R&B singer Cassie Ventura, a longtime girlfriend of Sean “Diddy” Combs, testified Tuesday that she loved the hip-hop mogul and felt a sense of duty to join in the drug-fueled sex marathons that he called “freak offs.”
“I was just in love and wanted to make him happy,” Ventura told a Manhattan jury as she sat opposite Combs during his criminal sex-trafficking and racketeering trial.
Ventura, who dated Combs from 2007 to 2018, described herself as a “people pleaser” and told the eight men and four women jury how Combs was often violent with her.
Arguments with Combs would regularly result in physical abuse, she testified.
“He would bash me in my head, knock me over, drag me, kick me, stomp me in the head,” Ventura said, adding that Combs beat her “too frequently.”
“I would get knocked in my forehead, busted lips, swollen lips, black eyes,” Ventura testified. “Bruises all over my body.”
The testimony from Ventura, the prosecution’s key witness in the case, could decide whether the jury ultimately convicts Combs.
Prosecutors allege that for two decades, Combs led a criminal enterprise that involved the sex trafficking of Ventura and an anonymous Jane Doe.
Ventura’s climb to the witness stand — she is eight months pregnant — is the first time she and Combs were in the same room since 2018, when she attended the funeral of Kim Porter, Combs’ long-term girlfriend and mother to four of his children.
Ventura told the jury that it was soon after she started dating Combs that she learned that he had sudden, violent mood swings.
“Make a wrong face and the next thing I knew I was getting hit in the face,” she told the jurors.
He would lash out, “If I wasn’t smiling at him, if I didn’t look the certain way that he liked,” or if she was being “bratty,” she said.
“Watch your mouth,” she said he’d tell her if he thought she spoke out of turn.
“Fix your face,” he’d say if he thought she was smirking, according to her testimony.
Ventura’s appearance followed a whirlwind first day of trial.
On Monday, the jury heard opening statements and testimony from the first two witnesses, including an exotic dancer who testified he was repeatedly paid to have sex with Ventura as Combs watched.
Prosecutor Emily Johnson told the jury how Combs used “lies, drugs, threats, and violence to force and coerce” Ventura and another woman into “freak offs.”
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Plenty of bathroom breaks
Prosecutors say Ventura, 38, will be on the stand testifying against Combs, 55, for most of this week.
She is due to give birth next month to her third child with husband Alex Fine, according to a source who asked not to be quoted by name. She will be given breaks every 90 minutes during her testimony.
Fine may be called to the stand as a defense witness, Combs’ attorney Teny Geragos told the judge, who is allowing him to watch part of her testimony.
If Fine is asked to take the stand, he would be asked to impeach the testimony of his wife
Fine may be asked about “several very threatening messages” in which he spoke of “beating the F-word out of” Combs, the lawyer said.
Ventura says she loved Combs ‘so much’
The criminal indictment against Combs accuses him of forcing the Ventura into “engaging in commercial sex acts as a result of force, fraud, and coercion” throughout their decadelong relationship.
Prosecutors have alleged that the commercial sex acts involved the so-called freak offs.
Ventura’s account of abuse could be bolstered by security video showing Combs beating Ventura in the hallway of the now-closed InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles. Prosecutors say the video shows Ventura struggling to leave the hotel after a freak off held there in 2016. Jurors were shown this video on Monday.
When shown a still from that video on Tuesday in court, Ventura told jurors, “We were having an encounter that we called a freak off.”
“During the first year of the relationship, Sean proposed to me this sexual encounter that he called voyeurism, where he would watch me have a sexual encounter with a third man, specifically another man,” Ventura testified.
Ventura said she initially agreed to a freak off because she “felt a sense of responsibility, with Sean sharing something like that with me.”
“Also, I loved him so much,” Ventura testified.
Combs apologized after the video surfaced in 2023, and his lawyers have conceded he was violent during the relationship. But they have alleged that Ventura was also violent.
“There was hitting on both sides,” Combs’ attorney Marc Agnifilo said in court on Friday. Ventura’s lawyer has declined to comment on this allegation.
During opening statements on Monday, Geragos described the infamous security video of Ventura and the rapper as “indefensible,” “horrible,” and “dehumanizing.”
“It is not evidence of sex trafficking,” Geragos told jurors. “It is evidence of domestic violence.”
Johnson, the prosecutor, told jurors in her opening statements that Combs has “brutally” beaten Ventura, “kicking her in the back and flinging her around like a rag doll.”
In order to maintain control of Ventura, Johnson said Combs would threaten to blackmail her with the release of videos of her having sex with male escorts.
Johnson called those videos “souvenirs of the most humiliating nights of her life.”
Since his arrest in September, Combs has maintained that he’s never sexually abused anyone.
If convicted on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, Combs could spend the rest of his life behind bars.