March 25 raided homes in the Los Angeles area and Miami connected to Combs. Responding to questions about news reports of a raid on Combs’ residences that day, Homeland Security Investigations said in a statement: “Earlier today, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) New York executed law enforcement actions as part of an ongoing investigation, with assistance from HSI Los Angeles, HSI Miami and our local law enforcement partners. We will provide further information as it becomes available.”
A spokesperson for Combs did not respond to a request for comment.
The criminal inquiry is being conducted by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a law-enforcement official said.
Combs was arrested at a hotel in Manhattan on Monday. Marc Agnifilo, one of his lawyers, said Combs had returned to New York last week voluntarily before an expected indictment. The indictment was sealed, but Agnifilo said he believed that the charges included racketeering and sex trafficking. Federal prosecutors said in a statement that they will likely unseal the indictment within a day.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jonathan Abrams, Elena Bergeron, Jenna Schoenefeld and Matt Stevens
Photographs by: Sara Krulwich
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