Last week, a lawsuit threatened to expose the violent hidden world of Sean Combs — aka Puff Daddy, aka Puffy, aka Diddy, aka Love — after decades of stories and rumors about his violent behavior.
On Thursday, the hip-hop mogul’s former girlfriend, R&B singer Cassie (née Cassandra Ventura) accused him of rape and abuse in a bombshell lawsuit.
The suit was then settled Friday, just 24 hours after it was filed as Cassie said: “I have decided to resolve this matter amicably on terms that I have some level of control.”
Combs’ attorney Ben Brafman insisted the settlement was “no way an admission of wrongdoing.”
However, a well-placed industry source believes the suit may have pierced the seemingly impenetrable fortress around Teflon Puffy.
“This feels like the tip of the iceberg to me with Diddy,” the source told Pvnew. “And the rumblings from people in the music industry are pretty much ‘We knew, but we were scared to talk about it.'”
“A day after the settlement was announced Friday, the hashtag #SurvivingDiddy was trending on X, with a number of people predicting that more women will come forward with accusations against Combs, 54.
“Everyone in the music industry knows about Diddy’s insidious past,” the source said. “I think many were shocked at the level of detail exposed via Cassie — but mostly shocked it’s taken this long to come out.”
After the suit was made public, singer Aubrey O’Day, who was in the Puffy protegé group Danity Kane, wrote on Instagram: “Been trynna tell y’all for years.”
In the lawsuit, Cassie, 37, accused her ex of allegedly repeatedly raping her, physically abusing her, and forcing her to have sex with male prostitutes as he watched and masturbated in what he called a “Freak Off.” The two dated from 2007 to 2018.
Combs, the suit claimed, was prone to “uncontrollable rage” and “frequently” beat her so “savagely” that she needed to hole up in hotels for weeks at a time to recover privately.
Cassie claimed she has been diagnosed with memory loss allegedly linked to Combs having kept her compliant with opiates and alcohol, leading to substance abuse problems.
Upon learning that Cassie had a fling with rapper Kid Cudi while she and Combs were on the outs, she alleged, Combs may have blown up Kid Cudi’s car.
Brafman said Combs denied all the allegations.
In 2009, Combs allegedly pressured Cassie to get breast implants — then demanded the next day that celebrity surgeon Dr. Frank Ryan remove them because they were too big, despite warnings it could be harmful to do so soon.
“But Diddy was like, ”No, they’ve got to come out, call who you need to call, they’ve got to come out,'” a source told the Daily Mail Tuesday.
The Post has reached out to Combs’ rep about these allegations.
Reached by Pvnew, Cassie’s attorney Douglas Wigdor declined to further discuss the case or say if he is working with any other potential accusers.
But it’s hardly the first time Combs has been affiliated with violence.
In Dec. 1991, when Combs was 22 and an intern at Uptown Records, the tone was set for some of the violence that would follow him throughout his career when a charity basketball game he was overseeing with rapper Heavy D at a City University of New York gym in Harlem turned into a stampede that killed nine people.
A judge ruled that Combs and Heavy D, whose real name is Dwight Myers, were responsible for the tragedy, though the ruling had no legal effect on Combs or Myers. Combs later settled with at least one injured survivor. (“It remains clear that [plaintiff] Nicole Levy’s case is without merit,” Combs’ lawyer Luke Pittoni said at the time.)
He burst on the hip-hop scene in the mid-90s when it was dominated by the deadly feud between East Coast and West Coast artists — reaching a tragic peak with the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur, followed by the murder of Notorious B.I.G. six months later.
According to Gene Deal, who was Combs’ bodyguard at the time, Combs — who was Biggie’s best friend and signed to his Bad Boy Entertainment record label — could have ended up dead in the drive-by shooting that killed Biggie.
“Now, I went because I knew that somebody was going to die that night, somebody was going to get shot. I did everything in my power to stop it from being Puff, and it wasn’t Puff … The people that was bodyguarding Big didn’t do everything in their power to stop it from being Big — and that hurts me, even though it wasn’t my principle,” Deal told The Art of Dialogue earlier this year.
In 1999, Combs apparently acted like a mafioso when he didn’t get his way — assaulting then-president of Interscope Records Steve Stoute with a chair, a telephone and a champagne bottle, according to prosecutors.
Combs had wanted to cut a scene from a video in which he was featured, “Hate Me Now” by Nas, showing two men crucified on a cross, fearing it was blasphemous.
But the original assault charge was dismissed by prosecutors who accepted Combs’ guilty plea to the lesser charge of harassment and was sentence to a day of anger management — as The Post wrote at the time, “a violation no more serious than if Combs had merely yelled at Stoute on the street.”
“The wheels of friendship,” The Post wrote in 1999, “were reportedly regreased with a $500,000 payment from Combs to Stoute.”
That same year, Combs was at Club New York in Times Square with his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez and rap protégé Shyne when a shooting erupted.
Later that night, the group’s car were stopped by cops and they were charged with “criminal possession of a weapon and possession of stolen property.” All three were arrested, though Lopez was released after a reported 14 hours
Both Shyne and Combs were charged in connection with the incident. Combs, whose legal team included O.J. Simpson’s future attorney Johnnie Cochran, skated. Shyne was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Combs’ driver at the time, Wardel Fenderson, testified at the time that he’d been warned not to take the job because Combs was “very arrogant, very demanding, has a very, very hot temper and some acquaintances of a bad nature.”
Puff Daddy, as he was then known, was found not guilty and changed his name to P. Diddy. He eventually lost Lopez for good, as the couple announced their split on Valentine’s Day, 2001.
In an interview with Vibe magazine in 2003, Lopez said their romance was the first time she wasn’t with someone who was not faithful to her.
“I was in this relationship with Puff where I was totally crying, crazy and going nuts, it really took my whole life in a tailspin,” she said. “I never caught him but I just knew.
Lopez says that she and Combs split so often that he didn’t believe it when she left him for good in February 2001. ”I had to think, do I want to be home with kids in 10 years wondering where somebody is at three in the morning?”
Also in 1999, Detroit talk show host Rogelio Mills alleged that Combs and his entourage assaulted him after he asked about rumors linking the mogul to Biggie’s death.
On the stand, asked by his attorney what happened, Combs responded: “I just remember ending the interview.
The jury ruled in favor of Combs, a decision upheld on appeal.
A 2004 New York magazine profile reported that Baby Phat designer Kimora Lee Simmons “said something to Combs and he threatened to hit her.”
“I was pregnant! The moron!” said Simmons.
According to the story “Combs eventually got down on his knees in public to apologize” to Simmons.
In addition to Cassie’s claims that Combs threatened to blow up Kid Cudi’s car, the two rappers got into a 2012 fight at a Hollywood club.
During Paris Fashion Week in February of that year, Cassie’s lawsuit alleged, Combs “told [Cassie] that he was going to blow up Kid Cudi’s car, and that he wanted to ensure that Kid Cudi was home with his friends when it happened.”
“Around that time, Kid Cudi’s car exploded in his driveway,” the suit claims.
A spokesperson for Kid Cudi told the New York Times last week, “This is all true.”
Three years later, Combs was arrested on suspicion of assaulting his son Justin’s UCLA football coach Sal Alosi with a deadly weapon — a kettlebell — after Alosi yelled at the young man during practice.
The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office decided not to pursue felony assault charges.
Then a woman who worked as a private chef for Combs filed a sexual harassment lawsuit alleging that she was forced to serve him “post-sex meals while he was naked.” She also accused him of not paying her for overtime. The suit was quietly settled in 2019. At the time, a rep for Combs told TMZ: “This is a frivolous lawsuit by a disgruntled ex-employee who was fired for cause.”
At Clive Davis’ 2021 pre-GRAMMY gala, Diddy decided to call out the Recording Academy for a lack of acknowledgement and appreciation of rap and R&B categories.
However, former Bad Boy star Ma$e retorted on Instagram: “Your past business practices knowingly has continued purposely starved your artist and been extremely unfair to the very same artist that helped u obtain that Icon Award on the iconic Badboy label.”
Another industry source told Pvnew: “People feel that Sean screwed people over — rappers and hip hop talent view him having taken advantage of them. He was seen as the king, and there is a perception that he badly treated the princes and princesses of the next generation.”
