How Cassie Calmly Revealed Years of Diddy’s Four-Day Freak-Offs

A new box of tissues was placed on the witness stand in preparation for what was sure to be wrenching testimony by the main witness in the Sean Combs sex trafficking and racketeering trial on Tuesday morning.

“The court calls Casandra Ventura,” a clerk called out

Ventrua, known as Cassie, entered Courtroom 26A in Manhattan federal court to recount what she says was more than a decade of physical and sexual abuse by Combs. He turned in the defendant’s seat to see Ventura for the first time since 2018. She had gone on to marry and have two children and she was now eight months pregnant with a third. A brown turtleneck dress conformed to the considerable contours of the impending arrival. Her stride was nonetheless even on the blue and gold carpet. She had to turn sideways to enter the witness stand and take a seat.

“Good morning,” she said.

She is a singer as well as a model, and as she uttered these first three syllables, her physical beauty was accompanied by a voice that was mellifluous despite an undertone of tension. She gave her name and age: 38.

The prosecutor, Asst. U.S,. Attorney Emily Johnson, asked the clerk to display government exhibit 2A-103. Ventura was asked to identify the face that appeared on the monitors.

“Sean Combs,” she replied.

She was asked how she knew him.

“We were in a relationship for 10, 11 years,” she replied.

She reported that they had gotten along well sometimes, but there were other times when he would turn violent, kicking her and dragging her around by her hair. “Things of that nature,” she said. “Mashing my head… kicking me in the head if I was down.”

“How frequent was that?” the prosecutor asked.

“Too frequent,” Ventura said. “Busted lips, swollen black eyes. The white of my eye would get red. Bruises on my body.”

Her voice caught for just a moment. She took a tissue from the box set before her. She dabbed her eyes and nose. But she maintained her composure.

The prosecutor asked the clerk to display another exibit on the screen, this a still from a 2016 surveillance video inside the International Hotel in Century City, Ca.

“That’s me and Sean,” she said.

On Monday, the prosecution had shown the full video in which Combs can be seen kicking Ventura and dragging her down the hallway. The prosecutor now asked what they had been doing at the hotel that day.

“We were having an encounter we called a freak-off,” she replied.

”Who introduced you to the term ‘freak-off?’” the prosecutor inquired.

“Sean,” Ventura said.

“How did the term ‘freak-off’ come about?” the prosecutor asked.

“I’m not sure,” Ventura said.

Ventura testified that during the first year she and Combs were together, he had told her he wanted to watch her have sex with a “a third party.”

“Specifically, another man,” she said. “So I could perform for Sean.”

She was asked how she felt when Combs first suggested it.

“I just remember my stomach falling down into my butt,” she said. “I had just turned 22 at that time. I was confused, but I loved him very much and I wanted to make him happy.”

She said that at first Combs would make the arrangements for the freak-offs, but then it fell to her to retain the male escorts.

“Eventually, it became a job for me,” she said.

She reported that the drug fueled freak-offs often went around the clock.

“I think the longest was four days,” she recalled. “Recovering from freak-offs, that was a big part of my life… There was no room for anything else.”

The prosecutor asked if she had considered refusing to go along with it.

“I didn’t know what ‘no’ could turn into,” she said.

She testified that along with violence, there was the possibility that Combs might blackmail her with videos he had taken of the freak-offs.

The prosecutor guided her testimony back in time to her 21st birthday, when Combs took her to the MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas as a singer who had just signed a 10-album deal with his label, Bad Boy records. She could have been somebody testifying against Harvey Weinstein in state court just across the street from Manhattan federal court as she recounted Combs suddenly kissing her in the bathroom of his hotel suite.

“I was pretty confused,” she remembered from the stand. “I was pretty naive. I just remember running out, back to my hotel.”

But Ventura testified that over time she and Combs had developed a friendship and she fell in love with him. She then began to experience “another side” of the charismatic music mogul.

“Which was the abusive side, the side that wanted control over my life,” she explained.

And, she reported, he was liable to turn violent at any time.

“Make the wrong face and the next thing he would mash my face in,” she said.

And then there was the psychological abuse.

“Psychological is an everyday thing,” she said. “Somebody telling you what to do.”

She added, “I was just a little shadow for a while.”

During her testimony, Ventura periodically placed her open hands over her belly, perhaps comforting both herself and the child within. Her voice remained steady as she continued on to the afternoon break. She had not reached for another tissue when the clerk called out for everybody to rise for the jurors as they filed out for lunch.

Nobody would have said anything if such a manifestly pregnant woman had simply remained seated. But Ventura rose for the jury, resplendently aglow with the new life to come.

She returned in the afternoon to testify about Combs sometimes handing her a gun to carry and once pressing her to climb, fully clothed, into a plastic wading pool full of baby oil in a hotel room and on other days allowing herself to be slathered with heated baby oil during freak-offs. She said she had at times been left feeling dirty and humiliated.

But had proven herself unsullied on Tuesday as she stood resplendent in Courtroom 26A next to a box of tissues she had barely touched.

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