Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, had been Mr. Combs’s girlfriend for a long time and filed the lawsuit in Federal District Court in Manhattan. She says that soon after she met him, when she was 19, in 2005, he started controlling and abusing her by giving her drugs, beating her, and making her have sex with a series of male prostitutes while he filmed the encounters. The suit claims that Mr. Combs broke into her home and raped her in 2018—not long after they broke up.
Ms. Ventura said in a statement, “”After years of silence and darkness, I am finally ready to tell my story and speak up for myself and for the benefit of other women who” are abused or violently assaulted in their relationships.”
In answer, Mr. Combs’s lawyer, Ben Brafman, said, “”Mr. Combs strongly denies these hurtful and ridiculous accusations.” For the past six months, Ms. Ventura has been threatening to” write a bad book about their relationship if Mr. Combs doesn’t pay her $30 million. This was clearly seen as blackmail and was refused. Even though she took back her first “threat, Ms. Ventura has now filed a lawsuit full of outrageous and” false claims in order to hurt Mr. Combs’s image and get paid.
A lawyer for Ms. Ventura named Douglas Wigdor said that the two people had talked “before the lawsuit was filed. He said, “Mr. Combs offered Ms. Ventura eight figures to shut her up and stop her from filing this lawsuit”.” “She turned down his offers.”
Recently, several civil suits for sexual assault have been made against well-known men in the music business. These include Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, L.A. Reid, and Neil Portnow, who used to run the organisation that puts on the Grammy Awards. (Mr. Portnow has rejected the charge, but Mr. Tyler and Mr. Reid have not said anything.)
In 1993, Mr. Combs, 54, started Bad Boy and worked with “hip-hop stars like the Notorious B.I.G. and Mary J. Blige”, making him one of the most important people in making hip-hop popular. People have said that Mr Combs’s net worth is as high as $1 billion. According to Forbes, he made $90 million a year last year, mostly from his share in the spirits brand Ciroc, which is owned by the huge drinks company Diageo.
Mr. Combs may be the most well-known music executive of his time. During his work, he has gone by the names Puff Daddy, Diddy, and Love. The lawsuit, on the other hand, says that Mr. Combs is a violent person who repeatedly slapped Ms. Ventura and asked her to carry his gun in her bag. It also says that he blew up the car of a rival suitor. The suit says that Mr. Combs once hung a friend of Ms. Ventura from a hotel window on the 17th floor.
In addition to naming more suspects, the court papers say that other people who worked with Mr. Combs helped him control Ms. Ventura by either helping to hide his behaviour or threatening her with punishments like turning off her music if she didn’t do what he said. The lawsuit is against Mr. Combs and some of the companies he works with, and it asks for specific damages.
The suit for Ms. Ventura says she became involved with Mr. Combs’s high-class lifestyle soon after meeting him and signing with Bad Boy, which put out her first record in 2006.
However, the suit says that he quickly took over her life in a very powerful way. She was under his control professionally, and he paid for her car, flat, clothes, and even saw her medical records. The lawsuit says that the results of an MRI scan she had for memory loss, which could have been caused by drugs or by the beating she said she got from Mr. Combs, went straight to Mr. Combs.
The suit says that Mr. Combs also gave Ms. Ventura “copious amounts of drugs,” such as ecstasy and ketamine, and told her to take them. He also got angry often and beat her “multiple times each year.” The suit says Ms. Ventura didn’t call the cops because she thought it “would just give Mr. Combs another reason to hurt her.”
The suit says that Mr. Combs got angry when he saw Ms. Ventura talking to another talent agent in Los Angeles in 2009. He then pushed her into a car and kicked her in the face several times, making her bleed. The suit says that Mr. Combs then had his staff take her to a hotel room for a week to rest. The suit says that she asked to go home to her folks but Mr. Combs wouldn’t let her.
Because she saw how violent it would be to turn down Mr. Combs and how he would cut her off from her friends and family, the lawsuit says that “Ms. Ventura felt that saying ‘no’ to Mr. Combs would cost her something—her family, her friends, her career, or even her life.” The suit says that even though she tried to leave Mr. Combs, he sent his workers to get her back.
According to court documents, Ms. Ventura says that Mr. Combs got so mad that she was dating the rapper Kid Cudi in early 2012 that he threatened to blow up the rapper’s car. The suit says, “At that time, Kid Cudi’s car blew up in his driveway.”
Thanks to a spokesperson, Kid Cudi confirmed what Ms. Ventura said. He said, “All of this is true.”
The lawsuit says that after a few years of dating Mr. Combs, he forced Ms. Ventura “to engage in a fantasy of his called ‘voyeurism,'” in which she was told “”to have sex with a series of male prostitutes while he watched, masturbated, took pictures, and shot video.
The” suit says that Mr. Combs called these meetings “freak offs,” and they involved outfits like masquerade masks and lingerie. They went on for years and took place in Mr. Combs’s homes and high-end hotels across the United States. The suit says that he told Ms. Ventura to look for male sex workers on the websites of escort services.
It was possible to get drugs at these events, and Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit says she did so because they “allowed her to disassociate during these horrific encounters.”
The suit says that Ms. Ventura would delete videos from her phone that showed these events, but Mr. Combs told her that he could still see them. He also made her watch a video on a flight that she thought she had removed.
The lawsuit says that Ms. Ventura was a victim of sex trafficking because of these sexual encounters in different places. The lawsuit also says that Mr. Combs sexually assaulted, sexually battered, and broke New York City’s rule against gender-based violence.
In her lawsuit, Ms. Ventura describes several times she tried to get away from Mr. Combs but failed.
The lawsuit says that Mr. Combs punched Ms. Ventura in the face while he was drunk during a “freak off” at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016. He passed out, and she tried to leave the room. But Mr. Combs woke up and followed her into the hallway, where he threw glass vases at her, breaking glass all the way down the hallway, according to the court document. The hotel had security cameras that night that caught the event, but the lawsuit says Mr. Combs paid the hotel $50,000 for the video.
According to the court document, Mr Combs raped Ms Ventura in her apartment in 2018 after they had dinner together, even though she “repeatedly said ‘no’ and tried to push him away.” The suit says she broke up with him after that. They got married the next year and now have two young children. Alex Fine is a personal trainer. The lawsuit says that her relationship with Bad Boy ended in 2019.
The Adult Survivors Act is a New York law that lets people who say they were sexually abused file civil suits after the time limit has passed. Ms. Ventura’s case, like other recent sexual assault cases, is being brought under this law. Next week is the last day of the year to file a case under this law.
In her complaint, Ms. Ventura talks about this rule, and in a statement, she talks about how important it is.
She said, “”With the end of New York’s Adult Survivors Act coming up quickly, it became clear that this was a chance to talk about the trauma I have been through and will be recovering from for the rest of my life”.”
We don’t know what to say. Cassie is so sad. We’re glad she at least spoke up.