Sean “Diddy” Combs’ ex-bodyguard offered rape accuser “Mia” a “gift” and tried to pressure her into making a statement on the rap mogul’s behalf after Cassie Ventura’s 2023 “freak off” lawsuit was filed, the woman told a Manhattan federal jury on Friday.
Jurors were shown a text reading, “I’m allowed to send my sister a gift,” sent to the witness by former bodyguard Damion “D-Roc” Butler two weeks after Ventura filed her explosive lawsuit accusing Combs of beating her and forcing her to have sex with male escorts.
She told jurors she believed he was trying to send her money, and changed the topic when he asked for her address.
Combs’ personal assistant and film executive, who testified under a pseudonym, revealed the text exchange on her second day testifying at her ex-boss’s sex-trafficking and racketeering trial.
On Thursday, she told Combs’ jury that the millionaire hip-hop mogul sexually assaulted and physically beat her throughout her eight years of working for him.
On Friday, prosecutors asked Mia to read aloud from text messages Butler sent her on November 30, 2023. It had been five years since she’d left her job with Combs, and 14 days after Ventura’s lawsuit revealed “freak offs” to the world and led to a torrent of related civil and criminal allegations.
Butler also called her, Mia testified, and tried to spin to her that Combs and Ventura used to fight “like a normal couple.”
“Yeah, it’s real crazy what’s going on,” Mia said Butler told her in the call, referring to Ventura’s quickly-settled lawsuit. “‘Cause you know, like, Puff and Cass, they would just fight like a normal couple.”
A half-dozen witnesses, including Mia and Ventura herself, have testified that Combs brutally beat the R&B star during their decadelong relationship.
In bail hearings last fall, prosecutors accused Combs of trying to tamper with witnesses through intermediaries and using the telephone at his Brooklyn jail, something Combs denied.
Jane Rosenberg/REUTERS
“He sounded nervous and was talking in circles,” Mia testified of the ex-bodyguard’s call. Butler told her, “Your boy Puff misses you,” and “we were just reminiscing about old family,” she said.
Butler suggested during the call that these others had already signed on to the same “normal couple” story, and she should, too, she said.
“Puff really wanted to talk to me,” she said Butler told her. Butler also suggested that “maybe you could say something” publicly, on Combs’ behalf.
“I just kept my mouth shut,” she told the jury. When she hung up, “I threw my phone as far as it could go.”
Mia said she remained pleasant as Butler reached out repeatedly via text over the next months. She said she rejected his offer to give her money or “gifts,” and promised to speak to Combs, but never did.
By February, she was avoiding texts from Combs himself. “I was terrified,” she said. “And I just wanted to play dumb.”
On February 4, 2024 — seven months before his arrest — Combs texted her one last time, “Just need my memory jogged on some things. You were my right hand for years so I just to[sic] speak to you to remember who was even around me.”
“He was the person I was traumatized by,” Mia said when asked why she didn’t respond. “And I was just starting to come back.”
The testimony may be used by prosecutors to support an obstruction of justice allegation that’s part of the racketeering charge against Combs.
The “coolest alien rockstar”
During cross-examination on Friday, Mia was asked why she never spoke out about Combs’ alleged abuses, and why she instead posted dozens of glowing messages about him on Instagram throughout her nine years working for him.
“YOU ARE THE COOLEST ALIEN ROCKSTAR UNICORN PIZZA SLICE AND WE FUCKING LOVVVVVE YOU!” she posted on her Instagram in a 2016 happy birthday message, one of dozens shown to jurors.
Mia explained that Combs had good moments and good days. Keeping him happy and celebrating him online was part of her job, and also in her own best interest, she said.
“When things were good, you felt really safe and you almost forgot” about the bad times, she said.
Defense lawyer Brian Steel asked how she could “forget” the rape she alleged Combs had committed.
“It’s too hard to think about it, so you don’t, and you don’t have time to, anyway, and you just want it to go away,” she said.
Steel kept pressing the point — why did she stay silent?
“I was young and manipulated and just eager to survive, and again I’m unraveling a lot of this now in therapy,” she said.
“But nobody was there to tell me that these things that were happening were wrong,” she said of Combs’ world, which she had described as “chaotic,” “toxic,” yet also, at times, “exciting,” filled with celebrities and foreign travel.
“No one around even flinched at his behavior,” she told Combs’ lawyer.
At one point, the defense lawyer asked her flat out — did she make the attacks up?
“Everything I’ve said in this courtroom is true,” Mia answered.
Mia worked as a personal assistant to fashion designer Georgina Chapman and actor Mike Myers before she started working as Combs’ PA in 2009, at the age of about 25.
She testified Thursday that she has been unable to work in the years since 2017, when Combs dissolved his movie production company, Revolt Films, eliminating her position as a director of development and acquisition.
“I would be triggered by really normal situations,” she said of attempting to work other jobs. “With, like an overwhelming sense of fear of being in trouble—like, overreacting to normal things that overwhelmed me.”
Combs’ criminal trial opened three weeks ago, with Ventura, the prosecution’s star witness, taking the witness stand in the trial’s first week.
Prosecutors allege Combs ran a criminal enterprise that involved the sex trafficking of Ventura — who he dated for more than a decade — and of another woman whom jurors have yet to hear from, and who may testify under the pseudonym “Jane.”
Combs has argued through his defense team that his sexual encounters have been consensual.
If convicted of the sex trafficking and racketeering charges against him, the onetime, near-billionaire could face up to life in prison.