A security officer testified on Tuesday that Sean Combs paid him $100,000 in a brown paper bag for surveillance footage that captured the mogul beating his longtime girlfriend Casandra Ventura at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.
The security officer, Eddy Garcia, is testifying under an immunity order after telling the government that he intended to assert his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
Mr. Garcia testified that on March 5, 2016, the date of the assault, he received a call from an employee of Mr. Combs, Kristina Khorram, who asked him if there was a way she could get a copy of the footage. He testified that he told her no and declined again when she showed up in the lobby later that day.
That evening, Mr. Garcia testified, he received another call from Ms. Khorram, who connected him with Mr. Combs. The music mogul sounded nervous, Mr. Garcia said, and explained that he had “a little too much” to drink the day of the assault. If the video got out, “it could ruin him.”
Mr. Garcia testified that he rebuffed Mr. Combs again, but Ms. Khorram and the mogul called again, and Mr. Combs said “he would take care of me,” suggesting a payment. Mr. Garcia later called his supervisor, who agreed to sell the footage for $50,000.
When Mr. Garcia told Mr. Combs that they would be willing to sell the footage, the officer said, “He was excited, said ‘Eddy, my angel, I knew you could help. I knew you could do it.’”
Mr. Garcia’s supervisor later gave him a USB drive with the footage on it, and on March 7, Mr. Garcia brought it to an address in Los Angeles, where he met Mr. Combs, Ms. Khorram and a bodyguard, the officer said.
At the meeting, Mr. Garcia handed Mr. Combs the drive and assured him that it was the only copy, he testified, but he also expressed concern that he could be implicated if there was a police report about the assault. Mr. Combs then called Ms. Ventura on FaceTime, passed Mr. Garcia the phone and told Ms. Ventura to “let him know that you want this to go away too,” the officer testified.
“She said that she had a movie coming out and it wasn’t a good time for this to come out and she wanted it to go away,” Mr. Garcia said Ms. Ventura, known as the singer Cassie, had told him.
At that meeting, Mr. Garcia said, he signed a document — which was shown to jurors — affirming that he had handed over the only existing copy of the surveillance video. He testified that he did not read the document in full, and that he also signed a nondisclosure agreement.
After he signed the documents, Mr. Garcia said, Mr. Combs left the room and returned with a brown bag and a money counter, feeding stacks of $10,000 at a time into the machine. At the end, the machine displayed $100,000 — double what his supervisor had asked for. Mr. Garcia said he understood that the additional money was for him and one of his colleagues.
“He said not to make any big purchases,” Mr. Garcia said of Mr. Combs. “I understood it as it would draw attention.”
Mr. Combs is facing charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, which involves accusations that the mogul engaged an inner circle of bodyguards and high-ranking employees to help him commit a series of crimes over two decades.
At least two of those criminal allegations — bribery and obstruction of justice — relate to the aftermath of the assault at an InterContinental hotel in Los Angeles.
Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all charges. His lawyers have said that he and his employees were involved in legitimate business operations, not a criminal conspiracy, and that the sex at issue in the government’s case was entirely consensual.
On Tuesday, jurors again saw the footage of Mr. Combs, wearing a towel around his waist, striking and kicking Ms. Ventura in an elevator bank of the hotel. During her four days on the witness stand, Ms. Ventura testified that she had been trying to escape Mr. Combs after he hit her in the face.
Footage of the hotel assault was broadcast on CNN a year ago; Mr. Combs apologized on social media two days later, saying “my behavior on that video is inexcusable.”
Prosecutors have said that Mr. Combs first tried to pay off another member of the hotel security staff before approaching Mr. Garcia.
At the start of the trial, that staffer, Israel Florez, testified that after he responded to a call about a woman in distress on the sixth floor of the hotel, Mr. Combs tried to bribe him with a “stack of money” in exchange for his silence; he said he declined. Officer Florez, who now works for the Los Angeles Police Department, testified that he had seen surveillance footage of the assault — and even recorded clips of it on his phone — but that when he returned to work after the incident, the footage had disappeared from the computer system.
Mr. Combs’s lawyers have not disputed that their client paid hotel security to make the assault footage “go away,” but they have argued that it was to prevent “bad publicity” for both Mr. Combs and Ms. Ventura, not to obstruct any law enforcement investigation into the beating.
“No law enforcement investigation existed, period,” said Teny Geragos, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, at the start of the trial.
Mr. Combs is accused of sex trafficking Ms. Ventura by coercing her into drug-fueled sex marathons with male prostitutes in hotel rooms, known as “freak-offs,” while he watched and sometimes recorded. Ms. Ventura testified that she had recently arrived at a settlement agreement with InterContinental worth about $10 million.
On Monday, Sylvia Oken, an employee of the Beverly Hills Hotel, testified briefly about hotel bills incurred by Mr. Combs. Under questioning from prosecutors, she pointed to hundreds of dollars in additional cleaning charges on his folios — including $500 attributed to “oil damage.” (Prosecutors have said that Mr. Combs demanded that copious amounts of baby oil be used during freak-offs.)
The trial is returning to the core sex-trafficking allegations regarding Ms. Ventura after several days of testimony from a woman who said that while she was an assistant to Mr. Combs he berated her, threw objects at her and sexually assaulted her multiple times.
Anusha Bayya contributed reporting.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
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