NEW YORK (AP) — Sean “Diddy” Combs’ recent ex-girlfriend told Combs that she cried for three days after reading R&B artist Casandra “Cassie” Ventura’s 2023 lawsuit against the music mogul, a case that described hundreds of drug-laced marathon sex sessions with Combs and other men as “horrific encounters.”
The woman, who is known in court by the pseudonym Jane, testified Monday that she felt like she was “reading my own sexual trauma” as she read the lawsuit, which was settled within a day for $20 million.
She read aloud in Manhattan federal court a text message that she sent Combs three days after the lawsuit was filed in November 2023. She said that she had been crying for three days and felt nauseated.
She said three pages of the lawsuit addressing what Cassie referred to as “freak-offs” and what Jane has called “hotel nights” followed her experience with the Bad Boy Entertainment founder “word for word, exactly my experience.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey raised the subject of the lawsuit as Jane testified for a third day about her experiences with Combs for over three years until his arrest last September.
Cassie testified for four days earlier in the trial, saying she engaged in the weekly sexual performances as Combs mostly watched or filmed her sexual activities with male sex workers in sessions that often lasted for days. Cassie dated Combs for nearly 11 years, ending in 2018.
Combs has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges that could put him in prison from 15 years to life if he is convicted.
Prior to bringing up Cassie’s lawsuit on Monday, Comey elicited from Jane that she had protested the way Combs was treating her in the weeks before Cassie sued.
She read aloud for the jury hundreds of text messages that she had exchanged with Combs, including some in which she complained that he seemed to be forcing her into the sexual encounters by threatening to take away her Los Angeles home. He had begun paying for the residence months earlier.
She pleaded with him to recognize the damage the sex marathons were doing to her, writing: “I am not an animal.”
Jane’s testimony was expected to fill the bulk of the trial’s fifth week, as prosecutors move closer to finishing the presentation of their evidence before the defense gets its turn.
As in her previous two days on the stand last week, Jane became emotional and cried briefly on Monday, but was mostly composed as she discussed her experiences with a man she said she loved.
She acknowledged that she had reviewed some of the sex sessions with prosecutors prior to beginning testimony last Thursday. Comey asked her what she saw on them.
“I saw me,” she responded, before adding: “following a pattern.”
She added that with the “majority of these tapes it was like the same show over and over again.”
Jane said that after she expressed her frustrations and desire to only have sexual relations with Combs, the verbal fights between them would sometimes be resolved when he would say all the things she wanted to hear and promise to spend time with her without a “hotel night.”
Then, she said, when she saw Cassie’s lawsuit, “I almost fainted.”
