In a chillingly graphic testimony that dripped with emotion, singer Cassie Ventura pulled back the velvet curtain on a very dark era of her life with music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, one rife with drugs, disguises, and such debasing sex acts that left her hollow and shattered.
Taking the stand in a New York federal courtroom, the 38-year-old bravely detailed what prosecutors have described as years of “sex trafficking” and mental abuse to offer a startling look inside what Diddy is alleged to be a sinister sexual universe dripping with baby oil, candle wax, and stark control.
“[He said] I was supposed to be sparkling,” Cassie recounted to the courtroom, detailing how Johnson’s baby oil was instrumental in the questionable “freak-offs,” which she testified were weekly sex flings Diddy had facilitated between himself, male escorts, and drugs even masks, she claimed. The first of these claims was said to have occurred at one of Diddy’s Los Angeles residences. “I put on the masquerade mask,” she testified, and “wanted to do what made him happy.” The words hung heavily in the air, as heavy as all the years she’d spent doing what he wanted.
But while control was part of it, this wasn’t just about control but was about humiliation; Cassie would say, usually in the throes of ecstasy, cocaine, GHB, and other drugs that helped her separate herself from the reality of what was happening. “I was high. So I didn’t feel much. Dirty and confused. And he was proud of me,” she said, her voice cracking as she tried to convey the emotional devastation.
The sessions were not isolated. “For a consistent number of years, weekly,” she said, with Diddy occasionally watching on FaceTime or videotaping the acts on her electronic devices. She spoke of being peed on without her consent, which she said happened “frequently enough” despite her disgust. “No, I did not want it. It was disgusting. It was too much. I choked,” she said. “And no one could believe I wanted it.”
Perhaps most gut-wrenching was her reading of the emotional coping mechanisms she had to develop to survive it all. “I have to dissociate and be dead inside,” she said. “Because it was something I hated.”
In an especially sickening detail, Cassie said after a male sex worker ejaculated on her, Diddy would ask for it to be “placed on his body” in an adjacent room, and his nipples were a favorite target. When the question was posed whether or not that was something she hoped for, her answer was straight to the point: “No.”
Diddy, now 55, has pleaded not guilty to a raft of federal charges ranging from sex trafficking to racketeering. A series of high-profile raids on his homes and businesses in Los Angeles and Miami led to his arrest in September 2023. Prosecutors have accused him of running a criminal enterprise that involved his smuggling women from state to state for sex.
What she describes in her testimony is a haunting, not just of an exploitative industry, no less a predatory space for women and girls as any work environment or social setting, but a woman coming back to her voice in defiance of the unthinkable.
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