Diddy’s Alleged Death Threat Against ‘Vibe’ Editor-in-Chief Detailed in New Essay: ‘I Had Reason to Fear for My Life’

The following day, Smith said, she received a threatening call from Diddy.

“He was still on message: He wanted to see the covers,” Smith, who noted that she previously mentioned the threat in her Shine Bright book “though I got wrong the reason for his vexation” and “repressed the rest,” wrote in the Times. “I was still on message: It’s not what we do. It was then that Combs told me, as I’ve retold hundreds of times over the years, that he would see me ‘dead in the trunk of a car.’ Not missing a beat, I told him he needed to take that threat back.”

From there, Diddy allegedly told Smith, “Fuck you,” prompting her to mention that she would be notifying her lawyer. But that allegedly didn’t stop the Bad Boy Records founder, at least not initially, as he then told Smith, “I know where you are right now.”

After a conversation with her lawyer, who then spoke with Diddy, Smith says she was sent an apology, though the subsequent theft of servers holding the Vibe cover files raised further questions.

“I had reason to fear for my life,” Smith wrote in the opening of the Times piece, available in full here, when looking back on the alleged 1997 incident. “What happened was insidious. It broke my brain. I forgot the worst of it for 27 years.”