Cassie’s Shocking Testimony in Diddy Trial Is Done: ‘I’m Here to Do the Right Thing’

Cassie spent two full days this week on the witness stand in the federal sex trafficking and racketeering trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs and Complex was in attendance for her testimony. Plenty has been said about Cassandra Ventura and what she allegedly went through at the hands of her ex-partner of almost eleven years, but Tuesday and Wednesday was the first time the world got to hear it directly from her. Diddy, has of course, denied the allegations against him. The mogul is being charged with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution.

Ventura, questioned by prosecutor Emily Johnson, told her story with Diddy starting at the beginning, with her signing to Combs’ Bad Boy Records in early 2006, when she was 19. And she ended at the end, with her blockbuster 2023 lawsuit against him and her reasons for testifying at this very trial.

In between, she painted a dark picture of a decade-plus spent managing the moods of a man who she said could turn violent on a moment’s notice; and the “hundreds” of times that she, against her will, participated in “freak-offs” — the sometimes days-long, sleepless, drug-fueled sexual encounters with Diddy and other men.

Sean Combs, in Cassie’s telling, was a man who moved from record label head to boyfriend to someone in control of every aspect of her life. She said that he used violence, blackmail, and his own resources, employees, and businesses— as well as Cassie’s love for him—to maintain that control.

Her testimony went deep inside the alleged freak-offs, which she said began within the first year of their relationship. He expressed, she said, that he was into voyeurism, and wanted to watch her have sex with another man.

What happened was far more detailed than that. Freak-offs, as described by Cassie, were highly choreographed affairs, with Diddy in control of every detail: from the lighting, to who would touch whom at what time, to when the escort could ejaculate.

Cassie said that from the beginning, she was not into the freak-offs. She painted them as an outgrowth of the control Combs had over every other aspect of her life: what songs she recorded, the way she dressed, how she styled her hair, even what color nail polish she wore.

“He called all of the shots,” she said bluntly.

Combs, she said, was enough of a puppetmaster that he intentionally kept her recording songs near-constantly not because he wanted to release her music, but to keep her doing what she called “busywork.” As long as she was in his studios, with his people, then making music was, she said, a way to “establish control over what I was doing every minute of the day.”

In fact, as she told the story, Diddy’s need to know what she was doing every minute of the day was near-constant. She recounted endless times where, if she didn’t respond to him immediately, he would call or text incessantly, or send an employee to find her—or simply show up to her home unannounced.

Part of the way Diddy maintained his control over her was, in Cassie’s telling, through violence. A good chunk of Wednesday’s testimony was spent with the singer recounting a number of alleged assaults.

The domestic violence began, she said, very early on in their relationship, after a dinner in New York City in 2007 or 2008. Cassie said that she acknowledged to a friend at the dinner that Combs was flirting with another woman. In the car afterwards, she said, Combs hit her in the side of the head—in full view of the driver.

“I didn’t understand why he was so angry,” she said.

But that, in her telling, was mild compared to what was to come. She recounted an alleged assault in 2009 where Combs stomped on her face. She tried to run away, she said, but his security caught up with her and brought her back. Diddy then, she said, forced her to go to a hotel, where she remained for about a week while her injuries healed.

There were a number of other alleged assaults she talked about in detail: the time he burst into her hotel room, beat her up, and threw luggage at her. The time he kicked her in the back hard enough to cause a large bruise after finding out that she was dating Kid Cudi. The time in Jamaica when he allegedly gave her a black eye and Cassie and her best friend hid from him by climbing under a tractor for several hours. The time in 2015 when, recovering from a prior beating from Diddy that left her with a black eye, he attacked her again, leaving her cowering underneath a toilet, trying to protect herself from his kicks. The time before an OVO Fest when he threw her into a bed frame, leaving a permanent scar. The time he hit her then-best friend in the head with a wooden hanger.

Then, of course, there was the assault that everyone knows about: the one that happened in the hallways of the Intercontinental Hotel in Century City on March 5, 2016. Ventura watched that video on the stand, in front of her alleged abuser, his family, his seven lawyers, and the world’s media.

But she also set up the context. It happened, she said, during a freak-off — one that was itself just days before a premiere of a movie she was in, an event she was really looking forward to.

“I never had an opportunity to enjoy the things I worked really hard on,” she explained. “If I pleased him with a freak-off, then my premiere would run smoothly.”

In the middle of the freak-off, she said, “I got hit by Sean and I had a black eye. I had my premiere and I didn’t want to mess it up.”

So she attempted to leave, which is what led to the scene that years later would end up on CNN and, eventually, screens across the world.

When asked how often she was violently thrown to the ground in the way shown on that tape, Ventura answered, “Too many times to count.”

A lot of Ventura’s testimony that was not about violence was about the freak-offs. She began with the very first one, which she said happened in Los Angeles. Combs, she said, provided ecstasy and instructed her to dress in high heels.

As she described it, Combs directed her and the escort to rub baby oil on each other, and then have sex while he watched. That happened at least twice.

Afterwards, she said, she felt “a mixture of dirty and confusion with [a feeling that] he’s really happy with me, so I did something right.”

Within weeks, he had proposed a second one. And then they kept going, to the point where freak-offs happened almost weekly for what she described as “a consistent amount of years.”

As mentioned, she said that the sessions could last for days, with Cassie awake the whole time. She testified that Diddy provided the drugs — molly, ecstasy, cocaine — that kept her awake. He would even, she alleged, tell her when to take them.

In her testimony, he would also be the one to say when the freak-offs would happen, and when they ended. He would also, she said, even insist that she participate in them when she was menstruating or had a UTI, the latter of which she said she had “sometimes back to back” as a result of the freak-offs.

When asked by the prosecutor what she enjoyed about the freak-offs, Cassie got choked up. She explained that the moments between sex with escorts, when she and Combs would retire to a separate room, was the only one-on-one time with him that she could get.

She also explained that she had been extremely young, and in love, when first presented with them.

“He brought the concept to me when I was 22 and would do anything for him,” she said on Wednesday. “And I did.”

Cassie explained that she often brought up—”gently,” she said, so as not to anger Diddy — the idea of wanting to stop the freak-offs. But he would be dismissive. And keeping them going was, after all, making him happy.

“When you love somebody, you don’t want to disappoint them,” Ventura explained.

While only Cassie, Diddy, and the escorts were, she said, present at the freak-offs, Cassie described the preparation as a family affair: Diddy’s assistants or security, she said, would often stock the room with baby oil, lubricants, and condoms, and would sometimes even bring the cash to pay the escorts.

Diddy, she testified, would sometimes record the sessions, saying that it was for him to view afterwards. But, she said, he quickly pivoted to using the potential release of the tapes as blackmail.

That threat hit Ventura hard, she explained.

“I would have to answer to my mother,” she said. “I feared for my career. I feared for my family.”

One of Cassie’s final in-person interactions with Diddy, she said, was in August, 2018, after they had broken up. Following what she called a “closure conversation” at dinner, where Combs was being nice and playful, they went to her house.

“And then,” she said bluntly, “he raped me in my living room.”

“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she continued. She said that the mogul’s eyes were black, and that he “wasn’t himself.”

“It was like somebody taking something from you,” she continued.

She was intimate with him one more time after the rape, after what she called “a really nice night that we never really had before.”

Toward the end of her testimony on Wednesday, Ventura broke down when recounting a particularly low point in early 2023, when she was feeling suicidal. She said that she “tried to walk out the front door [of her home] into traffic, and my husband would not let me.”

After that, she began writing down her experiences with Combs.

“I really wanted Sean to read the information. I wanted him to understand,” she said.

She continued crying when talking about realizing that the damage the freak-offs had caused her were a result of “having to carry the shame that was painful to [Combs].”

She continued, saying that she sent book chapters to Combs, asking for $30 million in exchange for the rights to the book. (She said of the amount that “I picked a number that would alert him.”)

“I wanted to be compensated for the time, the pain, the many, many years of having to fix my life,” she said.

The rest of the story is well-known from there: she filed her civil suit in November 2023, and settled for $20 million within 24 hours.

At the end of her time on the stand, Emily Johnson asked Cassie why she was testifying in this trial.

“I can’t carry this anymore,” she said. “I can’t carry the shame, the guilt. I was guided to treat people like they were disposable.

“What’s right is right, what’s wrong is wrong,” she continued. “I’m here to do the right thing.”