The Horrible Lawsuit Against Sean Combs Took Many People by Surprise. Not Me.

The set of It Is What It Is—a sports talk show hosted by Harlem rappers Cam’ron and Mase—is normally a pretty raucous place. But in late September, a long-unanswered question between the longtime friends brought all of their profane mischief to a halt.

“When you had your record deal,” Cam’ron said, turning toward Mase, “why did you take me to Biggie Smalls and not Bad Boy?”

For context: In the mid-1990s, Mase was an artist on Bad Boy Records, the label founded by hip-hop producer and mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs. That label was soon truly elevated by platinum star Christopher Wallace, known globally as “The Notorious B.I.G.” and, more colloquially, as “Biggie Smalls.” Mase’s friend Cam’ron had yet to release a studio album, but he was making noise as an underground artist, and he seemed destined for stardom too.

All these years later, this was apparently the first time they’d ever broached the subject. After a long pause, Mase attempted an answer: “Man, it’s almost going to bring me to tears to say this. Being that I saw you as such a good friend, I wanted to put you with somebody I knew would …”

“Don’t have me on here crying and shit,” Cam’ron said.

Mase powered through: “I knew Biggie would do right by you.”

The emotional moment was particularly notable because of what had gone unsaid between the friends: that Combs was someone who would not do right by his artists—that he was to be avoided.

That story came to my mind last week, when Combs was revealed to be facing a federal lawsuit filed by the former R&B singer Cassie, who accused him of rape and of abusing and harassing her and her associates over more than a decade.

In a 35-page filing that came with an unusual trigger warning, Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, alleged that Combs signed her to a 10-album deal with his label in February 2006, when he was 37 and she was 19. Ventura’s lawsuit says Combs spent the next year exerting increasing control over her professional and personal life until he eventually was plying her with drugs and pressuring her into sex during a trip to Miami in the fall of 2007. “Within two years of meeting Mr. Combs, Ms. Ventura found herself lured into the immediate circle of her boss, the owner of her record label, and one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry,” the lawsuit said.

Combs offered an unequivocal denial, saying through his attorney that Ventura had made a “persistent demand of $30 million” over the past six months and was “aiming to tarnish Mr. Combs’s reputation.”

A day later, Combs and Ventura announced that they had reached a settlement. In a statement, Combs said: “We have decided to resolve this matter amicably. I wish Cassie and her family all the best. Love.” Neither side released details about the terms of the deal, including how much money was exchanged.

Combs may have quickly closed off a potentially embarrassing and ominous legal process, but I don’t think Ventura’s accusations will soon recede from the public record. The lawsuit seemed to resurface a torrent of information about Combs’ alleged misdeeds on gossip sites and social media, from the founder of the Baby Phat clothing line accusing him of threatening to hit her when she was pregnant (Combs reportedly apologized to her for this) to his former chef suing him for sexual harassment and not fully paying her for overtime hours (that case was privately settled in 2019).

“He’s a fool if he thinks this is behind him. It is only the beginning,” dream hampton, an executive producer behind the Lifetime Network docuseries Surviving R. Kelly and iconic hip-hop magazine writer, said on X, formerly Twitter.

Why was it such a floodgate moment? I suspect it’s because many of the claims in Ventura’s stunning lawsuit echo previously aired allegations and complaints against Combs, now 54, over his nearly 35 years in the public spotlight.

One part of this suit in particular caught my attention, as someone who’s been reporting off and on in recent years about the deadly rivalry between Combs and Marion “Suge” Knight, who founded the competing Death Row Records. Knight, a 6-foot-2 former NFL defensive lineman who was affiliated with the Bloods street gang, got a lot of the blame for the ongoing tension—and eventually landed in prison for his role in a fight with a Compton gang member that Nevada prosecutors believed led to the fatal shooting of rap superstar Tupac Shakur. Before that, he almost seemed to take pleasure in challenging Combs publicly, daring him to escalate their conflict.

But I’ve long thought the Combs vs. Knight feud too often cast the overly solicitous Combs as an unwilling foil to the biggest bully in the music business. Their deadly rivalry was never quite as one-sided as it seemed. And as the recent lawsuit perhaps underscores, Combs also had a penchant for violence and bullying that never seemed to slow his stardom.

Ventura’s lawsuit against Combs made a number of extraordinary claims, all of them brought under a New York statute that temporarily allowed people who claim they are victims of sexual abuse to file suit after the statute of limitations has expired. (The window extended by that statute expired last week.) In a statement, Ventura said: “With the expiration of New York’s Adult Survivors Act fast approaching, it became clear that this was an opportunity to speak up about the trauma I have experienced and that I will be recovering from for the rest of my life.”

Among her claims: that Combs coerced her, over a number of years, into having sex with male prostitutes while he watched, masturbated, took pictures and shot video as part of a ritual he called “freak offs”; that after learning she referred to her grandfather as “Pop Pop,” Combs insisted she refer to him by that nickname; and that Combs once threatened to blow up the car of one of Ventura’s former partners, the rapper Kid Cudi. Soon after he made that threat, Kid Cudi’s car exploded in his driveway. Cudi’s attorney confirmed this story, which happened in 2012, to the New York Times. (Before settling the suit, Combs denied all allegations through his lawyer.)

All of this is disturbing to read through. But the claim that really caught my attention was this: Ventura alleges that she and Combs were once using drugs at his home in Los Angeles when a member of the security staff burst in to say that Knight had been seen at a nearby restaurant. According to the lawsuit, Combs hurriedly got dressed, gathered a number of guns from his house, and headed toward Mel’s, hoping to confront Knight.

Why did this pique my interest? Let’s go back to the arrest last month of Duane Keith Davis, better known as Keffe D, on a murder charge in the death of Tupac Shakur. Davis is believed to be the only surviving member of four Southside Crips who allegedly killed Shakur in a drive-by shooting just off the Vegas Strip in September 1996.

Shakur was on Knight’s Death Row label and was a rival of Combs and Wallace. In fact, Davis had long complicated the murder case by maintaining that Combs offered to pay $1 million for the deaths of Shakur and Knight. Davis claims that he’d known Combs for several years by then, having met him through a drug-dealing associate in New York named Eric “Von Zip” Martin. Davis said Combs first asked him and the Crips to work security for Bad Boy artists in the mid-1990s.

“Puffy would give us tickets to be at their Bad Boy west coast shows. We went everywhere with them fools. We’d meet up with them at the hotel, get the tickets and go with them. I used to ride in the van with the nigga. Crips were backstage deep at most of those west coast shows,” Davis wrote in his memoir, Compton Street Legend. Combs has always denied hiring gang members as his security.

A year into the security gig, Davis said, Combs came to him with a much more daunting request: “I have a couple of problems I need to be handled. Big CEO and Pac,” Davis recalled Combs as saying in his memoir. “That’s not a problem. We can make that happen,” Davis allegedly told Combs.

There was no contract, not even a handshake, nothing like that, Davis would later tell Los Angeles Police Department Detective Greg Kading. “It was more like a gentlemen’s” agreement, Kading wrote in his book on these events, Murder Rap. Kading even elicited a confession from Davis in 2009, as part of a multi-agency task force investigation into the Shakur and Wallace murders. But Davis wasn’t officially arrested until earlier this year.

Part of the reason for that is that Kading has long been dubious of Davis’ claims about Combs’ bounty on the Death Row stars. “We could never substantiate the context of the conversation,” Kading said to me last week, even though Davis had testified confirming the verbal exchange. “There could have been some nuanced interpretations of it.” In Davis’ version of events, he never explicitly says Combs asked him to kill anyone, giving both of them plausible deniability.

In Davis’ memoir, he recalled meeting with Martin, the New York associate he had in common with Combs, three days after the shooting in Vegas that killed Shakur. During the meal, Martin took a call from Combs, who asked both of the men, “Was that us?” Davis responded that it was. Combs was “happy as hell” at that answer, according to Kading’s book.

Davis said he tried to contact Martin about the money for weeks afterward—the promise had been a million bucks, after all. But he was never able to collect. Not long after, Davis was ensnared in an unrelated drug case and was sent to federal prison for more than five years. He said he never spoke with Combs or Martin again.

“Meeting Puffy has been like a bad dream from which I’m still trying to wake up,” Davis wrote in Compton Street Legend. “I hate that I ever met that son-of-a-bitch—my life has gone backward ever since.”

Now 60, Davis pleaded not guilty to murder in the Shakur case on Nov. 2 in Las Vegas. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison. Prosecutors have said Davis implicated himself in the killing in several interviews in recent years, as well as in his memoir.

So that’s what’s happening with Davis. What’s happening with Combs, given Davis’ allegations about his role in Shakur’s murder? Kading said the LAPD interviewed Combs about his supposed role in Shakur’s killing more than a decade ago but that it ultimately yielded nothing.

“It was under very controlled circumstances. Puffy is insulated by his lawyers, who are going to protect him at all costs,” Kading said. “We all can agree that justice ought to be blind and not be influenced by money. But the reality is that it is.”

Nevada prosecutors haven’t indicated that Combs will be involved in their new murder case against Davis, though, and Kading doubts Combs’ll ever be implicated or face charges.

But even if Combs never has to go to court, there’s still plenty of people waiting for him to face a long-overdue reckoning. One of those people is Mark Curry, who for years was one of the few people in the entertainment industry willing to publicly challenge Combs.

Curry, a former Bad Boy rapper, published a tell-all book in 2009 titled Dancing With the Devil: How Puff Burned the Bad Boys of Hiphop. Over 268 pages, Curry offers an unsparing look at the people and careers Combs trampled on during his own rise to fame and fortune. “Other than Puff, no one else has prospered off the label,” Curry wrote.

Curry first started working with Combs and Bad Boy in early 1997, tasked with writing the song “Come With Me” for the Godzilla movie soundtrack. It didn’t take long before he realized that Combs was ruthless as a businessman. Curry wrote that Combs pressured him into signing a contract that would require him to give up half his publishing rights, and even suggested that his career would be over unless he agreed to the deal.

“Puff was a rich cat with no musical talent but also with a stable of mostly white advisers and lawyers who taught him how to put voodoo on his artists,” Curry wrote.

Curry quickly realized he was trapped under the same exploitative business arrangement as were most other Bad Boy artists, including Wallace. “I was in the same spot as Biggie when he signed with Bad Boy,” Curry wrote. “After Biggie signed the contracts that Puff forced on him, for example, he walked away with only $25,000. To avoid people finding out just how broke Biggie was when he was killed, Puff announced that he was giving the fallen star’s family several million dollars.”

Curry said he soon noticed that most of Combs’ artists struggled after signing deals and even selling lots of records; some of them returned to a life of a crime, eventually dying destitute. As an example, Curry pointed to his old friend the late rapper Robert Ross, better known as Black Rob, who released a platinum album on Bad Boy in 2000—but then went to prison for grand larceny in connection with a November 2004 hotel robbery and later struggled with homelessness before dying of cardiac arrest in April 2021. He was 52.

“You’re not freeing niggas,” Curry said of Combs. “They still gotta be criminals and they know you’ve got money and that we mean nothing to you. Puff, how do you feel knowing that?”

Curry was once one of the label’s most promising stars and was featured on six songs on Combs’ third album The Saga Continues …, including the hit “Bad Boy for Life.” But Combs never released his solo album, and Curry grew frustrated, finally asking out of his deal in 2005. In the intervening years, he’s taken his crusade against Combs to his YouTube channel and his social media accounts. When I spoke with him last weekend, Curry was eager to finally have an audience again.

“What I always called him was the master of evasion,” Curry said. Combs was “very keen, very smart when it comes to avoiding the question and sending you off with what you thought was an answer. It’s like you can go into his office, talk about a million-dollar deal that you deserve, and when you leave the office, you leave thinking all you need to do is sell one more cheesecake to make it happen.”

Combs is definitely skilled at avoiding critical scrutiny, in part by making his problems go away with his millions and in part by charming the media and fans with his benevolent goofiness and knack for reinvention. Since becoming a celebrity in the 1990s, Combs has changed his stage name from Puff Daddy to P. Diddy to Diddy to Love, then Brother Love, even going so far as to legally change his middle name from John to Love.

In a splashy September 2021 Vanity Fair profile of Combs (that, full disclosure, the publication approached me about writing, but I declined), Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote that Combs “welcomes me and my assistant with a bear hug. When I mention it is one of my first hugs since COVID-19 made human contact feel dangerous, he comes back in for another. Sean Combs likes to spread the love.” He perfectly performed being harmless, almost softhearted, in that interview. He even took the initiative of bringing up the #MeToo movement, saying, “It inspired me. It showed me that you can get maximum change.” But also in the interview, Combs hints at his ongoing, not-so-subtle image management. “I always was a hustler, always.”

That’s what Curry can’t forget. Today Curry lives in Atlanta and works as a carpenter—“like Jesus,” he told me. He said he also wanted to sue Diddy, though he admitted to me that he was struggling to come up with a strong case for a lawsuit, even though “this has stunted my growth and I kinda want him to pay for it,” he said.

In his book, Curry also outlined a number of violent incidents he witnessed from Combs that recall some of the abuse allegations made by Ventura. One alleged incident, which happened in 2000, involved Kim Porter, Combs’ ex-girlfriend and the mother of three of his children. During a break in their on-again, off-again relationship, Combs discovered that Porter had been dating an Atlanta-based music executive and flew into a rage. Combs allegedly sought out the man and, flanked by a couple of bodyguards, attacked him with a chair.

“He’s a very possessive person,” Curry said. “And that’s in all walks of life. He’s just a weird person, a person who likes to be in control.”

Curry wasn’t on the Bad Boy label when Ventura was a performer, but he said he supported her effort to finally hold Combs accountable.

“If Cassie is married and happy and she came out with these allegations, that means this is something she needed to get over with to move on,” Curry said. “Her husband is holding her down, standing by her. She wouldn’t be lying and risk tearing down her own house.”

And because of Combs’ legendary temper and lengthy record of assault allegations, Curry wanted to make one thing clear about the risk of speaking out publicly: “In the event anything happens to me,” Curry said, “blame him.”