On the witness stand Wednesday, Sean “Diddy” Combs’ ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura listed out the many people who stood by or prevented her escape when she was allegedly beaten and stomped on by him over the course of their 11-year relationship.
She was testifying as part of his dramatic federal sex trafficking and racketeering trial in New York City.
Ventura said those people included Combs’ security guards, who would bring her back to him after the vicious assaults, as well his many assistants, his driver, and James Cruz, her music manager. She also detailed the first time Combs was violent toward her, which was shortly after they became romantically involved in 2007. “He hit me in the side of my head and I fell to the floor of the car,” she said. She would have been 21 at the time, and Combs was 38.
Combs’ driver and guard were also present another time Combs attacked her in a vehicle in 2009. Ventura said he attacked her for the whole 10-minute car ride. Combs’ guards caught up to her when she tried to escape the beating, and brought her back to him. “I had never experienced anything like that, when I was really badly beaten,” she said. Afterward, Combs’ team set her up in a London hotel to hide her until her wounds healed. She was forbidden from seeing anyone except her stylist, she testified, and told to keep her face covered.
She described her own face when she finally looked in the mirror, as having “just knots and bleeding, swollen everything. I looked horrible.” Ventura added that after one of the beatings, she wanted to go home but knew “it wouldn’t be safe” for her mother because of Combs’ “capabilities, his access to guns, the threats he made prior to that.” That’s why she kept the abuse a secret from her mom at the time.
Per the New York Times, she said, “I didn’t tell my mom the truth because I was ashamed … I also didn’t want to put my mother in danger for knowing anything of that magnitude.”
During another beating incident in 2015 at a Las Vegas hotel where Combs was hosting a party in another room, Ventura said he “punched me, kicked me … I was trying to run away and I made it into the bathroom.”
Combs’ management team and security witnessed and ended the altercation. Ventura said one guard started to cry when he saw the “black eyes” and “golf-ball sized knots” on her forehead, CNN reports. No other intervention was offered, however.
Combs’ son was at his house at the same time Ventura was instructed to stay there to hide her wounds after that incident, prompting Combs to tell Ventura to put on more makeup to hide her injuries from him.
Combs’ team plans to argue that the couple was “mutually” violent. Ventura has been calm and collected throughout her testimony, which analysts say may cause Combs’ defense to rethink their strategy.
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