A thing happened between Sean Combs and me. Unlike what he has been accused of over the last eight months, what occurred between us was not sexual. It was professional — demonstrative of the way dynamic and domineering men moved in our heyday. Combs and I worked together a lot. Competed, in our way. So often I thought I came out on top. I was mistaken. I had reason to fear for my life. What happened was insidious. It broke my brain. I forgot the worst of it for 27 years.
It was July 1997. In the fading smoke of the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., I was named editor in chief of a music magazine called Vibe. Started by Quincy Jones and Time Inc. in 1992, the magazine chronicled Black music and culture with rigor and beauty, 10 issues a year, for an audience that was relentlessly underserved. When I took over, we thought hip-hop might have died with our heroes, and we were determined not only to keep it alive but also to give it the cultural credit it was due.
Hip-hop was both in mourning and in marketing meetings. Combs, Biggie’s creative partner and label boss, was the personification of this dichotomy. His Bad Boy Records was having a $100 million year — much due to the work of Biggie and Mase, as well as Combs’s own debut album, “No Way Out,” which was anchored by the blockbuster Biggie tribute “I’ll Be Missing You” featuring Faith Evans. Other singles, “It’s All About the Benjamins” and “Been Around the World,” functioned as a score for hip-hop’s megawatt moment — its commercial evolution and international expansion. (“No Way Out” would go on to sell over seven million copies.) So I wanted Combs on the cover of Vibe’s December 1997/January 1998 double issue. And I wanted him to wear white feathered wings.
My point of reference was the poster for “Heaven Can Wait,” a 1978 film starring Warren Beatty. The movie is about a quarterback who dies before his time and is reincarnated as an idiosyncratic and callous billionaire. Vibe’s working cover line for Sacha Jenkins’s article was “The Good, the Bad and the Puffy.” Not so elegant, but it would work if the fashion director Emil Wilbekin and I got Combs (then known as Puffy, or Puff Daddy) to put on the angel wings. And if we also got a shot that looked even slightly mischievous, we could do a split run of the cover — one with heavenly signifiers and another with hellish ones. Possible cover line: “Bad Boy, Bad Boy, Whatcha Gonna Do?”
The photo shoot took place in Manhattan in September 1997. I had probably said hello to Combs at an event, but the shoot was the first time I was around him for an extended period. Either it was a crowded set or I just felt claustrophobic. I wore yoga pants and an oversize T-shirt. I remember wanting to minimize my bust more than my bra was already doing. I remember cajoling. And I remember knowing that as a Black woman, I was in a no-win situation: to fail was to live up to my male bosses’ low expectations, and to succeed was to invite their resentment. That day, Combs was begrudgingly compliant. We finally got him to shrug on the white feathered wings.
He cooperated up to a point, but eventually his controlling ways took hold. A few days later, Combs wanted to see the Vibe covers before they went to press. It wasn’t our policy to show covers before publication, so after I told him no, we heard that he planned to come to our office and force us to show him what we’d chosen — and to make us choose something else if he didn’t like what he saw.
I’m sure I was concerned, but my priority was getting the issue to the printer on time. There was vague talk about Combs’s beating a woman at the Bad Boy offices. In 1996 he was found guilty of criminal mischief for threatening a New York Post photographer with a gun. Combs was also busy denying that he had something to with the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur. In September 1997, Combs had a reputation for shaking tables. I’d reconciled the rumors with his relevance, and the math was ugly and simple: I had to have him on the cover. So a few Vibe employees put together a plan to keep me safe if he chose to visit that day.
I was in my office on the third floor of a building on the boring corner of Lexington and 32nd Street. A few doors away from me, Vibe’s research chief, Ava Chin, was with the managing editor, Jesse Washington, in his office with her back to the open door. Jesse looked over her head, as if someone was behind her. Jesse stood up. He’s 6-foot-4, and Ava saw him trying to make himself even taller. As though he were squaring off. So she turned toward the door and saw Combs with two security dudes. Combs asked, “Where’s Danyel?” The receptionist had already notified other colleagues that Combs had walked into the editorial bullpen. As he and his two associates looked into various cubicles and offices, my co-workers eased into mine.
Paper proofs of the cover story and both the angelic and devilish covers were on my desk. I grabbed the unruly stack of 11x17s. Staff members shuttled me from office to office to the spiral staircase and the alternate second-floor elevator bank. I made it to 32nd between Lexington and Third Avenue, clutching the proofs. Jesse eventually came down. He took the pages from me, flagged a taxi and put me in a yellow cab home to Brooklyn.
The next day, though, I was right back in the office. My assistant received a call on my line. “It’s Puffy,” she said. I got my mind right and picked up. He was still on message: He wanted to see the covers. I was still on message: It’s not what we do. It was then that Combs told me, as I’ve retold hundreds of times over the years, that he would see me “dead in the trunk of a car.” Not missing a beat, I told him he needed to take that threat back. “Take it back,” I said, sounding as if I were 10.
“Take what back?” Then, with a vile laugh, “[Expletive] you.”
“Take it back now,” I said. “Or I’m calling my lawyer, and you’re going to jail.”
He said: “I know where you are right now. Right on Lexington.”
I called my personal lawyer. I do not know what he said to Combs. Within two hours, Combs faxed over an apology. One of my male bosses was furious that I had not involved him. Combs had called him to complain that I sicced my lawyer on him, as if I somehow wasn’t playing fair.
Soon after those menacing encounters, I walked into work one morning to find my staff members tamping down panic. A couple of servers, which back then were as big as end tables and twice as heavy, had been stolen, and the scuttlebutt was that the theft was an inside job. That someone on Vibe’s publishing side had let in movers from Bad Boy. It was almost time to send pages to the printer, and the whole issue was saved on those servers. All the editorial changes. All the pages, with the advertising adjacencies that had been paid for by clients. Gone. (In response to fact-checking inquiries, Combs, via representatives, would not comment on the record for this piece.)
I’ve always remembered the threatening call. I mentioned it in my memoir, “Shine Bright,” though I got wrong the reason for his vexation. But I repressed the rest. The only reason I know the details is a chance meeting I had at the MacDowell artists’ residency this May. Ava Chin, who is now an author and a professor of creative nonfiction, was also there. I hadn’t seen her in decades. Ava asked me early in the residency if I was ever going to write about Vibe. I said, “Yes,” and she said, “Good.” Then, just before I left, I mentioned that I was writing about Combs and told her that he said he would see me dead in the trunk of a car. In the previous months, accusations of his serial abuse of women, which had been rumored for years, had surfaced, and I was thinking about my professional relationship with him. I asked her if she remembered the tense situation. Over her turkey club, Ava said, “I absolutely remember.” She wasn’t privy to the phone conversation, but she knew other details. She told me my own story. I don’t remember being shuttled from office to office. “Shuttled” is Ava’s word.
The entire memory had been removed from my mind, like the servers that were stolen from the offices. I wanted someone else to validate the story, so from the rear garden of MacDowell’s main building, I FaceTimed Jesse Washington, who is now a journalist and filmmaker. When he confirmed Ava’s recounting, I stared at the long green meadow, processing. The fact that two people had to tell me a story about myself was mortifying. It made me question my own truths. I was flooded with questions about my own experiences of vulnerability, victimhood, ambition, fear and regret, and what all of it means with regard to my professional and personal legacies. Considering this nauseating image of myself running and hiding from Combs, of people at work protecting me, made me confront other things I’d possibly repressed about that feral and fantastic time in my life. To be a powerful woman in the music industry, and in the hip-hop media specifically, exacted a toll I’ve resisted reckoning with. It’s so much easier, frankly, to tell other people’s stories. As a journalist, I have learned how to get people to recall stuff they would rather forget or keep to themselves. It’s an art tart with betrayal. But it’s mine. And so Here we are, I was thinking in that garden. Now I have to remember.
I don’t recollect exactly how Combs and I left things after he threatened me in ’97, but it’s not as though we could stop dealing with each other. Hip-hop, inching its way toward world domination, needed us to keep contributing in our respective ways — on my end, documenting its trajectory, and on his, branching out into television, liquor and more. We interacted when necessary. Sometimes an exchange was just us smiling for cameras.
Two photos of us stand out to me and mark places where our journeys intersected. There’s one from the 1990s in which my hair is its natural dark brown, and I have on a navy-and-turquoise zip hoodie. I’m awkward in his embrace, still getting used to being in the limelight. The other is from October 2006. I’m 41, with my new grays cinnamon-coated by the celebrity colorist Rita Hazan. My teeth have been Invisaligned, and my gaze is sure. We’re posing before a party celebrating both the release of his album “Press Play” and the new issue of Vibe magazine. Combs is the cover star. I wrote the celebratory article.
In our 2006 photo, Combs is in a black tuxedo, a black shirt and sunglasses. In some of the shots from that night, I look discordantly joyful; in others I look like I would rather Combs not hold me so closely or kiss me on the cheek. I was a newlywed, and also a professional. I had resigned from Vibe in 1999, and when I was rehired in 2006, Combs was among the first people I called to appear on a cover. I did so because I knew the cover would both succeed at the newsstand and reaffirm to my new venture-capitalist chieftains that I still had my chops and that my industry relationships were flawless. So in that series of photos, Combs and I are playing the roles of mogul and editor in chief, and we’re nailing it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about those two photos lately — and all the photos of me and Combs together. It’s bizarre to see myself smiling in pictures with someone accused of such heinous crimes. In November 2023, Casandra Ventura, who performs as Cassie, sued Combs under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, claiming that he raped, abused and sex-trafficked her over the span of a decade. (They settled one day after Ventura filed the lawsuit, and the terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.) In the ensuing months, Combs has been the subject of seven civil lawsuits; six of them accuse him of sexual assault. The accusations go as far back as 1990. After Ventura filed her lawsuit, Liza Gardner accused Combs and the R.&B. singer Aaron Hall of a 1990 rape. Shortly after, Joi Nickerson-Neal accused Combs of drugging her, sexually assaulting her and recording the assault without her knowledge in 1991, when she was a student at Syracuse University. A Jane Doe filed a suit in December claiming that Combs, along with his Bad Boy colleague Harve Pierre and a third unidentified assailant, gang-raped her at Daddy’s House, a recording studio owned by Combs, in 2003. This May, April Lampros, who was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, accused Combs of raping her three times in 1995 and 1996. That same month, the model Crystal McKinney said that Combs invited her to Daddy’s House during Men’s Fashion Week in 2003 and assaulted her. (Combs’s lawyers have so far denied the accusations in all but the last two of these lawsuits.)
The videographer and producer Rodney Jones, also known as Lil Rod, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Combs has hidden cameras in all his properties, that individuals were recorded without their consent and that because of a “treasure trove” of compromising video, Combs believes he is “above the law.” Jones also claims that Combs threatened and sexually harassed him. In one instance, he says, he woke up dizzy and naked — with Combs and two sex workers. (In a statement, one of Combs’s lawyers characterized Jones’s accusations as “complete lies.”)
Last December, Combs took to Instagram, writing: “I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.” Then, on May 17, a 2016 surveillance video obtained by CNN showed Combs, in a white towel, attacking Ventura at an InterContinental hotel. In the clip, he hits, shoves and kicks Ventura, who was his girlfriend at the time. He drags her limp body. In this video, the body language that makes him so singular as a performer and a bon vivant gives him completely away. On May 19, Combs did a 180, seeming to change course on his claim that Ventura’s accusations were “baseless and outrageous lies.” He shared a recorded apology on his Instagram feed: “My behavior on that video is inexcusable,” he said. “I take full responsibility for my actions in that video.” (In late June, Combs deleted all of the posts on his Instagram page.)
In past times, I attended Combs’s large music-industry parties — in New York City, the Hamptons, Miami. To be clear, he has never acted in any way sexually inappropriate toward me. I have slammed shots with him at Rockefeller Center and the Roc Nation Brunch. Combs is a genius. He is also sincere in his ambition, and in his malevolence. In the entertainment industry, none of this makes him unusual. It’s shameful, and wack, for me not to have known fully. I considered myself a hard-hitting journalist. At the time, I broke stories about predation in the music business.
In 1994, when I was the music editor at Vibe, the investigative team that I was a part of figured out that the 27-year-old R. Kelly had married the 15-year-old Aaliyah. We got our hands on the license, and the photographer Dana Lixenberg and I chased Kelly to a tour stop in Philadelphia. I wrote the cover story that verified what had only been wild rumors about his sex crimes.
It’s easy to think of the ’90s and aughts as a strange time. I could, in the space of a day, be working on an R. Kelly article, editing a piece about hip-hop feminism and then be at one of Combs’s — or most anyone’s — shindigs, not knowing what was happening in the very next room. All of this has been normal since the dawn of pop. To report sexual misconduct — whether it was to attorneys or law enforcement or even your supervisor — often meant losing your job. Being ostracized. Or being a girl that just didn’t “get it,” or didn’t know how to fend for herself.
The music industry was, and is, a mean place. Journalists were being threatened at recording studios and stomped in their own offices. In the spring of 1999, the music executive Steve Stoute claimed that Combs and two bodyguards attacked him over the way Combs was depicted in a music video. He said that Combs punched him in the face and hit him in the head with a telephone and a Champagne bottle. (Stoute later asked the court to drop the charges after Combs publicly apologized and pleaded guilty to harassment.) Not only were many rank-and-file workers in our business — men and women alike — jittery about our physical and emotional safety, we were enlisted to boost the egos of the very artists and executives who felt entitled to violate us. We became used to playing the game; we were conditioned to look the other way or, when looking at something straight ahead, to not see it for what it was. Or even to unsee it. In our 2006 interview, Combs said: “Somebody gave me multiple choices early on — having a smooth working relationship, having a personal life or being in the music industry. I chose the music industry.” Same, Puff. Same. Too many of us did. We wouldn’t have thought of ourselves as ambivalent or numb then, but that’s what we were. A lot of us women wanted our fair shot at winning. There were dues to pay. We paid dearly.
There’s no party cooler and more insanely fun than a music-industry party. Right? The trade salts and sugars its women and devours them like hors d’oeuvres. Our bodies are not our own: breasts and asses are meant to be squeezed anonymously from behind at crowded bars where real and difficult work is being celebrated. Some girls survive — dried out or skeletal or just tough. Some women, via luck or brilliance or exfoliation, excel. Some marry in. Others disappear. The business, moving at its seductive, breakneck pace, spits them out.
Many female executives and top-level creative types started as standout students, interns, administrators and receptionists. We communicated in the posh ladies’ rooms in hip restaurants and in nods and fleeting eye contact in office buildings. One intern said she was hesitant to speak to me because “the guys downstairs told me you were such a bitch and that you hate pretty girls.” I was a bitch because I had heard that the sales guys were using their offices as late-night no-tell motel rooms. This woman remembered that I used to look away from her when she passed me in hallways. It was weird though, she said, because you seemed nice?
It was weird. And I was nice — as I could be, when I could be. Ambition, in an industry that pretends scarcity, must make monsters of women who wanted to be what was back then called Big Willies, a euphemism for large penises. Vibe honchos organized “Big Willie” panel discussions at industry seminars. This when female artists and executives were working twice as hard for less money and only whispered credit. This when so many wives and girlfriends of male stars succeeded in the music business by formally or informally managing their partners’ careers without professional kudos or full payment. Even the work of being a muse is usually grimy and unprotected.
Take Kim Porter, for example. Porter, who died in 2018, was a model and sometimes actor. Combs is the father of three of her children. On a late autumn afternoon in 1998, I visited Porter at the Park Avenue apartment, in a 12-story limestone building, Combs was in the process of buying, that she shared with her two little boys. Combs was not there that afternoon. I rarely ended up in Porter’s presence, but when I did, her personality seemed a mix of femme fatale and mean girl. The mean girl felt fueled by a broken heart.
Porter and I and two other friends eventually went to a buzzy restaurant for cocktails. Sometime later, Combs came in. He knew all of us at the table but didn’t acknowledge us. He demanded that Porter hand over her baguette purse and turned it upside-down. Her belongings splattered on the table among lime eighths and ice crumbs. He snatched up her bank cards to the beat of: You ain’t got. No business. In here. You need. To be. At home. With. Those. Kids. Combs yelled something like, Get home as best you can. From the sidewalk, I saw Porter being hustled into the limo in which we arrived. One of the friends, more tired than terrified, shot me a look: You good? And they were gone.
“A woman deserves to be nurtured and taken care of,” Combs told me eight years later, for our 2006 cover story. “Kim taught me that. She … taught me how to love.” Maybe he learned that. Maybe he didn’t. To be honest, pressing him didn’t occur to me. I had just laid off almost a dozen good people. This was the beginning of the end of print magazines, and another one of those times when I did what I had to do to keep the magazine alive. It was my job.
It was also my job to hear what women were saying even when they weren’t quite saying it. On Aug. 29, 2015, I was in Culver City, Calif., at Epic Records’s annual celebration of its artists. There was a lot of loud talking and drinking, and I found myself retreating to a cool alcove where the wait staff was being handed platters of tuna in tong gang spoons. In four-inch sandals, Cassie walked over uncharacteristically alone. She and Combs were rumored to have gotten engaged the year before, but there had been no wedding, and I didn’t see a ring. She also hadn’t released a second album after her smash single “Me & U” went to No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 2006, despite being signed to Bad Boy for almost a decade. When I saw her in Culver City, it was about six months before the assault shown in the CNN InterContinental video.
She surprised me when she gracefully squatted, so that we were eye to eye. Cassie asked how I was.
Me: “Fine, lady, fine. How are you?”
She: “How are you doing it?”
Me: “Doing what?”
She: “Like, how are you managing?”
She placidly awaited an answer, and I felt myself tremble. Maybe she saw in me a fellow industry introvert, someone skilled at the Irish exit. Perhaps she wanted to know how I was still married (at that time, for 10 years) to a man in the music and media industries. But what caused the tremble was the feeling that she had heard from mutual friends that I was sexually assaulted (a decade before) by someone we both knew. Because I was. And I was paranoid. And she was still there, looking at me. It felt as if she were trying to send me an extrasensory signal. I gave her a generic “Girl, what? I’m fine.”
We each wanted to say something. It seemed that neither of us could find the words. After a moment, she rose up on those stilettos as if she were barefoot on a soft lawn. She waved goodbye and walked back toward the fresh air. (Contacted through her lawyers, Cassie had no comment.)
There’s no safe space for an ambitious woman. Not anywhere, and definitely not in the entertainment business. Men keep it dangerous so they can keep it theirs. Once, a media executive bullied me in a bar and, despite my protests, made it clear he was going to walk me to my hotel room. It was obvious that he wanted sex. In his pulsing nostril was resentment about the job I had. He had the focused look of a person who believes you have stolen something from him, and that something is actually you. That happened to me in the mid-90s, but it has been going on in pop music since forever.
Louis McKay physically and financially abused Billie Holiday. Ike Turner physically and emotionally abused Tina Turner. Ted White beat Aretha Franklin. Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin, who, when filing for divorce more than a decade later, in 1970, claimed that she had been “subject to every type of physical and mental abuse imaginable.” Both David Ruffin and James Brown beat Tammi Terrell. The convicted killer Phil Spector locked Ronnie Spector in their home. Miles Davis’s marriage to the funk singer Betty Davis reportedly ended because of what she called his “violent temper.” Donna Summer was abused by her boyfriend Peter Mühldorfer. Dr. Dre beat the singer Michel’le and the journalist Dee Barnes. Chris Brown hit Rihanna. More than a dozen women have accused Russell Simmons of sexual assault, and in some cases rape, all of which he denies. (He also has denied that he moved to Bali to avoid extradition.) L.A. Reid stepped down as the chief executive of Epic Records following a 2017 accusation of sexual harassment by an assistant (a lawsuit filed last year accuses him of sexual assault and harassment). Tory Lanez shot Megan Thee Stallion. Last month, the producer Diplo was accused of distributing sexual images and videos of a woman without her consent. (His lawyer cast doubt on the accusation.) And then there are the countless women who remain unnamed or choose to be anonymous or decide not to report at all.
I know the beats of getting beat (I was half-raised by an alcoholic father figure), and I still don’t know how to act. A Vibe staff member told me on her return from interviewing a musician that he assaulted her. I tried to comfort her but didn’t say much that helped. I know I didn’t, because years later she told me so. I stuttered and stumbled. I had no language to talk about what happened to her, because I couldn’t even say what happened to me. She was healing. I was still running and reeling from a work-related sexual assault. She and I always kept in touch, though, and years later she invited me to her wedding. I couldn’t get myself together to attend. Supposedly the big-time mentor lady, I was embarrassed and guilty and ragged about not being there for her, about not being the person I wish had been there for me. Sometimes acknowledging another woman’s pain forces you to stare deep at your own. So you minimize hers, and you minimize yours and you keep it moving. As they say in books, and on T-shirts, and in so many rap songs — including the Lox and Puffy’s 1998 track — can’t stop, won’t stop.
My glory days were infused with crisis. There was the not knowing, the wondering, the suspecting, the kind of knowing, the actually knowing, the acting as if you don’t know. I have been a fly on the wall, and a fly pinned to it. I made a career in the music business. I loved it, and it almost killed me. It was a lot to hold in my mind at once. The sadness and anxiety pushed me to nicotine and then Wellbutrin. Some of my past times, including Combs’s stalking me at the Vibe office, had to be redacted. I blacked them out in order to keep the lights on.
Some things were recovered. Back in 1997, on the afternoon the servers were stolen from the Vibe office, it turned out that our art director had the issue on a disk she had taken home. We were able to publish our angel and devil covers of Combs. In each, he is looking over the top of dark glasses. In each, he looks as though he would continue winning for a long time.
The last time I saw Combs in person, it was February 2020, at the house in Los Angeles that was raided this March by Homeland Security Investigations agents. I was invited to chat about possibly participating in a docuseries that Combs was creating about his life. I hadn’t spoken to him in a while.
As it was, Combs was fresh off a star-studded 50th-birthday party. I was curious about whether such a big milestone had triggered in him a desire to tell his true stories. My husband and I put in place a plan of texting and pin-dropping, so I would never be out of touch. There was no way, though, that I wasn’t going to go. One, I’m a journalist; I was dutybound. Two, my ego, ambition and expertise say that it should be me getting the big interviews. Three, there is power and meaning in showing up. If I don’t go, I can’t take notes, and I can’t have an experience that becomes mine through writing.
A film crew was at Combs’s house. He was in a leg brace, having just undergone his fourth surgery in two years (this time it was to repair a quad tendon tear). “This is God’s work,” he said on Instagram, “to slow me down.” His twin daughters, then 13, drifted about, concurrently blasé and inquisitive. Over a dozen of us sat in a pristine outdoor kitchen watching emotional footage. Combs introduced me to the group as a longtime journalist who asks real questions.
I was surprised when he asked me what, when I eventually interviewed him, I would ask him first.
I hesitated.
He said, “Don’t answer that.”
People laughed. I remember being glad I was part of such a large and familial group. And even comforted a bit by the post-surgical leg brace that Combs appeared to need. I was where I was supposed to be. I’d been told since I first started going to shows on my own that it was dangerous, that someone was going to rape me, or stab me, or rob me. Or steal me. It seemed then like a conspiracy to keep me in the house — from becoming myself, from knowing myself as brave.
Three weeks later the Covid lockdowns began in Los Angeles. I didn’t end up participating in the documentary.
Combs and I traded goodbyes in a great room overwhelmed by “Past Times,” a huge painting by Kerry James Marshall. The acrylic-and-collage work was created in 1997, that unfathomable year that Biggie died, Combs the producer/entrepreneur emerged as an artist and hip-hop changed forever. It’s easy to see why Combs would be drawn to such a larger-than-life depiction of play, freedom from labor and affluence as ordinary. There’s water skiing, croquet, golfing, picnic accouterment. On the 9.5-by-13-foot canvas are bits of lyrics from the Temptations and Snoop Dogg. The painting’s inhabitants wear white, as the “who’s who” did for years at Combs’s Gatsbian “white parties.” I attended a few of those. Scanning “Past Times,” I could almost smell those old coupes of evaporating champagne.
The painting had carried a presale estimate of $8 million to $12 million. Anonymously, Combs battled bidders as the price rose to a record-setting $21.1 million (widely reported to be the most ever paid for the work of a living Black artist). “Sky is the limit/And you know that you can/Have what you want/Be what you want.” So goes the Bad Boy song. Perhaps every Bad Boy song. Sky’s the limit when you’re buying a picture in which you see yourself in all your glory. One that seems to float close to your own memory of the way things were. The painting sits in his home as an angelically clean version of a deeply explicit industry. Our past times, unironically nicknamed “the golden era” of hip-hop, are as much folk tale as fact.
The growing set of accusations against Combs has me angrily calling into question the fullness of my own memory and the precision of my timeline. I have already lost long stretches of my life, so what, in the grand scheme of things, is an afternoon from 1997? Actually, it’s everything. I already spend a lot of time playing catch-up, because I’ve handed whole years to depression. I was a bed-rotter before it was called that. I could barely hear music for the tears in my ears. It’s one thing to deal with brain fog. You guzzle cold-water-fish oil, and you keep it moving. But I mean, to have blocked out a whole series of events is terrifying. Because what else is missing? What do I not know that I have not seen? What, in hip-hop, have I not heard?
I’ve never wanted to believe that music — which saved my life as a child and teenager, reinforced my audacity in my 20s and provided a way for me to make a living in my adulthood — could fail me. It is, in too many ways, my life. I’m the goddamned institutional memory. So it’s particularly rancid that this suppressed episode has placed me in a well of self-doubt. Here I am, in a familiar victim mode, disciplining myself into not taking on blame — for not knowing what I didn’t know and for managing what I did. The questions drip down on me, slowly, steadily, a torture: Was my magazine too well done? And too loud? Should I have even gone to the white parties? They keep coming. Was my skirt too short? Is it possible that I stayed at the party too long?
Source photos for top illustration, from left: Steve Double/Camera Press/Redux; Marc Serota/Getty Images; Prince Williams/WireImage, via Getty Images.
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