At the start of her second day of testimony at the Sean Combs trial, Combs’ ex-girlfriend Casandra Ventura was asked by a prosecutor to identify two thumb drives.
Ventura, eight months pregnant and wearing a gray turtleneck dress, said she had viewed what was in the drive and confirmed they contained sex videos extracted from broken laptops and cell phones she had given to the government to assist its investigation.
In her first day’s testimony, Ventura had told the court that Combs had made the videos of what he called ”freak-offs,” drug-fueled sessions lasting as long as four days in which she had sex with another man while Combs watched and masturbated.
She said Combs had continually threatened to make the videos public as he subjected her to a decade of physical and sexual abuse. She feared that the images would subject her to unbearable shame and destroy her singing and modeling career. She was particularly fearful of having to then face her mother.
She said Combs had terrified her by showing some of the sex videos on his laptop while they were flying commercial back from the Cannes Film Festival. She had been already shaken by going from the red carpet to sitting in the dark of a screening while he inflicted serious pain by forcefully squeezing her thigh so hard that the beads of her gown pressed into a bruise from an earlier battering. She said they had no sooner landed back in New York and gone to dinner than he pressured her into yet another freak-off.
She testified that after she had finally managed to break off her relationship with him in 2018, he had burst into her Los Angeles apartment and raped her on the living-room floor. He had subsequently texted yet another threat to make the videos public. She had replied that she might tell the whole truth, noting, “It’s way deeper than iPads.”
Her truth had first taken the form of a lawsuit seeking $30 million for what she alleged was more than a decade of sexual and physical abuse. He had settled the suit the very next day for $20 million.
That meant nobody could say she was doing it for the money when she assisted federal prosecutors in using her civil suit as a blueprint for criminal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. She became the government’s prime witness, and the videos that Combs had threatened to use against her were now key evidence in the case against him.
In an effort to shield her from the very sort of public embarrassment that Combs had threatened her with, the prosecution extracted video stills and placed them in black binders to be seen only by the jury, judge and lawyers on both sides. Ventura had a binder before her on the witness stand on Wednesday afternoon when the prosecutor asked her to examine a video still marked “Government Exhibit B-X-220-B.”
“That’s Jules,” Ventura said.
“What type of event is this image taken from?” Asst. U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson asked.
“This is a freak-off,’ Ventura replied.
Jules is one of a dozen male escorts whose photos she had identified earlier. The prosecutor asked Ventura to look at the next still.
“That’s me and Jules,” she said. “Also a freak show.”
A weariness crept into her replies as she was directed to look at the next still, and the next, and the next.
“That’s me and Dave. We are at a freak-off… That’s me and Greg…That’s me.”
“What’s on your skin?” the prosecutor asked.
“Oil,” Ventura replied.
Combs had a thing for baby oil and kept gallons of it on hand.
“What are you doing?” the prosecutor asked.
“Just standing there,” Ventura replied.
As this manifestly pregnant woman identified image after image from freak-offs, one of the four female jurors swallowed hard. One of the eight men raised his eyebrows, while another began to take notes.
Over at the defense table, Sean Combs was a watcher in a very different venue. He leaned over to look at one of his lawyers’ binder and one of the images that he allegedly used to blackmail Ventura.
The court is presently working on a suitable way to show the actual videos as evidence without members of the public overhearing the audio.
“That would require earphones,” U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian said.
Just before Ventura took the stand for the first time on Tuesday, a new box of tissues had been placed there, in anticipation of her impending ordeal.
She managed to maintain her composure through all of Tuesday and nearly to the end of Wednesday, when she spoke of a particular night in the new life she had established since marrying Combs’ former trainer, Alex Fine, and having two children.
She testified that she had been shooting a music video in 2023 when she began suffering severe flashbacks and returned home shaken.
“My kids were asleep, my husband was home,” she told the jury. “I just remember saying, ‘You can do this without me. You don’t need me anymore.’”
She walked out the front door and into traffic.
“At that point. I didn’t want to live anymore,” she recalled.
But her husband had saved her. And here, he was keeping a protective eye on her from the spectator seats in the courtroom.
Combs sat impassive in the defendant’s seat as Ventura finally broke into tears on the witness stand. She reached for the tissues.
Ventura is is due back in court Thursday morning to undergo cross-examination. The trial is expected to still be continuing when her new life is blessed with a third child.
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