A former girlfriend of Sean Combs who has said she was traumatized by degrading sex marathons with a succession of hired men finished more than 24 hours of testimony at the music mogul’s federal trial on Thursday.
Across six days, the woman — who is known in court by the pseudonym Jane — recalled a boyfriend who both showered her with love and affection and pressured her to have drug-dazed sex with strangers in hotel rooms, at times mentioning that he paid her rent when she expressed hesitancy.
The defense’s questioning of Jane sought to portray her as a person with agency who chose to engage in these encounters, highlighting text messages in which she reflected positively on them. On the witness stand, Jane repeatedly asserted that she was telling Mr. Combs what she knew he wanted to hear.
When the prosecution took over again after days of cross-examination, Maurene Comey, the lead prosecutor, sought to drive home how the encounters were unwanted, asking Jane bluntly if she had orgasms during them. She said she did not, but agreed that she had pretended.
“I was putting on a show,” Jane testified.
“For who?” Ms. Comey asked.
“Sean,” she replied.
Mr. Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking. Prosecutors have accused him of coercing Jane and another former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, into drug-fueled sex marathons with male prostitutes. His lawyers have asserted that the sex was entirely consensual.
The extensive questioning of Jane reflects the complexity of her relationship with Mr. Combs. They were still dating — largely in secret — in 2023, when Ms. Ventura, known as the singer Cassie, filed a bombshell lawsuit accusing him of physical and sexual abuse. Jane and Mr. Combs’s on-and-off relationship continued until his arrest in September 2024, and she did not participate in the criminal investigation until she was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury the next month. Jane met with the defense several times before the trial started but chose to stop when the case began.
Though Jane is a now witness for the government, Mr. Combs continues to pay her legal fees and rent, she said.
Jane kept largely calm during her many hours of testimony, but showed flashes of irritation, including when the defense questioned her about the total of $150,000 Mr. Combs had wired her throughout their relationship.
“Did you want more than that?” asked Teny Geragos, a lawyer for Mr. Combs.
“Does he think I’m worth more than that?” Jane shot back, the jurors’s heads ping-ponging back and forth between them.
When she got off the stand, Jane hugged the lead prosecutor, then — more surprisingly — Ms. Geragos.
On Thursday, another former girlfriend of Mr. Combs who had previously sued him anonymously refiled her lawsuit under her real name, Chelsea Lovelace, as first reported by Rolling Stone. Ms. Lovelace’s account, as detailed in her suit, parallels in some respects the testimony of Jane and Ms. Ventura at trial in its descriptions of how she said Mr. Combs, with whom she was involved from 2021 until his arrest, used drugs and money to compel her “into engaging in sex acts without her consent,” including with others. Mr. Combs has denied having sex with anyone without consent.
When the defense picked up its cross-examination on Thursday morning, Ms. Geragos questioned Jane about her relationship with the mogul while he was under a federal criminal investigation.
Text messages entered into evidence showed that Jane had already been complaining to Mr. Combs that she felt traumatized by the nights of sex with hired men when Ms. Ventura filed her suit. Mr. Combs quickly settled for $20 million, but the lawsuit led to a criminal investigation into his conduct.
Learning that Ms. Ventura had similar experiences with male escorts in hotel rooms stunned her, Jane has testified.
The jury has seen a series of messages in which Jane unloaded her feelings of trauma and pain, writing to Mr. Combs in December 2023 to “please stop drugging and using women for your fetish nights.”
On Thursday, the defense highlighted efforts to repair their relationship, noting that Mr. Combs had once asked Jane to find a couple’s therapist.
“Would he tell you that he was sorry that you felt this way?” Ms. Geragos asked.
“Yes, he would,” Jane said.
After the relationship devolved at the end of 2023 and the couple was on a break, Jane testified that she went to Las Vegas, traveling on the private jet of a famous rapper who went unnamed in the courtroom. Before Jane took the stand on Thursday, there was a delay in proceedings as lawyers debated whether he should be identified.
The government, which argued he should not be named to avoid jeopardizing Jane’s anonymity, prevailed. Ms. Geragos described the rapper as an “icon in the music industry” with whom Mr. Combs is close and has collaborated.
While on the trip, Jane testified, the group went to a dinner for the rapper’s girlfriend, to a strip club and then back to the rapper’s hotel room, where she saw guests gathered around watching a man and a woman have sex. The man, Anton, was someone who had been a regular participant in sex nights with Mr. Combs, she testified.
Jane acknowledged that in the hotel room, the rapper and his girlfriend approached her and asked if she knew anyone in “the lifestyle,” and she recommended a pornographic actor with the stage name Sly who had participated in hotel nights with her and Mr. Combs.
In 2024, after she and Mr. Combs reconciled, Jane was with Mr. Combs at his home in Miami Beach, Fla., when CNN published hotel surveillance footage of him assaulting Ms. Ventura in 2016.
At the time, Jane said, Mr. Combs had never been physically violent with her.
“That was just not the man that you knew, right?” Ms. Geragos, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, asked of the video.
“No,” Jane replied.
Ms. Geragos started to ask about how Mr. Combs had tried to enter a “program” after the hotel assault footage was released, but he was rejected. An objection from the government ended the subject. The defense has said Mr. Combs’s violence was often connected to drug use.
After the footage came out, Jane’s friends told her to leave him, she said. Still she stayed in the relationship.
But one month after the release of the video, Jane and Mr. Combs had a violent brawl that left her with a black eye and welts on her forehead, she testified.
The cross-examination highlighted Jane’s role in initiating the fight: She acknowledged that after they began arguing about another woman Mr. Combs was seeing, she shoved his head into a marble countertop and threw multiple candles.
He then chased her around the home, busting through locked doors, and put her into a chokehold, before he punched and kicked her repeatedly, she said.
Testimony about that night has become central to the prosecution because of the sexual demands that followed the violence. Mr. Combs had been overcome by anger after finding out that Jane had seen Anton in Las Vegas, telling her “I can’t believe you went to another man’s freak-off,” according to his lawyer.
Jane testified that while she was injured, Anton arrived, and Mr. Combs insisted that she take Ecstasy and have sex with him despite her protests. She said she complied, taking the pill and performing oral sex on Anton.
Through much of her testimony, Jane spoke about her affection for Mr. Combs — acknowledging that she loved him to this day — and explained that she often “went along” with his requests for hotel nights because she wanted to please him.
But when a prosecutor asked how Jane would describe Mr. Combs’s demeanor on the night that he beat her, she responded with a starkly different term: “evil.”
Olivia Bensimon, Joe Coscarelli and Ben Sisario contributed reporting.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.
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