“Jane,” a recent ex-girlfriend of Combs, testified that on their first date at a Miami hotel in 2010, she fell “pretty head-over-heels for Sean.”
The date lasted five days, she told the jury.
Over the next four months, she said, Combs slowly introduced her to his sexual preferences.
He loved baby oil and drugs that kept them up day and night. He loved it when she dressed in lingerie and “high stripper heels.” He’d play pornography and tell her to fantasize about the men on screen.
“Do you like what you see there?” she said he’d ask her of these men. “Do you want that?”
Then one night in 2021 at his Miami mansion, as the pornography rolled, he told her, “I can make this fantasy a reality if you’d like that.”
She loved him, she explained, and agreeing made him so happy. So she said yes.
Jane said she soon realized she’d opened up “Pandora’s box.”
Gone were the romantic trips and dinner dates of their first four months. Combs wanted freak offs — by now he was calling them “hotel nights” — nearly every time they saw each other over the next three years, up until his arrest in 2024.
“It was just a door I was unable to shut,” she told the jury.
Jane must show force, fraud, or coercion
Jane’s testimony has so far described some of the elements of sex trafficking. She said she reluctantly crossed state lines, traveling from the East Coast to Miami to Los Angeles, to engage with paid sex workers.
But her testimony, which continues next week, has yet to show that Combs sex trafficked her using force, fraud, or coercion, as the indictment requires.
She instead described intensive psychological and financial pressure. She said she agreed to hotel nights because she loved him, and because he’d moved her to Los Angeles from the East Coast and was paying rent and other costs for her and her child.
And when she told him she no longer wanted to do hotel nights, he would brush her off, or make what may or may not rise to the level of a coercive threat to withdraw that financial support.
“If you want to break up, that’s fine,” she testified he’d tell her. “Do you need, like, what, three more months in the house? Because I’m not about to be paying for a woman’s rent that I’m not even seeing.”
Prosecutors have said Combs defrauded Jane by promising romantic dinners and trips, only to renege and persuade her into another hotel night.
They have also said Combs was brutally violent with Jane, though it’s unclear how they plan to draw a link between that violence and sex trafficking by force.
Meanwhile, the defense will likely use hundreds of affectionate and erotic texts between Jane and Combs to argue that she is a bitter ex who willingly suffered any demands and violence, and who continues to have her expenses paid by Combs in return.
Asked late Friday who is currently paying her rent, Jane answered, “Sean is.”
Jane pushes back
Prosecutors have also hinted that Jane is a witness to obstruction of justice, one of the underlying crimes they can use to prove the racketeering charge.
“You will hear him try to manipulate Jane into saying she wanted freak offs,” Emily Johnson, an assistant US attorney, told the jury during May 12 opening statements, describing a phone call recorded after Ventura’s lawsuit was filed.
“You will hear him interrupt Jane when she pushes back,” Johnson said. Prosecutors have also said he made a point of paying for Jane’s housing — even after his arrest.
