The Unsettling Spectacle of Cassie’s Diddy Trial Testimony

In November 2023, Casandra Ventura sued Sean Combs for extensive sexual and physical abuse during their relationship. For more than a decade, the singer and hip-hop mogul, better known as Cassie and Diddy, were a reliable fixture of courtside seats and red carpets. The suit was settled within a day, with Combs denying any wrongdoing, but it immediately reframed this sunny portrait of the couple, and of Combs himself.

A year and half later, with Combs standing trial in a Manhattan federal courthouse, Ventura remains the axis of the story that has enveloped her former partner. Her lawsuit set off a wave of further civil complaints as well as a criminal indictment that largely mirrored her accusations, even as it set out a broader view of Combs’s alleged violence and misconduct. Prosecutors charged Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution, claiming that he had used his business empire as a criminal enterprise to coerce Ventura and others into elaborate sexual performances with prostitutes, now known widely as what he called “freak-offs.” (Combs has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing in connection with the civil suits he faces.)

Ventura is the prosecution’s star witness—and the defense’s primary target. Earlier this week, one of Combs’s attorneys requested that Ventura, eight months pregnant with her third child, be seated in the witness box before the jury arrived for the beginning of her testimony. “Pregnancy is beautiful and wonderful,” Marc Agnifilo told the judge. “It also is a source of potential sympathy.” (The judge denied the defense’s request.)

In her opening statement on Monday, another of Combs’s attorneys, Teny Geragos, said that Ventura had been free in her relationship with Combs.

“She was not coerced,” Geragos told the jury. “When she left there were no repercussions. She ran into the arms of a physical trainer Combs had hired to train her.” (Ventura’s husband, Alex Fine, has been watching her testimony in the courtroom.)

As she testified, Ventura recounted in often excruciating detail the abuse she said she suffered at the hand of Combs. “I was just so young,” she said, recalling the beginning of their relationship and its turn to sex. “I didn’t even have the vocabulary for some of the things we talked about.” Later, she said, Combs and escorts, at Combs’s direction, would urinate in her mouth, sometimes causing her to choke. Ventura testified that Combs would instruct her to rub the escorts’ semen onto his body.

The most graphic portions of Ventura’s testimony have inevitably traveled the widest. The true crime podcaster Stephanie Soo, who has attracted some measure of reprisal on social media for her exuberant coverage of the trial, said on Instagram on Tuesday that she needed to scale back her daily coverage. “Given the time and the severity of the information that’s revealed/spoken about in court each day,” Soo wrote, “we don’t feel great rushing it just to get information out to you guys.” In a letter to the judge in the case, Ventura’s attorney Douglas Wigdor asked that news organizations not be allowed to view videos of freak-offs that Combs allegedly used to keep Ventura quiet about his abuse. On Wednesday, the judge ruled that the footage would only be shown to the jury.

“Unsealing these videos,” Wigdor wrote, would “essentially allow the media to carry out the very threats that [Combs] held over her.”