In federal court, the music mogul Sean Combs is facing a sweeping indictment that accuses him of running a criminal enterprise that engaged in sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.
Online, a cottage industry of amateur sleuths, speculators and self-described past associates have accused him, often with little grounding, of far worse.
After Mr. Combs was charged in September, the social media theorizing about rampant celebrity debauchery and additional victims only grew more feverish and conspiratorial. Soon, a man began showing up on true crime podcasts claiming he had been given videos that showed sexual encounters involving Mr. Combs and a variety of other stars, including some he said looked to be inebriated and underage.
Media outlets have received anonymous emails offering to negotiate deals to provide the supposed footage, but none have published any images and it remains unclear whether such videos even exist.
Yet in a startling twist that brought the internet rumor mill into the U.S. court system, prosecutors recently subpoenaed Courtney Burgess, the man who said he had the explosive videos, to testify in front of a grand jury considering additional charges against Mr. Combs.
The surfacing of Mr. Burgess, a one-time music industry bit player, has only amped up the circuslike frenzy surrounding the case. With much of the investigation shrouded in secrecy, it is unclear whether the prosecutors view Mr. Burgess as a possible new witness — the keeper of a smoking gun — or simply wanted to test the online bluster of someone seeking to be part of the action.
Lawyers for Mr. Combs, who has vehemently denied the charges, have dismissed Mr. Burgess’s claims about the existence of the videos as “false and outrageous,” arguing that making him a grand jury witness has lent an air of legitimacy he does not deserve.
In addition to his testimony, the government’s Oct. 24 subpoena ordered Mr. Burgess to produce any electronic devices or files “relating to, created by, recorded by and/or depicting” Mr. Combs, who is also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy.
A representative for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York declined to comment.
The deluge of innuendo on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube has only complicated the job of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, who are also contending with at least 30 civil lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct and the wide-scale re-examination of Mr. Combs’s personal history, including his assault arrests and a security video that showed him abusing his girlfriend in a hotel hallway.
Calling Mr. Burgess’s claims “ridiculous” and the public discussion of such tapes “profoundly prejudicial,” Mr. Combs’s lawyers wrote in court filings that “the government is fueling the fire of online conspiracy theories and making it impossible for Mr. Combs to have a fair trial.”
They sought a gag order on all potential witnesses and their lawyers, but a judge declined to grant it.
It is true that, given the vacuum of new information about the prosecution’s intentions, Mr. Burgess’s role has been magnified by his willingness to speak publicly — and in recent weeks, he has, at much length.
It was in an interview with reporters outside a federal courthouse in Manhattan last month that Mr. Burgess took the unusual step of making his role in the investigation public. Suddenly, a fringe character who acknowledges that he has never met Mr. Combs had become an unlikely new focal point in the prosecution of the storied hip-hop icon.
“I ain’t never nervous,” Mr. Burgess, 54, said outside the courthouse. “The only thing that puts fear in me is God.”
His account of his involvement in the case can be as roundabout as his life story, which according to Mr. Burgess has included dabbling as an entrepreneur in farming, solar energy, transportation, real estate and publishing. As is the case with his account of videos, which has evolved in Mr. Burgess’s telling over time, many of his claims — a foiled youthful stint as a major-league baseball prospect, near-miss hit records and personal tragedies attributed to shadowy forces — prove difficult to verify.
“He’s a mover — he’s always working on something low-key, always in the background,” said Dawn Monique Edmond, a former high school classmate of Mr. Burgess who worked with him on a short-lived magazine, Hip Hop Herald.
“He’s a storyteller,” she added. “He embellishes, but I don’t think he’s a liar.”
Mr. Burgess, who described himself in interviews as both an “outlaw” and a practicing Mormon, was born and raised in Newark, N.J., where he was charged in 1989 in a drug-related drive-by shooting that killed one young man and injured two others. After being acquitted, Mr. Burgess said he began working in the music business; for a time, he managed the Newark hip-hop group the Artifacts, which signed to a subsidiary of Atlantic Records.
Mr. Burgess said he soon found himself in the extended orbit of Tupac Shakur — and therefore Mr. Combs, a onetime antagonist of the star gangster rapper.
“I was like his shadow, always in the background watching his back,” Mr. Burgess said of Shakur, who was shot to death in 1996. Although he admits that he did not know Mr. Combs personally, he said, “We was always bumping heads from a distance.”
Mr. Burgess said he also never had more than passing interactions with Kim Porter, the woman Mr. Combs was in a serious relationship with for many years and with whom the mogul had three children. But he named Ms. Porter, who died in 2018, as the source of the video footage he received as well as a manuscript of what he described as a rough draft of her memoir.
According to Mr. Burgess’s account, he received the first of those materials in 2008, after a session at an Atlanta recording studio with a music executive, Shakir Stewart. Mr. Burgess said Mr. Stewart delivered him a yellow envelope containing a couple of USB thumb drives, allegedly from Ms. Porter, a friend of the executive.
Mr. Burgess’s account of when and how he received the materials — told in bits and pieces across niche podcasts and expanded upon in interviews with The Times — is difficult to corroborate because Mr. Stewart and Ms. Porter are dead. Relatives and friends of Ms. Porter have already dismissed it as a fabrication and Mr. Burgess’s retelling is at times vague and inconsistent.
“I’ve never heard of this man in my life,” said Lawanda Lane, a close friend of Ms. Porter who lived with her for more than 20 years and has spoken out against Mr. Burgess’s role in the case.
Mr. Burgess said that he did not initially realize the significance of what had been turned over to him in 2008 because he did not review the material on the drives for nearly 10 years. “I thought it was a demo tape, an artist she wanted me to check out,” Mr. Burgess said.
But he said that around the time of Ms. Porter’s death he received additional files related to Mr. Combs from another mutual friend, who he declined to identify. Still, for years, he said, he kept what he described as the salacious videos and the draft memoir private.
Mr. Burgess can turn ambiguous when asked what is on the tapes, saying he never viewed them in their entirety. He has cited numerous celebrity names as being shown in sexual scenarios, but when pressed for specifics, he described non-pornographic social media and paparazzi footage featuring celebrities that was widely distributed online.
This summer, as Mr. Combs’s troubles significantly escalated as raids on his homes fueled speculation about impending criminal charges, a would-be economy began to grow from the crevices of the tabloid internet.
In July, through a connection in the true crime podcasting world, Mr. Burgess was introduced to Chris Todd, who describes himself as an independent author and investigator of sensational cases.
The manuscript Mr. Burgess said he had been given, with editing and promotion from Mr. Todd, was put up for sale as a 59-page book, “Kim’s Last Words,” on Amazon in September, published under the pseudonym Jamal T. Millwood. It rose at one point to the top of the site’s best-seller list. But after it was denounced as fraudulent by Ms. Porter’s children and one of her close friends, Amazon pulled it from its website.
Even as the book grabbed headlines, Mr. Burgess remained a background figure in the controversy.
After Mr. Combs was indicted in September, a lawyer, Ariel Mitchell-Kidd, began publicly discussing the supposed videos. She was already a frequent media commentator on the Combs cases and at the time represented a woman who had filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit against the mogul. (She later dropped that client.)
In a television interview, Ms. Mitchell-Kidd said she had been shown still images — “pornographic in nature” — of an A-list celebrity with Mr. Combs by a person she did not name who wanted her help in arranging a so-called “catch and kill.” Under the proposal she outlined, the video would be offered to the celebrity for purchase in order to prevent it from becoming public. Ms. Mitchell-Kidd said she declined to get involved in such an arrangement.
The next month, in a YouTube interview titled “I HAVE THE DIDDY TAPES!” with a true crime podcaster, Mr. Burgess, who denies being involved in efforts to sell the videos, stepped forward to claim credit for the much-discussed materials.
Pressed by the host, Matthew Cox, on why he hadn’t voluntarily approached the government with his alleged evidence, Mr. Burgess replied, “Where I’m from, that’s snitching.”
Mr. Burgess said he was then visited in late October by federal agents at his home in South Carolina, who delivered the subpoena ordering his appearance in court. He quickly hired Ms. Mitchell-Kidd as his lawyer.
Mr. Burgess and Ms. Mitchell-Kidd flew to New York for his testimony on Oct. 31. He said he testified that he had disposed of the original flash drives containing the videos, but that his phone and email may have also contained copies.
In an interview, Ms. Mitchell-Kidd said that immediately following Mr. Burgess’s grand jury testimony, which she was not allowed to observe, they attended a hearing with prosecutors about a dispute over the breadth of the subpoena, which ended with the government modifying the subpoena to just recover Mr. Burgess’s phone. Ms. Mitchell-Kidd said she could not confirm the contents of the device.
“Right now, as it pertains to the grand jury, I think his role is over,” she said. If Mr. Combs faces additional charges based on information from Mr. Burgess’s phone, Ms. Mitchell-Kidd added, “that’s another story.”
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