When R&B singer Cassie Ventura settled her very detailed lawsuit against Sean "Diddy" Combs, it ended nothing but the legal proceedings. The suit uncovered about 20 years of an ugly, violent, drug-fueled history that had mostly only been whispered about prior. Ventura had endured several years of abuse, rape, battery, drugging, and forced sex acts with male sex workers throughout her relationship with Diddy, which started when she was 19 years old and had just signed her first-ever record deal with Bad Boy. In the wake of those gruesome revelations, and decisive action by Diddy and his lawyers to settle it quickly, more lawsuits have been filed by different Jane Does against the entertainment mogul. All of them allege similar abuses, stretching back to the early 1990s.
The singer-songwriter Tiffany Red even wrote an open letter on behalf of Ventura, corroborating her claims, specifically the ones tied to Diddy's forcing Ventura to perform sex acts on male sex workers. When you see all of these claims, and consider the decades over which the offenses were alleged to take place, it's easy to wonder how these people get away with it for so long. How this kind of depravity and violence can be an open secret that people talk about, sometimes even in public, but that nothing ever gets done about. It's also familiar.
The latest suit against Diddy, this time brought by Rodney "Lil Rod" Jones, offers the clearest attempt yet to paint a picture of how Diddy's network of abuse works in a structural sense. This is sometimes to its detriment, as the lawyer for Jones, Tyrone Blackburn, has written the complaint in a way that feels targeted to get quick attention from gossip blogs looking for salacious bait. The filing makes allegations that in some instances aren't even illegal, just messy and homophobic. There are weird Christian overtones to the filing as well, which seems gratuitous and unhelpful even considering our current Supreme Court. And while much of it is indeed believable, some of it seems easy to disprove, and Blackburn also implicates his client in many of the crimes alleged in the filing, while noting that Jones was forced into doing it.
At any rate, the allegations are that Diddy is a violent, abusive tyrant, and that he drugs women at his parties, and that he invites underage girls to those same parties with drugs and sex workers around, and that he drugged and sexually assaulted Jones as he did many others before him. The suit alleges that Diddy invited certain celebrity friends to said parties and specifically invited one of those to sexually assault Jones. Most essentially, it argues that Universal Music Group, Motown, and even police departments like the LAPD have been complicit in allowing Diddy to get away with just about anything.
According to the complaint, Jones has hundreds of hours of footage and audio that contains evidence of Diddy, his team, and his guests engaged in illegal activity during the 13 months Jones spent working alongside Diddy on his recent comeback album The Love Album. This evidence includes the procuring of various illegal drugs and firearms by staff, the rap mogul providing laced drinks to minors and sex workers at his home, and multiple people sexually assaulting Jones on behalf of Diddy.
The complaint also alleges that the shooting of a friend of Diddy's son, which had previously been reported as happening outside of a Hollywood recording studio in a drive-by, actually took place inside the bathroom of the studio, and that the trigger was pulled by either Diddy or his son.
One evening during this camp, Mr. Combs, J. Combs, and G were in a heated conversation.
That conversation was moved out of the studio and into a restroom adjacent to where Mr. Jones was sitting.
Mr. Jones was approximately two feet away from the bathroom when gunshots rang out. Mr. Jones recalls hearing multiple gunshots.
According to the suit, when the LAPD arrived they accepted the version of events offered by Diddy and his security team, despite seeing evidence that clearly indicated otherwise. "The LAPD was in CRS [Chalice Recording Studios] and witnessed the blood in the restroom, and they went with the bogus claim that the shooting of G occurred outside of the studio," the complaint reads.
Further, the complaint gives a detailed and thorough explanation of how Diddy's staff would procure sex workers and drugs for him when necessary and how he would take bottles of his liquor and spike it with ecstasy to pass out to sex workers and any other women that attended his parties; no one's ID was ever checked. All this has been alleged before, by other people who have previously been in Diddy's circle. The complaint also makes a very specific point of highlighting Diddy's contact with Universal Music Group CEO Sir Lucian Grainge and Motown CEO Ethiopia Habtemariam. They were not participants, but the complaint alleges that they are enablers in his greater project of abuse due to their extensive communication and personal relationship. As highlighted in this January piece on the fallout with Diddy and his liquor sponsor Diageo, plenty of rich, global partners have enabled Diddy's egomania and power trips, at the very least, throughout the years. It's always been great for their business.
My thing with most conspiracy theories is that they're usually onto something. That doesn't mean they're correct; they often aren't, because the theorizers behind them tend to take them further than necessary, or just as far as they need to go to align with those theorizers' chosen narrative. The music business is not some factory of devil worship, but it very much is a hotbed of every sort of criminal activity, primarily because vice and leverage are the best ways to maintain power over people.
The vice is in ready supply as a matter of course; a person who succumbs to it, or just gets enlisted willfully or unwillfully in its procurement, becomes complicit, and that complicity can be used as leverage. The suit highlights that there are cameras all over Diddy's various homes, in every room, and that they are always on. "Mr. Combs possesses compromising footage of every person that has attended his freak off parties, and his house parties," the complaint reads. "Upon information and belief, due to this treasure trove of evidence he has in his possession, Mr. Combs believes that he is above the law and is untouchable."
That, too, is not unique to Diddy. It is not accidental that R. Kelly thrived as long as he did, even after evidence that he was a serial predator was public knowledge. The same is true of Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby, and Jeffrey Epstein. While the more gossipy, salacious stories from this lawsuit will create easy headlines for the TMZs and the Shade Rooms of the online world, the darkest part of it is global. There is an infrastructure that keeps these abusers in power, and which allows new predators to spring up from whence the last one came.
