Casandra Ventura, the star witness of the federal sex-trafficking and racketeering trial of the music mogul Sean Combs, cried during her first day on the stand on Tuesday as she testified about drug-fueled sex sessions with male prostitutes that could last several days and made her feel “disgusting” and “humiliated.” He has pleaded not guilty.
Ms. Ventura, who is known as Cassie, had accused Mr. Combs of rape and years of physical abuse in a 2023 lawsuit that was quickly settled. Her testimony is vital to the prosecution’s case, and she will return to the stand on Wednesday.
Here are four takeaways from her initial testimony:
The drug-fueled freak-offs could last for days.
The sex sessions known as freak-offs ranged from roughly 36 hours to as long as four days, Ms. Ventura testified, sometimes without any sleep. She recalled drinking, taking drugs and having sex with strangers while staying up for “days on end.”
Drugs helped keep them awake, she said. But then she would need to recover from the drugs, dehydration and sleep deprivation.
“The freak-offs became a job where there was no space to do anything else but to recover and just try to feel normal again,” Ms. Ventura testified.
The freak-offs orchestrated by Mr. Combs “took a big chunk of my life,” she testified, saying that they continued for years — sometimes on a nearly weekly basis. At the end of the sessions, she said, the hotel room linens were often soiled baby oil residue as well as bodily fluids including blood and urine.
Choking back tears, she testified that the freak-offs made her feel “disgusting” and “humiliated.”
Mr. Combs dictated Ms. Ventura’s sex acts and appearance down to her nail color.
Lawyers for Mr. Combs have argued that the sex acts were consensual, but Ms. Ventura repeatedly contended otherwise.
She detailed Mr. Combs’s alleged orchestration of the freak-offs down to dictating the color of her nails (white or white french tips) and which sex acts she performed, demanding she reapply baby oil every five minutes until she was “glistening,” and paying male escorts less if they failed to perform to his standards.
Ms. Ventura testified that over time the sex sessions grew more elaborately staged, with Mr. Combs specifying that they be lit by candles or colored lights similar to what was used on music videos.
Her testimony at times contained graphic descriptions of sex acts she said she did not consent to. Lying on the floor, “in a position I could not easily get out of,” she said an escort urinated on her at Mr. Combs’s direction, until, choking, she put up her hands. “Eventually Sean saw me, and told him to stop,” she said.
She said she stayed to keep Mr. Combs happy.
Ms. Ventura, whose relationship with Mr. Combs’s was intermittent over a period of more than a decade, described falling in love with Mr. Combs and participating in the freak-offs because she wanted to make him happy.
“When you’re in love with someone you don’t want to disappoint them,” she testified.
But as the years passed, she said that, even as he she still sought to please him, she recognized that he had become increasingly abusive, beating her and orchestrating ever more degrading sessions that made her feel like her career was no longer music but performing for Mr. Combs’s sexual satisfaction.
Mr. Combs’s lawyers have depicted the sexual encounters as consensual and denied there was anything coercive about them. But Ms. Ventura, seeking to explain why she did not end the relationship, described being fearful, not just of Mr. Combs’s anger, but of his power over her career and the fact that he possessed videos of the freak-offs that could be used to blackmail her.
The judge denied a request to downplay Ms. Ventura’s visible pregnancy.
Ms. Ventura was always expected to be the prosecution’s star witness. Her November 2023 lawsuit accusing Mr. Combs of rape and repeated abuse over their decade-long relationship helped begin the federal investigation that led to his indictment. Questions about her career — why she released only one album on Mr. Combs’s Bad Boy label, and then largely vanished from the music industry — and Mr. Combs’s influence on it have long followed her.
But Ms. Ventura was an even more dramatic figure on the stand than anticipated, testifying while in the third trimester of her latest pregnancy — so far along that the defense asked the judge to consider having her seated in the witness box before the jury entered so the visibility of her pregnancy would not prejudice the jury against Mr. Combs.
The judge did not grant that request, and Ms. Ventura arrived in the courtroom in a brown turtleneck dress that accentuated her pregnant belly. Mr. Combs turned in his chair to watch her enter; Ms. Ventura stared straight ahead.
Ms. Ventura’s husband, Alex Fine, was permitted to stay in the courtroom under the condition that he leave when she is questioned about an allegation that Mr. Combs raped her in 2018; that line of questioning did not begin on Tuesday.
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.
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