Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs videos don’t usually come without sound but none was needed on the CCTV footage that showed him with a towel wrapped around his waist running down a hotel corridor and mounting a brutal attack on a young woman desperately trying to get away from him.
The rap star and music mogul ran up to his then girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, who was putting on her shoes as she waited for the lift after fleeing his hotel suite.
Grabbing her by the back of the head, he threw her to the floor and then kicked her viciously as she lay motionless.
He furiously delivered another hard kick before dragging her back along the corridor floor towards his room. The video also shows him throwing a glass vase in her direction.
The shocking CCTV footage shows Sean Combs chase after Cassie Ventura and grab her
He throws her to the ground after grabbing her by the back of the head
When she falls to the floor her viciously kicks her
The harrowing footage publicly emerged little more than a week before it was revealed today that federal investigators are preparing to bring Combs’ accusers before a grand jury.
In what would be a significant escalation of efforts to prosecute the star, possible witnesses have been told they may be brought to testify in front of a federal grand jury in New York, sources told CNN.
The security video of the attack on Ventura, captured on several cameras, was recorded at the Intercontinental Hotel in Century City, Los Angeles, in March 2016. Two days later the couple were photographed holding hands on the red carpet for the premiere of The Perfect Match, a romantic comedy in which Ventura starred.
The video which emerged only a week ago after being obtained by CNN corroborates some of the allegations made against Combs in a shocking lawsuit that Ventura filed last November.
She claimed that during more than 10 years of physical abuse, sexual slavery and rape, she’d been subjected to ‘savage’ beatings from a highly jealous man ‘prone to uncontrollable rage’.
The lawsuit was settled by both parties the following day for an undisclosed amount with Combs — estimated to be worth $1billion (£790million) — admitting no wrongdoing.
In the suit, the actress and R&B singer, who Combs had signed to his Bad Boy record label, accused the flamboyant star of taking over her life after they met in 2005 when she was trying to make it in showbusiness and he was already one of the biggest stars in the music industry. She was 19 at the time; he was 37.
Ventura described a pattern of control and abuse that included Combs plying her with hard drugs, beating her so badly she would have to stay holed up in hotel rooms for days and forcing her to have sex with male prostitutes while he watched and masturbated – twisted sexual encounters he called ‘freak-offs’.
In what appears to have been a reference to the incident covered by the CCTV footage, Ventura said he’d attacked her in a hotel corridor after one such freak-off during which he ‘became extremely intoxicated’ and punched her in the face, giving her a black eye.
Ventura said she waited until he was asleep to leave the hotel room but he woke up and followed her, screaming.
‘He grabbed at her and then took glass vases in the hallways and threw them at her, causing glass to crash around them as she ran to the elevator to escape,’ said her lawyers, who also claimed Combs – whose stage names have included ‘Puff Daddy’ and ‘P Diddy’ – had paid the hotel £40,000 for the CCTV footage of him attacking her.
Observers have long been surprised that, unlike Hollywood, the music business has been spared a major MeToo moment that would act as a belated reckoning for an industry that has long tolerated sexual predators.
That oversight appears to have been finally addressed in recent days as the gilded but sordid world of a rap superstar has come crashing down around his diamond-bejewelled ears.
The pair appear on the red carpet in LA just two days after the attack was caught on CCTV
And just as with film mogul Harvey Weinstein and his disgusting attacks on women which turbocharged the original MeToo movement in 2017, it appears that Combs’ monstrous temper and abusive behaviour has been an open secret in the music world for years.
Last Sunday, two days after CNN aired the hotel footage and despite police claims that it is too late to charge him over the incident, Combs issued a video statement in which he apologised for the assault.
‘It’s so difficult to reflect on the darkest times in your life but sometimes you got to do that. I was f***ed up. I mean, I hit rock bottom but I make no excuses,’ he said, shaking his head in apparent deep regret. ‘My behaviour on that video is inexcusable.’
He went on: ‘I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now,’ added the man, who until that moment had ‘vehemently’ denied ever assaulting Ventura.
‘I went and I sought out professional help. I got into going to therapy and going to rehab,’ he assured viewers. ‘I had to ask God for his mercy and grace. I’m so sorry. But I’m committed to being a better man each and every day. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m truly sorry.’
It was a pathetic, grovelling plea for mercy from a star whose public image has always been one of glowering defiance — and this time nobody was convinced.
Combs, 54, had previously not only denied Ventura’s assault allegations but vindictively insisted that she and other accusers were just looking for a pay-off.
On Thursday, she urged people to ‘open your heart to believe victims the first time’, saying that domestic violence ‘broke me down to someone I never thought I would become’.
Ventura’s camp was quick to point out the glaring weakness of Combs’ video mea culpa. ‘Combs’ most recent statement is more about himself than the many people he has hurt,’ said her lawyer in a statement.
‘When Cassie and multiple other women came forward, he denied everything and suggested that his victims were looking for a payday. That he was only compelled to “apologise” once his repeated denials were proven false shows his pathetic desperation, and no one will be swayed by his disingenuous words.’
And nor indeed have they been. Four months after Ventura made her allegations, federal agents and police carried out dramatic raids on Combs’ homes in Miami and Los Angeles as part of a sex-trafficking investigation based on fresh claims from three women and one man.
Harvey Weinstein’s disgusting attacks on women turbocharged the MeToo movement in 2017
One month on from those raids, celebrity support for Combs has finally dried up and yet more women are going public with tales of abuse.
Fashion designer Misa Hylton, who was in a relationship with Combs in the early 1990s and has a child by him, said the video of him attacking Ventura ‘triggered my own trauma’.
Although she has never directly accused him of abusing her, she seemed to hint at it in a social media post directed at him last year: ‘Everyone has to sit around for years and act like there isn’t anything wrong with you. This is where the buck stops for me.’
Bishop T.D. Jakes, a megachurch preacher in Dallas, who was reportedly a longtime spiritual mentor to Combs, last Sunday issued a public denunciation — without naming him — from the pulpit.
Addressing the hotel assault video, he thundered to his 17,000 congregants: ‘When I saw the images that have been floating all over the news all week, it became difficult to watch. The atrocious, degrading, demeaning debauchery.
‘I know who it was, but as a man, I saw my daughters. And it made me angry.’
Jennifer Lopez, who was in a relationship with Combs from 1999 to 2001, had been left ‘disturbed’ and ‘heartbroken’ by the hotel video, said an insider. ‘She is aware and has seen what Diddy did and is tremendously disappointed.’
Indira Milini Khan, daughter of singer Chaka Khan, also attacked Combs, claiming her mother had also once been the victim of his explosive temper — ‘yelling and screaming like a lunatic’ — and that Diddy’s security guards had attacked her 19-year-old brother when he intervened.
The hip hop world is full of fierce rivalries and one of Combs’ old sparring partners, Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson, whose production company has made a documentary series about the allegations against Diddy, this week quickly agreed a deal with Netflix.
Jackson has already leaked an excerpt from the series in which a rapper named Mark Curry discusses partying with Combs as he allegedly spiked bottles of champagne with ‘something to make the girls real, real slippery’.
Fashion designer Misa Hylton, who was in a relationship with Combs in the early 1990s and has a child by him, said his attack on Ventura ‘triggered my own trauma’. Pictured in 2019
Big brands and politicians are also distancing themselves from Combs, a highly successful businessman who launched lucrative ventures in fashion, food and television, as well as producing music for a raft of other performers.
The uber-narcissistic star has never shied away from conspicuous consumption. Apart from acquiring a £36million yacht, he once blew £5.4million on a diamond necklace and splashed out nearly £330,000 on Krug champagne for a single party.
The likely guest list for such celebrations has suddenly become much, much smaller. New York mayor Eric Adams, who gave local boy Combs the ‘key to the city’ only last year, admitted that he was now considering revoking the honour.
Fitness company Peloton has banned Combs’ music from its workout playlists while the online streaming of his songs as ‘Diddy’ has plunged by more than half in five months.
On Tuesday, Crystal McKinney, a former model, compounded his already serious legal woes when she claimed in a new lawsuit that Combs ‘drugged and sexually assaulted’ her in 2003. McKinney, who was then 22, said they met at a fashion event in New York and he invited her back to his studio.
She said Combs and several friends began smoking cannabis there and she was encouraged to have a puff. It was ‘very powerful’, her suit claims, and she believes it may have been laced with another drug.
Former model Crystal McKinney has alleged the rapper drugged and sexually assaulted her in his studio in 2003. She claims still have the unwashed clothes she wore on the night
Combs then allegedly ordered her to follow him into a bathroom where he forced himself on her and, despite her resistance, made her have oral sex. She says she later lost consciousness and woke up in a taxi where she realised she had been sexually assaulted.
McKinney said that her modelling opportunities began to dry up following the incident and she believes Combs used his influence to ‘blackball’ her in the industry. Plunging into a ‘tailspin of anxiety and depression’, she says she attempted suicide in or around 2004.
She said she was filing her lawsuit now to seek ‘justice for herself and for any other of Combs’ victims’. Her lawsuit claims she still has the unwashed clothes she wore on the night of her ordeal in a sealed plastic bag.
Then, on Thursday, a seventh accuser – April Lampros – filed court papers in New York accusing Combs of sexually assaulting her four times after she met him in 1994 when she was a fashion student.
She says one assault occurred after he had forced her to take Ecstasy and that, when she tried to distance herself from him, threatened her with violence and ruining her fashion ambitions.
Hers is the sixth lawsuit to be brought against Combs since Ventura sued him last November. Three other women have accused him of sexual assault and rape, one saying he later beat her up and another saying the rapper and two other men gang raped her in 2003 when she was only 17.
Joi Dickerson, one of the three women, says he drugged and raped her in 1991, filming the attack when she was a 19-year-old student. Some of the lawsuits were filed under the New York Adult Survivors Act, which created a one-year window – which ran until November last year – for adult victims to file suits against alleged abusers regardless of the statute of limitations.
However, the accusations haven’t just come from women. In February, music producer Rodney ‘Lil Rod’ Jones claimed Combs made unwanted sexual advances towards him, too.
In a £24million lawsuit, he said Combs assaulted him and subjected him to ‘constant’ sexual harassment and groping, walking around naked in front of him and touching his genitals.
Jones further alleges that, over a year, Combs plied him with drugs, threatened him and forced him to hire prostitutes and have sex with them during wild house parties for the star’s voyeuristic pleasure.
As well as prostitutes, Jones claims that underage girls were at the parties and that he watched Combs spike their drinks. He also claims he has hundreds of hours of videos documenting ‘serious illegal activity’ by Combs and his staff and guests.
One accuser compared Combs to paedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (pictured)
According to Jones, who compared the star to paedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Combs installed hundreds of hidden cameras in his various homes to record people having sex.
Jones also alleged that people were drawn to attending Combs’ lavish parties because of his ‘access to celebrities such as famous athletes, political figures, artists, musicians and international dignitaries like British Royal, Prince Harry’.
His lawsuit doesn’t suggest any wrongdoing by the celebrities or the prince, who is believed to have only met Combs once backstage at the 2007 Concert for Diana at Wembley Stadium in London. But these nebulous connections, says Jones, gave Combs ‘legitimacy’.
Prior to his admission of the attack on Ventura, Combs had denied all wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime.
NBC News has estimated that Combs has faced legal action or settlement payouts more than four dozen times over his 40-year career. Half a dozen of those concerned allegations of violence but he has rarely faced criminal charges.
That could all be about to change, however. Legal experts point out that Combs’ previous strenuous denials of abusing Cassie Ventura were likely to cause him significant problems as they undermine the credibility of his testimony when it comes to his other accusers.
While he cannot face criminal charges for kicking hell out of Ventura as the offence took place too long ago, that hotel video may yet finish him.
Receiving a prestigious music award in 2022, Combs gave Ventura a ‘special shoutout’ as someone who would ‘hold me down in the dark times’. Even darker times surely await him now.
