Sean “Diddy” Combs paid Cassie Ventura $20 million to settle her 2023 sexual abuse lawsuit, the R&B singer said at his Manhattan sex-trafficking trial on Wednesday.
If Combs, 55, had ever hoped this massive, eight-figure payment would silence Ventura, 38, he would have been mistaken.
Ventura revealed the settlement’s previously sealed bottom line at the conclusion of nearly two days of direct testimony against Combs.
During this testimony, she described Combs forcing her to have what she called painful, humiliating sex with male escorts on hundreds of occasions throughout their decadelong relationship, while he filmed her and pleasured himself.
She described these encounters — Combs called them “freak offs” — in far more detail than was in the 35 pages of her bombshell lawsuit, and with far higher stakes than the millionaire hip hop tycoon had faced in civil court.
If convicted of the top charges of racketeering and sex trafficking, Combs could be sentenced to life in prison. Combs has pleaded not guilty; his lawyers are arguing at trial that the sexual encounters were consensual and that his accusers have a financial incentive to falsely implicate him.
“I wanted to be compensated for the time, the pain, the many, many years of trying to fix my life,” Ventura said of her efforts to force a payment from Combs, including through a failed attempt to sell him the rights to a tell-all memoir.
Ventura, who is eight months pregnant, has broken down in tears three times during her testimony, which on Wednesday included an accusation that Combs raped her on her living room floor after she broke up with him in 2018.
“I don’t think he even noticed” that she was crying during the attack, she told the jury. Asked what happened afterward, she responded, “he got up and he left.”
She also described trying to kill herself months before filing the lawsuit. “I just tried to walk out the door into traffic,” she said.
Ventura is due to be cross-examined on Thursday and Friday.
She spent most of Wednesday’s testimony describing six separate times when she said Combs’ jealousy-fueled attacks left her with bruises, black eyes, or a busted lip.
Her relationship with rapper Kid Cudi in 2011, when she was in her mid-20s, sparked back-to-back eruptions of violence, she told Combs’ jury of four women and eight men.
The first came during a freak off at Combs’ rented mansion in Los Angeles, when he “lunged at me with a wine bottle opener between his fingers,” she testified.
She fled the mansion, escaping injury, though not for long, she told the jury. She testified that when she returned to his mansion to talk things over some time later, Combs kicked her in her lower back so hard that she was sent flying to the floor.
Prosecutors say Combs ordered security employees from his Bad Boy Records empire to exact revenge on Kid Cudi, whose given name is Scott Mescudi.
The racketeering count includes an allegation of arson. Prosecutors allege that Combs ordered his underlings to torch Mescudi’s vehicle “by slicing open the car’s convertible top and dropping a Molotov cocktail inside the interior,” they wrote in September.
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Allegations of a severe beating
“I was basically under the back seat of the Escalade,” Ventura said of what she described as her most severe beating, which she said happened in Los Angeles in 2009, when she was 22 years old.
Combs spied Ventura speaking to a record producer during a party he had hosted at a club called “Ace of Diamonds.”
“Sean called me a slut or a bitch or something when we got into the car,” Ventura told jurors. “I punched Sean’s face.”
She said she hit Combs “as hard as I could hit somebody when I was drunk.”
Combs’ retaliation in the back seat of the chauffeured luxury vehicle was brutal, she testified.
“His whole demeanor just switched over,” she said. “I remember his eyes went black.”
He punched and kicked her throughout the ten-minute ride back to his rented mansion, she said.
“After I punched him and he attacked me, I was basically under the back seat,” she told jurors.
“I was trying to cover my face,” she said. “Because Sean was stomping on it with his foot.”
Combs ordered her to stay at the The London West Hollywood hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. She described being secreted inside by one of Combs’ security staffers, with her face covered up.
It took her a week, maybe more, before her injured face healed enough for Combs to allow her to be seen in public, she testified.
Until then, “I couldn’t go home,” she said. “Absolutely not,” she said he’d tell her.
“I don’t think I would have gotten out of there smoothly,” she added.
