It’s week five of the Sean “Diddy” Combs sex-trafficking and racketeering trial.
A federal jury in Manhattan has heard R&B singer Cassie Ventura — Combs’ ex-girlfriend and the catalyst for his public downfall — tearfully testify about the humiliating “freak offs” she says she endured throughout their 11-year relationship.
A second sex-assault accuser, who testified as “Mia,” described four times she says Combs attacked her, and a third accuser. A third accuser, “Jane,” is testifying about the alleged violence underlying what prosecutors say were her three years as Combs’ sex-trafficking victim.
Along the way, there have been numerous celebrity mentions, including pop icon Britney Spears, actor Michael B. Jordan, rapper Kid Cudi, and late music legend Prince.
Combs was arrested in September on charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution — the culmination of months of lawsuits and public accusations of sexual assault and other misconduct.
The music tycoon is arguing through his defense team that all sexual encounters were consensual, including the alleged drug-fueled freak offs at the trial’s center — and that any violence fell short of sex trafficking.
Here are some of the most striking moments from the trial so far.
In May 2024, shortly after CNN aired hotel surveillance video showing Combs dragging Ventura down a hallway and beating her, the rapper posted an apology on Instagram.
On video, Combs told his followers that his behavior that day was “inexcusable” — and that he began therapy soon after the 2016 hotel incident.
“I take full responsibility for my actions in that video. I’m disgusted. I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now,” he said in his Instagram video.
On June 9, however, Combs’ ex testified that exactly one month after he posted that apology, he abused her, leaving her face covered in bruises.
After the abuse, she said, Combs leaned close to her and asked her: “Is this coercion?”
The woman, testifying under the pseudonym “Jane,” said he then demanded she put on makeup, pop an ecstasy pill, and have sex with a male escort.
“Take this fucking pill. You’re not going to ruin my fucking night,” Jane said Combs demanded as she screamed, “I don’t want to! I don’t want to!”
Prosecutors say Combs sex trafficked Ventura and Jane by means of false promises, violence, and coercion.
Jane’s and other trial witnesses’ testimony contradicts the story she says Combs told people close to him after the CNN video was released.
Jane testified that when the news broke, Combs “huddled” with his team and his family.
“He said that that was the only time that they had physical violence like that,” Jane said of the abuse between Combs and Ventura. “He said that she was a hitter and she would hit.
At trial, the jury has heard testimony from multiple witnesses describing more than a dozen times they said Combs physically abused Ventura between 2008 and 2018.
A former security guard described Combs personally pulling $100,000 out of a paper bag and counting it, painting an image that’s both surprising and legally significant.
The guard said Combs hoped the cash — prosecutors call it a bribe — would bury forever a 15-minute video showing him beating Ventura in the hallway of the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in March, 2016.
Combs fed “stacks of $10,000 at a time” into a money-counting machine, then stuffed it back in the paper bag, according to the ex-guard, Eddy Garcia.
The ex-guard said Combs then handed him the bag as payment for a USB thumb drive containing what both men believed was the only copy of the incriminating footage.
“Eddy, my angel,” the guard said Combs called him after the transaction.
“Something like this would ruin him,” he said Combs told him.
Eight years later, a surviving copy of the video was first made public by CNN. Now, it’s the single most important piece of evidence in the trial, both sides say.
Prosecutors say the video shows Combs in the very act of sex-trafficking Ventura, meaning coercing her through physical force into engaging in sex at the hotel with a male sex worker known only as “Jewels.”
The first charge in Combs’ indictment accused him of racketeering, a charge that requires proof of at least two underlying crimes. Prosecutors may argue that the video alone is proof of three underlying crimes: sex trafficking, bribery, and obstruction of justice.
Prosecutors hope the video will also clinch the second charge in Combs’ indictment, which accuses him of sex trafficking Ventura. Both racketeering and sex trafficking carry maximum sentences of life in prison.
One of Combs’ former personal assistants testified under the pseudonym “Mia,” telling jurors he sexually attacked her four times between 2009 and 2017, when she was in her mid-20s and early 30s.

She said that two of the attacks were at the sprawling glass and concrete mansion he rented in Beverly Hills, including a rape in the staff bedroom. She described waking to feeling Combs on top of her. “Be quiet,” she said he told her.
“I knew his power and I knew his control over me,” she told the jury, her voice hushed and halting.
“And I didn’t want to lose everything that I worked so hard for — or this, like, this world that was the only thing I had anymore.”
Combs once attacked Ventura during a party thrown by music icon Prince, the former personal assistant also testified.
The ex-PA, who used the pseudonym “Mia,” told the jury she and Ventura had snuck out to Prince’s Los Angeles home after learning he would be performing for a small gathering — a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience, as Ventura described it on the stand.
Prince did not disappoint. Mia said that as he played music, they danced atop his backyard pool, which was backlit and covered in purple plexiglas.
Then Combs showed up, she said.
“I saw his bucket hat come through the entrance and then made eye contact with him,” Mia said of Combs. “Me and Cass just booked it.”
They ran through Prince’s house and into the woods out front, where “Puff caught Cass,” and started beating her, Mia said, until Prince’s security intervened.
Later that night, Ventura testified that Combs continued to beat her back at her hotel, leaving her with “bruising on my face, knots on my head.”
Capricorn Clark, another former personal assistant and one who became one of his top marketing executives, kicked off week three of the trial by telling jurors that he once kidnapped her at gunpoint.
It was December 2011, after Combs learned of rapper Kid Cudi’s brief relationship with Ventura, Clark testified on May 27.
Combs was “furious” with Clark for keeping him in the dark about Ventura’s romance with the “Pursuit of Happiness” rapper, she said.
Clark told the jury that Combs, armed with a gun, went to her house in a rage and banged on the door.
“He just said, ‘Get dressed, we’re going to go kill'” him, Clark testified that Combs told her, using the N-word to refer to Kid Cudi.
Combs then took Clark to Kid Cudi’s Los Angeles home, she told the jury, describing it as being “kidnapped.”
“The way he was acting, I just felt like anything could happen,” a tearful Clark testified.
In the first week of trial testimony, Ventura told jurors that starting in late 2008, she was coerced by Combs into a decade’s worth of near-weekly “freak offs” — dayslong sex performances, usually at luxury hotels, involving male escorts, Glade candles, and numerous bottles of baby oil.
Clark told jurors that in the years she was Combs personal assistant, from 2004 until 2006, she would set up and clean up the hotel rooms where Combs took another longterm girlfriend, model Kim Porter, the mother of four of Combs’ children.
During those years, Combs and Porter would stay for days at luxury hotels in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York. Clark said, as a personal assistant, she made sure Combs’ suite was stocked with ecstasy, baby oil, and pricey Diptyque candles.
Cleanup was tricky, Clark told jurors, who mentioned “handprints left in oil on the, like, ultra-suede wall” as a particular problem. “It was just a lot of baby oil. It was just everywhere.”
These were not “freak offs,” Porter’s former family attorney, Suzanne Kimberly Bracker, told Business Insider.
“He was madly in love with Kim,” said Bracker, who helped negotiate Combs’ child support settlement and who said that Porter had two children with Combs at the time.
“There is absolutely no way that he would share her with another man,” she said. “He would tell her ‘I’m not gonna pay for an apartment with my kids in one room while you’re with another guy in the other bedroom.'”
Kid Cudi took the witness stand in Combs’ trial on May 22, telling jurors that in December 2011, the music tycoon broke into his Hollywood Hills home, enraged after finding out about the rival rapper’s short-lived romance with Ventura.
Kid Cudi, given name Scott Mescudi, told the jury that he returned home after the break-in to find the Christmas gifts he’d planned to give his family unwrapped and opened. His dog, he said, had been shut in the bathroom.
“Motherfucker, you in my house?” Mescudi recalled telling Combs over the phone as he raced home to confront him.
Combs was gone by the time he arrived, Mescudi said.
Mescudi also told the jury that some two weeks later, his Porsche was firebombed while in his driveway.
The Porsche “arson” is a specific element in the racketeering charges against Combs. Prosecutors alleged in court papers that Combs ordered his underlings to torch a vehicle “by slicing open the car’s convertible top and dropping a Molotov cocktail inside the interior.”
Regina Ventura corroborated her daughter’s testimony, telling jurors she witnessed the aftermath of two of Combs’ violent, jealous rages over romantic rivals.
The first was in 2011. The mom said Cassie Ventura came home to Connecticut for the Christmas holidays with a large bruise on her back.
Cassie Ventura had told jurors the week before that the bruise was from being kicked to the ground by Combs during a fight over Mescudi.
Regina Ventura also confirmed a 2016 incident from shortly before the younger Ventura’s 30th birthday. Combs had swiped her cellphone, Cassie Ventura testified, after learning about her affair with an unnamed professional NFL player.
When she returned to her Los Angeles apartment without her phone, her mother, who was visiting, called the police and confronted Combs outside the building as her daughter remained upstairs, the elder Ventura testified.
“I was yelling and screaming and trying to hit him,” the mom told jurors. “He did give it back,” she told jurors of the missing phone.
A former Combs personal assistant described watching — and doing nothing — as his boss brutally attacked a cowering Ventura in the bedroom of the rapper’s private jet.
George Kaplan, 34, said the attack happened on a crowded flight to Las Vegas in the latter half of 2015. Kaplan said he heard the sound of screams and shattering glass coming from the jet’s bedroom.
He said he turned to see Combs standing over Ventura with a “whiskey rock glass” in his hand, as she cowered on the bed.
“After the glass crashed, Ventura screamed, ‘Isn’t anybody seeing this?'” Kaplan told the jury.
“Did you look away?” asked a federal prosecutor, Assistant US Attorney Maurene Comey. Kaplan said he did.
“And after you looked away, what did you hear?” the prosecutor asked.
“Further glass crashing and chaos.”
When the prosecutor asked what, if anything, the Combs security staff did in response, Kaplan answered, “Nothing.”
No one, he said, went back to check on Ventura after Combs left the bedroom to rejoin his employees.
“I was 23 years old,” Kaplan said in explanation of his own inaction. “All I wanted to do was have a great job in the entertainment industry.”
Ultimately, he told the jury, this and similar domestic violence incidents drove him to quit.
Combs’ former personal assistant spent two days on the witness stand, and in his most dramatic testimony, described how a 2008 run for cheeseburgers at an all-night diner nearly escalated the East Coast-West Coast rap wars.
It started at 4 a.m. in the parking lot at Mel’s Drive-In in Los Angeles, the ex-assistant, David James, testified.
Combs’ trusted security guard, Damian “D-Roc” Butler, noticed that Suge Knight, cofounder of rival recording studio Death Row Records, was sitting in an Escalade just a few parking spots away.
James, Combs’ personal assistant from 2007 to 2009, testified that he was at the wheel of Combs’ silver Lincoln Navigator when Knight and D-Roc faced off.
“What are you doing in my city?” James, according to his testimony, remembered hearing Knight asking Combs’ security guard, who had introduced himself as “D-Roc, Biggie’s boy,” a reference to the rapper Notorious B.I.G.
Within moments, James and the bodyguard saw someone pass a gun to Knight and watched as four SUVs pulled up into different corners of the parking lot, he told jurors.
James testified that he was ordered by D-Roc to speed back to Combs’ Hollywood Hills estate. There was no mention of whether they drove back with or without the cheeseburgers.
Once back home, and as Ventura protested in tears, Combs grabbed three guns for the ten-minute drive with D-Roc back to Mel’s, testified James, who said he was still the driver.
Knight was nowhere to be found upon their return, James said.
“It was the first time I realized my life was in danger,” the former PA testified, telling jurors that he sent in his resignation soon after.
Danity Kane singer Dawn Richard was the fifth prosecution witness, and her testimony on May 16 alleged that in 2009, Combs brutally beat Ventura after she took too long to cook him dinner.
“Where’s my fucking egg?” Richard recounted to the jury Combs shouting in 2009, as he stormed into the kitchen of his rented Los Angeles mansion.
“He took the skillet with the eggs in it and tried to hit her in the head, and she fell to the ground,” Richard testified.
Ventura cowered on the floor “in a fetal position” as Combs punched her and kicked her, she testified. Then he dragged her upstairs by her hair, she said, adding that she then heard the sound of screaming and breaking glass from the third floor.
The next day, Combs called Ventura and Richard into the mansion’s first-floor recording studio, she said.
“He said that what we saw was passion, and it was what lovers in a relationship do,” Richard said.
She said Combs told the two women that “he was trying to take us to the top, and that, where he comes from, people go missing if they say things like that, like, if people talk. And then he gave us flowers.”
While back on the stand on May 19, Richard re-emphasized that she felt this was a threat to her life.
The details in the testimony came as a surprise to Combs’ lead defense attorney Marc Agnifilo, who called it prejudicial and “just a drop dead lie.”
“It didn’t happen,” the lawyer complained to the judge. “And the reason we know it didn’t happen is that Ms. Ventura didn’t talk about it” during her four days on the witness stand.
On cross-examination on May 19, Richard agreed that she only recalled the alleged death threat in speaking with prosecutors earlier this month. It had gone unmentioned, she agreed, during a half-dozen prior interviews with prosecutors.
Ventura was beaten by Combs for the most minor of perceived infractions, including taking too long in the bathroom, prosecutor Emily Johnson said in her opening statement.
“He beat her when she didn’t answer the phone when he called. He beat her when she left a freak off without his permission,” Johnson said.
Ventura’s ex-best friend, Kerry Morgan, was called to the witness stand on May 19 and told jurors about two attacks on Ventura she witnessed, including one while on vacation in Jamaica in 2013.
Morgan said Ventura at one point went to the bathroom at the residence where they were staying, and Combs said, “She’s taking too long.”
“A few minutes later, I heard her screaming — like guttural. Terrifying,” Morgan said. “He was dragging her by her hair on the floor.”
Morgan told jurors that she saw Combs push Ventura to the ground, causing her to hit her head on the paving bricks.
“She didn’t move. She fell on her side,” Morgan said, adding, “I thought she was knocked out.”
Ventura, too, had testified that arguments with Combs would regularly result in physical abuse.
Ventura —who dated Combs on and off from 2007 to 2018 — described six separate times when Combs’ attacks left her with injuries, with the most severe beating occurring in Los Angeles in 2009 following a party Combs had hosted at a club called Ace of Diamonds.
Ventura said she punched Combs in the face after he called her a “slut or a bitch” for talking to a record producer. Combs retaliated in the back seat of a chauffeured luxury vehicle by punching and kicking Ventura throughout a ten-minute ride to the rapper’s rented mansion, she said.
She said she hid under the back seat to escape the attack. Combs demanded she stay hidden in a hotel for a week so her bruises could heal, she said.
The prosecution’s fourth witness took the witness stand briefly on May 16 to detail what she and other Homeland Security investigators say they found inside Combs’ suite at Manhattan’s Park Hyatt New York after his September arrest.
Combs had checked into the luxury Midtown hotel, his lawyers have said, in case federal prosecutors in Manhattan had asked him to surrender voluntarily.
Special Agent Yasin Binda told the Combs jury she photographed what her colleagues found inside the room.
Those items included a clear plastic bag of baby oil bottles found inside a duffle bag. There were three more bottles of baby oil in his bathtub, alongside two bottles of personal lubricant.
Two more bottles of lubricant were recovered from a nightstand drawer, next to a prescription pill bottle she said held two small baggies containing a pink powder.
On the living room floor was a large blue party light of the kind Ventura testified were used to illuminate freak offs.
Similar bags of pink powder have previously been seized from Combs and tested positive for ecstasy and other drugs, a prosecutor had said in court the day after Combs was arrested.
In some of her final moments on the witness stand, Ventura was asked by the defense about a legal settlement that she said she is on the verge of receiving from the InterContinental Hotel in Century City, Los Angeles.
“I think it was $10 million,” Ventura said of the settlement, hesitating when asked for the total amount agreed to.
The InterContinental is where security cameras captured Combs beating Ventura in a hallway in 2016, as she tried to flee what prosecutors say was one of Combs’ freak offs.
The jury was shown the infamous footage at the beginning of the trial.
Johnson, the prosecutor, said in her opening statements that at the time of the attack, Combs paid a security guard at the hotel $100,000 in a brown paper envelope in exchange for the footage.
Combs apologized for his actions in the video after CNN published the footage last year.
It was the second big-money settlement revealed in Ventura’s testimony.
Earlier in her testimony, Ventura told jurors that Combs paid her $20 million to settle her civil suit against him in 2023.
Pop icon Britney Spears and actor Michael B. Jordan were both name-dropped on May 15, on Ventura’s third day of testimony.
During a cross-examination, Ventura was asked to tell the jury about the 21st birthday party Combs threw for her in 2007, at a club in Las Vegas.
The party was a significant moment in the Combs-Ventura story. Ventura testified that Combs, who recently signed her to his record label, gave her an uninvited kiss in a bathroom, sparking their relationship.
“I believe there were other celebrities there in attendance?” defense attorney Anna Estevao asked Ventura, who answered yes, there were.
“Sean was there, and he brought Dallas Austin, he brought Britney Spears,” Ventura said, referring to the “Oops!… I Did It Again” singer and the record producer. “I think those were the two people that stand out to me,” Ventura added.
Asked how a 21-year-old of limited fame was able to attract such big names to her party, Ventura credited Combs, saying, “That was all him.”
Jordan’s name came up as the cross-examination focused on 2015, when Combs became suspicious that she was having an affair with the actor.
“Is Michael B. Jordan a celebrity?” Estevao asked.
“I would say so,” Ventura answered, sounding surprised.
Ventura testified on May 13 that she was initially nervous, but felt a sense of responsibility to participate in Combs’ freak offs.
“I was just in love and wanted to make him happy,” Ventura told the jury.
Ventura testified that in 2007, Combs first proposed “this sexual encounter that he called voyeurism, where he would watch me have a sexual encounter with a third man, specifically another man.”
“I didn’t want to upset him if I said it scared me or if I said anything aside from, ‘OK, let’s try it,'” she said.
Johnson said in her opening statements that Combs eventually made it Ventura’s job to find and book escorts to participate in the sex encounters.
While on the stand, Ventura described in detail what went on during freak offs. Prosecutors say Combs arranged, directed, and often electronically recorded the sex performances.
Ventura testified that Combs would urinate and ask escorts to urinate on her during the freak offs.
“It was disgusting. It was too much. It was overwhelming,” she said. “I choked.”

If you are a survivor of sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673) or visit its website to receive confidential support.
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Attacks in state of Benue latest wave of violence amid conflict between Fulani herders and Indigenous farmers
Forty-two people have been killed in four communities in central Nigeria in attacks blamed on itinerant herders, in the latest wave of violence that continues to upend life in the rural region.
Reuters reports quote a local official, Victor Omnin, the chair of the Gwer West local government area in Benue state, as saying 10 people were killed in a Saturday attack on the villages of Tyolaha and Tse-Ubiam. Thirty-two others were killed the following day in a separate attack in the nearby Ahume and Aondona villages.
“It’s a pathetic situation,” Omnin told the press on Tuesday. “As we speak, we are still recovering corpses.”
According to Reuters, a Catholic priest was also shot in the area by the assailants, and the office of the Benue governor, Hyacinth Iormem Alia, who is also a priest, said he had been wounded and was in a critical but stable condition.
“They killed women and even children as young as two years old,” one resident of the area told the Daily Trust, which focuses on northern Nigeria.
Parts of central and north-western Nigeria have experienced waves of violent attacks as itinerant Fulani herders and Indigenous farmers clash when cows often left to graze openly sometimes stray on to farms.
In some villages, farmers have accused herders of being initial perpetrators and then banded into vigilante groups and militia to embark on reprisal attacks. And while many analysts blame the climate crisis and overpopulation for the conflict as pastoral land diminishes across the country, the villagers allege land-grabbing and ethnic cleansing.
According to Nextier’s Nigeria Violent Conflicts Database, at least 2,347 casualties were recorded in 359 incidents involving farmers and herders across Nigeria between 2020 and 2024. Some experts and locals say the numbers are conservative, as many of the incidents and fatalities are often undocumented.
The situation is especially prevalent in central Nigeria, known as the middle belt, where the conflict has religious undertones as the herders are usually Muslim and the farmers Christian. In April, 56 people were reportedly killed by herders during the Easter period in Benue state.
The conflict has also disrupted farming activities in Benue, an agrarian state known as the “Food Basket of the Nation” for producing significant amounts of Nigeria’s main food crops, such as yams, maize and soybeans.
Last year, the Benue state government announced that it would begin full implementation of a law enacted in 2017 banning open grazing and establishing ranches. That is yet to happen, some residents of the state claim.
“The relentless violence must end,” Asema Achado, a federal lawmaker, said in a statement last October. “Our farmers are the backbone of our economy, yet they live in constant fear.”

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