The term first came to public awareness in November 2023, when the singer Cassie filed a lawsuit accusing Sean Combs, her onetime boyfriend and record label boss, of years of sexual and physical abuse: “freak-off.”
According to the suit by Cassie, who was born Casandra Ventura, this was what Mr. Combs called the highly choreographed sexual encounters that he directed “to engage in a fantasy of his called ‘voyeurism.’” They involved costumes, like masks and lingerie. “Copious amounts of drugs,” including Ecstasy and ketamine. The hiring of male prostitutes. Mr. Combs watching and recording the events on a phone while he masturbated.
Freak-offs have become a central part of the government’s case, which charges Mr. Combs with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual encounters with women were not consensual.
In much-anticipated court testimony this week, Ms. Ventura — who is visibly pregnant with her third child — described the freak-offs in sometimes excruciating terms. During hours of testimony on Tuesday, she cried and occasionally dabbed her eyes with tissue.
The first freak-off happened when she was 22, when Mr. Combs hired a male stripper from Las Vegas to come to a home that Mr. Combs was renting in Los Angeles, she testified. Ms. Ventura said she wore a masquerade-style mask and provocative clothing from a “sex store,” and that she and the man took Ecstasy and drank alcohol before they had sex and Mr. Combs watched.
The freak-offs “made me feel worthless,” Ms. Ventura testified, “like I didn’t have anything else to offer” Mr. Combs.
Freak-offs soon became nearly weekly occurrences, Ms. Ventura testified. They took places in homes and hotels across the United States and in international locales like Ibiza, a Spanish island; Mr. Combs had his employees make travel arrangements for the men to come to him and Ms. Ventura — a key point in the government’s case for sex trafficking. They also became more elaborately staged, with candles and studio-style lighting, and Ms. Ventura said she would sometimes take an entire day to prepare herself for them — Mr. Combs controlled that too, she said, down to the color of her nails.
She testified that she took part in the events partly because she wanted to make Mr. Combs happy. “When you’re in love with someone you don’t want to disappoint them.”
But she also said she feared his violence if she refused, and recounted episodes of him beating her. When Mr. Combs became angry, she said, “His eyes go black. The version of him that I was in love with was no longer there.”
The events drained her, she said, and it sometimes took days to recover.: “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.”
The videos Mr. Combs made, she said, became “blackmail materials” that pressured her to agree to participate, for fear videos could be released on the internet, she testified.
Fueled by drugs, the freak-offs could last from 36 hours to four days, Ms. Ventura testified. They also became more “humiliating,” she said: Mr. Combs would direct her and the men on sexual positions, and he would order them to continually apply baby oil to keep themselves “glistening.” Blood was left on bedding because Ms. Ventura had to perform while menstruating, she said. There was also urine, as Mr. Combs sometimes told the men to urinate into her mouth while she lay on the floor — she could end it only by holding her hands in the air and hoping Mr. Combs would tell the man to stop.
In her testimony, Ms. Ventura said that a freak-off was underway in March 2016 at the InterContinental Century City hotel in Los Angeles, where a hallway security camera captured her trying to take the elevator before Mr. Combs assaulted her and dragged her away.
The freak-offs, she said, continued until she finally left Mr. Combs in 2018. But the government contends that another victim, who will be testifying under the pseudonym Jane, had freak-offs with Mr. Combs from 2021 until his arrest last year.
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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