A woman and a male prostitute meet for sex in a luxury hotel suite that the government says has been lit for filming and stocked with baby oil and drugs. Another man watches and sometimes films the proceedings. These sex marathons, accompanied by a cleaning crew, sometimes last for days.
To those affected, they were known as “freak-offs.”
The 14-page federal indictment against Sean Combs, the music mogul known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, accuses him of engaging in a range of crimes, including arson, bribery, kidnapping and obstruction of justice. But the heart of the government’s case is that the “criminal enterprise” he ran as an alleged racketeer was responsible for coordinating these “pranks” and then covering up the damage to hotel rooms or people after they were over.
The government said they were horror shows — “elaborate and produced sexual performances,” according to the indictment — that involved heavy drug use and forced sex, leaving participants so exhausted and drained that they were given intravenous fluids to help them recover. Then, the government said, Mr. Combs weaponized the videos he shot to keep participants from complaining.
“The activities of the raving lunatics are at the heart of this case, and raving lunatics are inherently dangerous,” Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors, said at a hearing last week.
The government’s description closely mirrors the allegations made by the singer Cassie in the bombshell civil lawsuit she filed last fall against Mr. Combs, her former boyfriend. The indictment gives no name to her account of the violence, referring only anonymously to “Victim 1.”
Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, said in her complaint that Mr. Combs frequently staged “freak-offs” at upscale hotels across the country, ordering her at the events to pour “excessive” amounts of oil on herself and directing her where to touch prostitutes while he filmed and masturbated.
“He treated the forced encounter as a personal art project, adjusting the candles he used for lighting to frame the videos he took,” the lawsuit says.
Lawyers for Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty to the sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges he faces, presented an entirely different view of the “monsters” in court.
They presented the scenes as consensual encounters between Mr. Combs and Ms. Ventura, longtime partners in a complex and troubled relationship. Those trysts, they argued, may be shocking to some people, but they did not involve sexual assault and did not involve “force, fraud or coercion,” as required by the main federal sex-trafficking statute.
“Has everyone experienced this kind of intimacy? No,” Marc Agnifilo, Mr. Combs’s lawyer, said during a court hearing Tuesday. “Is this sex trafficking? No, not if everyone wants to go there.”
Mr. Agnifilo said he interviewed six of the men the government describes as sex workers. They told him they did not consider the acts to be coercive or prostitutes, but only escorts paid for their time.
“Was there anything that seemed nonconsensual?” Mr. Agnifilo said. “Was someone too drunk? Was someone too high? Did anyone express hesitation? Was there any suspicion that the woman might not have consented?”
Mr Agnifilo said their answers were: “No. No. No. No.”
The government, in asserting that Mr. Combs ran a criminal racketeering enterprise, has sought to emphasize that the escapades were events coordinated by a team of accomplices who worked for him. Prosecutors have noted that witnesses witnessed violence “during and in connection with” the escapades, which the defense has denied.
Neither man is named or charged in the indictment, but they are described as a team that was deployed to find prostitutes and hotel rooms, deliver supplies and repair damage to the rooms after the sessions. “At times, the victim had to remain in hiding — sometimes for days — to recover from the injuries inflicted by Combs,” the indictment states.
Citing racketeering laws long used against mobsters and drug lords, prosecutors argued that Mr. Combs used his subordinates to do his bidding, expected “absolute loyalty” and ruled under the threat of violence.
“Combs did not do this alone,” Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference last week. “He used his company and its employees and other close associates to accomplish his goals. These individuals apparently included high-ranking supervisors at the company, personal assistants, security personnel and household staff.”
Asked why these people have not been charged, Mr Williams said the investigation was ongoing.
Anthony Capozzolo, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, said it was possible that some of Mr. Combs’s staff were not named as defendants because they were already cooperating witnesses, or that the government hoped they would be convinced by the indictment to join others in testifying against their boss.
“It will be interesting to see if people, now that this has started, will plead guilty,” Mr. Capozzolo said.
In a few months, a jury in Manhattan will have to decide which of two conflicting accounts of the hotel room hearings is more credible. Until then, Mr. Combs will likely be in a federal prison in Brooklyn, denied bail.
Johnson has expressed confidence in the case prosecutors are bringing, telling the court last week that the government has a “massive amount” of evidence, including numerous witnesses, photos, videos and text messages.
Perhaps the most compelling video was one that emerged at a bail hearing last week, showing Mr. Combs brutally assaulting Ms. Ventura at an InterContinental hotel in Los Angeles in 2016. Presented as evidence that force, fraud or coercion were commonplace in Mr. Combs’s orchestrated sexual relationships, the surveillance video shows him punching her, throwing a vase at her and dragging her down a hallway by her sweatshirt.
Ms Johnson described the video in court as showing Ms Ventura trying to leave the scene of the attack. She said there was evidence that at least one prostitute was in the hotel room at the time of the attack.
“It’s a bad video for Mr. Combs,” Mr. Agnifilo acknowledged on CNN last week.
But Mr. Combs, who apologized in May after the video was leaked, calling his behavior inexcusable, has given his lawyers a different version of the encounter. They say the video does not prove that their client used violence to control participants in a sex act. Instead, they argue that the altercation was sparked by Ms. Ventura finding evidence on Mr. Combs’s phone that he had “more than one girlfriend.” Mr. Agnifilo has said that Mr. Combs was asleep when Ms. Ventura hit him in the head with her phone and left the hotel room with all his clothes on. (Surveillance video shows Mr. Combs assaulting Ms. Ventura while he was wearing a towel.)
Prosecutors dispute that the argument was solely about retrieving the clothes. If it had been, they say, Mr. Combs could have simply retrieved the clothes without dragging her to the hotel room.
The government also alleged that Mr. Combs and his employees sought to cover up evidence of the assault on Ms. Ventura. Ms. Johnson said that Mr. Combs tried to silence a hotel security guard by offering him a “handful of cash” and that three days after the assault, “the surveillance video was gone.”
Although the indictment names only one specific victim, prosecutors said there were several. At a court hearing, they presented snippets of additional evidence from women accusing Combs of using perverted video footage to blackmail them. One said, “He just threatened me about the sex tapes he has of me on two phones. He said he would report me, notice these sex tapes where I’m heavily drugged.”
Although Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit was settled a day after it was filed and Mr. Combs denied her allegations, it set off a cascade of other civil lawsuits against him. Several of those lawsuits, all of which Mr. Combs is challenging in court, were filed by women whose accounts bear some similarities to Ms. Ventura’s, including descriptions of coerced and drugged sex.
One plaintiff, Adria English, has accused Mr. Combs of asking her to have sex with guests while he worked at Mr. Combs’s notorious “white parties” in the Hamptons and Miami Beach, where she allegedly received alcohol laced with ecstasy. Mr. Combs’ lawyers have characterized the civil suits as complaints filed by plaintiffs who jumped on the bandwagon with false statements in an attempt to secure a settlement.
In denying Mr. Combs bail on Wednesday, Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. noted his concern that Mr. Combs was obstructing justice by falsifying witness testimony. Prosecutors have said that for months, Mr. Combs “fed victims and witnesses false stories,” while sometimes having accomplices record the conversations. His lawyers contend that he was simply telling his contacts that his lawyer would be contacting them.
But in court, prosecutors told the chilling story of an unnamed woman who texted Mr. Combs three days after Ms. Ventura filed her complaint in November, with her descriptions of “monsters.”
“I feel like I’m reading my own sexual trauma,” she writes. “It makes me sick to see three full pages, word for word, describe my exact experiences and anguish.”
Mr. Combs then called her twice, prosecutors said, while an accomplice recorded the conversation on another phone. “He manipulated her and tried to convince her that she had willingly had sex with him,” Ms. Johnson said. “But she resisted.”
