Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ violent attack on ex-girlfriend Cassie during a freak-off at a Los Angeles hotel was made public early Wednesday after the entire unedited footage was shown to court.
Cassie Ventura, 38, came face-to-face with the hip-hop mogul on the second day of his trial as she revealed intimate details of their sordid relationship.
The singer claimed she took part in his days-long sex parties because she feared he would blackmail her if she refused, jurors heard yesterday.
The unedited surveillance videos have been submitted as evidence at the trial and show various angles of the brutal attack as Diddy drags the R&B singer from an elevator and menacingly paces down the hallway in a towel.
Combs shook his head slowly from side to side and the packed courtroom fell silent as jurors were shown the 2016 hotel security camera video for the first time.
The video did not have sound.
Jurors watched intently on video monitors at their seats in the jury box, but there were no discernible, visible reactions.
First, prosecutors showed it all the way through. Then, they played it as the hotel’s assistant security director at the time, Israel Florez, described how the situation unfolded.
‘I don’t want to lose anything and I can lose it all,’ Florez described Diddy as saying.
The video shows clear footage of Cassie walking down the hall at the InterContinental Hotel in Century City and at one point, Combs clearly drags her across the floor, mid-tantrum.
As she tried to get into an elevator, he grabbed her by the back of the head and slammed her on to the ground.
He then kicked her as she lay on the ground motionless.
Diddy stood over her, kicked her again, and then dragged her back to their room by the hoodie.
Late in the clip, you see what appears to be a security guard walk into the fray.
Florez, the security guard in question, testified in court Tuesday and submitted an email showing his report of the incident that includes stunning photos of the aftermath in the hotel room.
Ventura said she remembered ‘my stomach falling to my butt’ when Combs suggested the idea of ‘Freak Offs’. She told the court: ‘Within the first year of our relationship Sean proposed to me this idea this sexual encounter that he called voyeurism where he’d watch me in sexual activity with a third party, specifically another man.’
She added: ‘Pretty quickly I knew that it wasn’t something I wanted to be doing. Especially as regularly as it became but I was in love and wanted to make him happy. It got to a point I didn’t feel I had much of a choice.’
Ventura said she did not want to make Combs ‘angry’ because he ‘controlled a lot of my life’ and she feared he would put the explicit videos of her online. She told jurors: ‘Over time it turned into the fact there were blackmail materials to make me feel if I didn’t do it, it would be hung over my head or these things would become public.’
Ventura said that before she met Combs, she thought he was a ‘larger-than-life’ figure in the music industry, while she was ‘completely sexually inexperienced’. She repeatedly called herself ‘naive’ and said: ‘I was insanely jealous but also super young, didn’t get it at all, I didn’t get that he was him.
‘As he would say, I’m Puff Daddy and Puff Daddy has many women, he likes the company of women. I had to learn that over time. He made me feel like we were in a monogamous relationship.’
Ventura wept as she spoke about her first ‘Freak Off’ party and how she did not want to engage in any of them. ‘I just felt it was all I was good for,’ she said.
‘I felt pretty horrible about myself. I felt disgusted. I was humiliated, I didn’t have those words to put together at the time, how horrible I felt. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it so.’
Ventura said the only part of the ‘Freak Offs’ she enjoyed was the ‘time’ she spent with Combs during them. She told the court: ‘Plainly the Freak Offs became a job where there was no space to do anything else but to recover and try to feel normal again. Staying up for days on end, taking drugs and other substances, drinking. Having sex with a stranger for days.’
Asked how long the ‘Freak Offs’ lasted, Ventura replied: ‘They ranged anywhere from 36, 48 to 72 hours. The longest one ever was four days. Maybe even more on and off with breaks.’ She said about 10 large bottles of baby oil were used at each party.
Ventura also claimed that Combs would leave guns lying around his homes to scare her.
‘The guns came out here and there – I always felt it was a little bit of a scare tactic,’ she said.
Earlier, Judge Arun Subramanian indicated he could make the ‘Freak Off’ videos and photos public despite pleas from Ventura to keep them sealed.
Combs, who has worked with Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige and Jennifer Lopez, who he also dated for a time, denies racketeering conspiracy, two charges of sex trafficking and two charges of transportation to engage in prostitution. He faces life in jail if convicted.