Cassie Ventura’s mother told a federal jury in Manhattan that she once screamed at and tried “to hit” her R&B singer daughter’s ex, Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Regina Ventura sat wrapped in a large beige shawl as she described physically confronting the hip-hop tycoon during testimony at Combs’ sex-trafficking and racketeering trial on Tuesday.
It was August 2016, and the mom of two from Connecticut had been visiting daughter Cassie Ventura in Los Angeles when she learned that Combs had stolen her daughter’s cellphone, she told jurors.
Cassie Ventura was upstairs in her apartment, the mom testified, leaving her to call the police and take on Combs outside the building.
“I was yelling and screaming and trying to hit him,” to get Combs to give the phone back, the mom testified, her voice quiet and calm throughout her 15 minutes on the stand.
“He did give it back,” she told the eight men and four women on Combs’ jury.
The elder Ventura also described an incriminating Blackberry text from the couple’s 2011 breakup, a message first shown to the jury last week.
In the message, Cassie Ventura tells her mother that Combs threatened her with revenge porn and physical harm out of jealousy over her relationship with rapper Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi.
Southern District of New York
Combs’ jealous threats around Cassie Ventura’s 2011 Kid Cudi romance came with a demand for money, jurors heard Tuesday.
Regina Ventura testified that she borrowed against her home of 57 years — Cassie Ventura’s childhood home in Connecticut — to pay $20,000 that Combs said he needed for unpaid “expenses.”
Combs was “angry he spent money on her and she had been with another person,” Regina Ventura said.
“I was scared for my daughter’s safety,” the mom said, when asked why she wired Combs the money.
Combs returned the Ventura family’s cash “about four or five days later,” she told jurors. Her testimony gave no explanation for why the money was returned.
Regina Ventura’s turn on the stand followed more than 20 hours of testimony delivered to the jury by her daughter.
Cassie Ventura took the stand last week while eight months pregnant with her third child with husband Alex Fine. She detailed what she said were years of sexual abuse at the hands of Combs during their 11-year relationship.
The younger Ventura, who prosecutors allege was one of two women that Combs sex-trafficked, has played a key role in the hip-hop mogul’s ongoing trial.
Over the course of her four days on the witness stand, Cassie Ventura at times gave tearfully described feeling “worthless” while joining in on the drug-fueled, often dayslong sex performances that Combs dubbed “freak offs.”
These sex encounters, which prosecutors say Combs arranged, directed, and often recorded, are at the core of the indictment against Combs.
Combs used “lies, drugs, threats, and violence to force and coerce” Ventura and later an anonymous Jane Doe into the freak offs, prosecutor Emily Johnson told the jury in her opening statements last week.
If you are a survivor of sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673) or visit its website to receive confidential support.
