For more than 13 hours over three days, jurors in the federal trial of Sean Combs have heard gripping testimony from one of his former girlfriends, a witness for the prosecution called Jane. On Tuesday morning she took the stand to be cross-examined by the mogul’s lawyers.
Mr. Combs, the producer and impresario also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, is charged with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. The government has accused him of running a “criminal enterprise” whose objectives included coercing women into sex and covering it up; after Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, who testified over four days last month, Jane is the second woman put forward by prosecutors as a victim of sex trafficking.
Mr. Combs, who faces life in prison if he is convicted, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and has strongly denied that any of his sexual relations were not consensual.
Appearing under a pseudonym to protect her privacy, Jane first took the stand on Thursday afternoon. She has recounted vivid details of a troubled relationship with Mr. Combs, which began in 2021 and continued until shortly before Mr. Combs’s arrest in September 2024.
Jane said she was pressured to have sex with a succession of male escorts without condoms, and developed painful infections as a result. She once threw up in the bathroom of a luxury hotel after having sex with two men, she testified; after Mr. Combs told her “let’s go” because a third man was waiting to have sex with her, she complied.
Jane was also part of Mr. Combs’s life during the critical period after Ms. Ventura filed her bombshell lawsuit in November 2023, in which she described being coerced into drug-fueled sex marathons she called “freak-offs.” Recognizing a similar pattern to what she called “hotel nights” or “debauchery,” Jane texted Mr. Combs three days after that suit was filed: “I feel like I’m reading my own sexual trauma. It makes me sick how three solid pages, word for word, is exactly my experiences and my anguish.”
She was also staying at Mr. Combs’s Miami-area mansion in May 2024 when CNN broadcast a leaked hotel security video showing Mr. Combs assaulting Ms. Ventura, and witnessed the mogul and his team preparing an apologetic response. Even when testifying against him, Jane retains strong ties to Mr. Combs. He is paying her legal expenses as well as the $10,000-a-month rent on her home in Los Angeles.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Combs’s lawyers got their opportunity to question Jane. Like Ms. Ventura, she had a yearslong relationship with Mr. Combs that she said could be loving and tender at times — in addition to being filled with violence, drug use and jealous anger. As it did with Ms. Ventura, the defense has already signaled that it intends to argue that however fraught her relationship was with Mr. Combs, Jane was a willing participant in the “hotel nights” she shared with him.
“The evidence is going to show you a toxic and dysfunctional relationship between these two individuals,” Teny Geragos, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said in her opening statement last month. “And you may think to yourself, ‘Wow, he is a really bad boyfriend.’ But the evidence is going to show you that she is a capable, strong woman who willingly engaged in their sex life so they could spend time together.”
“That,” Ms. Geragos added, “is simply not sex trafficking.”
Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.
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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