54-year-old Sean Combs, who as founder of the famous label Bad Boy Records helped to make hip-hop mainstream, organized sex parties for years, so-called freak-offs. Combs told talk show host Conan O’Brien in 2002 that at his parties the doors were locked and the heat was turned up so that the (famous) attendees would sweat and get drunk faster. „It’s a little kinky.”
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Various artists, including actor Ashton Kutcher, singer Usher and the celebrity Kardashian family, have sometimes revealed something about Combs’ parties over the past twenty years, but otherwise what happened behind the closed doors remained a secret. His annual ‘white parties’ were known as the place to be. At those big parties he brought together the rich white elite, the old money, and the new hip-hop elite. In 2001, Combs called himself in The Independent ‘The Great Gatsby’. That he next to this white partieswhich also organized sex parties, remained under the radar for a long time.
After Comb’s ex-girlfriend Cassandra Ventura (better known as singer Cassie) accused him of rape and years of abuse in November 2023, another three thousand people reported to the police. Of those complaints – from the period 1991 to the present – sufficient evidence was provided in 120 cases to file a civil case against Combs. During a raid on his house, the police found weapons, a thousand bottles of baby oil and four hundred dildos.
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Of the 120 accusers, 25 were minors at the time of the abuse they accuse Combs of. Combs is said to have filmed the abuse of dozens of men, women, boys and girls as possible blackmail material. The youngest victim was nine years old at the time of the abuse. The case against Combs is therefore one of the largest MeToo cases ever, although Combs has so far pleaded not guilty and dismissed the prosecutors as ‘sickening money-grabbers’. Rival rapper 50 Cent sold the rights to a self-produced documentary about Combs’ misconduct to Netflix in May, titled Diddy do it?. The judge denied Comb’s $50 million bail request.
Mysterious
The lack of information and the scale of the case also means that numerous rumors are being spread online – making the image all the more important. This is also known by the victims’ lawyer, Tony Buzbee, who stated at a press conference: “The biggest secret in the entertainment industry, which was actually not a secret at all, has finally been revealed to the world. The wall of silence has now been broken.”
The US Court of Appeal is treating the case as a so-called RICO case. The RICO law (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization), under which many mafia families have been convicted, is used in the US to unmask criminal organizations. The prosecutor’s burden of proof then lies on patterns, rather than on individual acts.
Superhuman proportions
Even though the ‘freak offs’ were a secret, the ‘Diddy Parties’ were part of the celebrity culture in America. If you were invited to Combs you would have made it. But now online speculation about the parties could have real consequences for stars’ reputations. For example, an old, emotional interview of Justin Bieber with Apple Music from 2020 is circulating on social media, in which he talks about the young superstar Billie Eilish (then 18 years old). “I just want to protect her. I don’t want her to have to go through the same things I did.” That video is now being shared as if it were about Combs.
When Bieber broke through at the age of fourteen, he had millions of teenage fans overnight – ‘beliebers’. Combs, 24 years his senior, immediately established himself as a ‘big brother’. The two were and worked together a lot for years, as a video from 2009 circulates, where Combs spends “48 hours” with Bieber in his house. Bieber has not publicly commented on the matter. On Bieber’s Instagram page, numerous fans are commenting with messages expressing pity for Bieber, assuming he is also a victim of Combs, something that has not been confirmed.
Trump on Harris
Other celebrities associated with Combs are seen in a negative light. For example, millions of people unfollowed singer Beyoncé on Instagram after a conspiracy theory circulated that she, Combs and her husband Jay-Z, would control the music industry. One of the pieces of evidence: all three of their birthdays are on the fourth of the month.
Fake news is now also being used in the battle for the American presidency. Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris of attending Combs’ sex parties, sharing a photo of the Democratic presidential candidate and Combs together. The photo is fake, but was accompanied by the text “Kamala Doing the Diddy?”, and has already been shared tens of thousands of times.
On Wednesday, October 9, an American judge will determine the further course of the case. Combs faces a possible sentence of 15 years in prison.
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