Jury selection is underway for the sex trafficking and racketeering trial of Sean 'Diddy' Combs. The media mogul has pleaded not guilty to all criminal charges against him. But for the past 18 months, Combs has also faced an onslaught of civil lawsuits that paint a pattern of physical and sexual abuse closely matching his criminal indictment.
His ex-partner, the musician Cassie Ventura, was the first to come forward with a November 2023 lawsuit that sent shockwaves through pop culture — and may have opened the doors for the federal investigation that landed Combs in custody.
Ventura met Combs when she was 19 and he was 37. The following year, the R&B singer signed to Combs' label, Bad Boy Records, and released her debut album, Cassie. In her lawsuit, Ventura said that the pair's professional relationship soon turned personal. Combs allegedly began exerting control over all aspects of her life, luring her into a romantic relationship which Ventura said became violent and abusive for over a decade. In her lawsuit, she accused Combs of forcing her to take illicit substances, raping her, forcing her to engage in sex acts with male sex workers and frequently beating her.
Combs denied the allegations, and he and Ventura settled out of court for an undisclosed amount within a day of the lawsuit being filed.
"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," Ventura said at the time in a statement to The New York Times.
The New York Adult Survivors Act was a law that gave alleged victims of sexual violence a one-year window, from November 2022 to November 2023, to file civil claims even after the statute of limitations had lapsed. It was part of a bigger wave of similar "lookback window" legislation around the country passed in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement.
"We know that a lot of people who experience abuse, especially sexual assault, tend to come forward years after the fact. Some never come forward, and there's so many reasons for that. There's shame. There's fear of retribution," says Carolin Guentert, a civil law attorney specializing in sexual violence cases. "During the #MeToo movement, we saw that people were talking about things that happened decades ago, and only once there was the right cultural moment for people to speak out about this and more people to come forward to back them up did people feel comfortable."
Overall, more than 3,000 lawsuits filed were during the one-year period — and Guentert says they grew considerably in the weeks and days leading up to the deadline, in great part because it took months for both alleged victims and attorneys to understand how the law applied to their cases. Ventura's lawsuit was filed a week before the New York Adult Survivor's Act ended, and on the last day of the lookback window, two more women filed lawsuits against Combs.
Ventura's lawsuit also cited another key piece of legislation. New York City's Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law provided a two-year lookback window for alleged victims of violence committed against them because of their gender. Under that statute, several more women and men filed civil lawsuits against Combs. Although all of the civil lawsuits against Combs are separate from the criminal law system, it's highly possible that Ventura and the other alleged survivors who filed claims opened the floodgates for a criminal investigation.
"Cassie's lawsuit detailed extremely troubling things in a moment where high profile sex cases were important to the U.S. attorney," says criminal law professor Aya Gruber. "The combination of it being such a high profile person, such salacious allegations, and coming at a moment when sex trafficking is incredibly salient to the public — the U.S. attorney could perk up and be interested in following this one out of the many cases that were being filed under this [law]."
The U.S. District Attorney's office did not respond to NPR's questions about whether Ventura's lawsuit sparked its criminal investigation. But in the fall of 2023, Combs was in the midst of a professional victory lap, which included receiving a Global Icon Award at the MTV Video Music Awards, getting a key to the city of New York from Mayor Eric Adams and obtaining a Grammy nomination for his record The Love Album: Off The Grid. Less than a week after the hip-hop mogul received that recognition from the Recording Academy, Ventura — who Combs had thanked while accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from BET just a year prior— filed her lawsuit.
In March of 2024, federal law enforcement raided several of Combs' properties. Two months later, CNN published hotel surveillance footage that showed Combs violently kicking and dragging Ventura, which will be admitted as evidence during his upcoming trial. In September, Combs was arrested and indicted on criminal charges that mirror and expand on Ventura's allegations. Since then, dozens more civil lawsuits have been filed against Combs, and it's likely that some of those alleged victims will be called to testify during his criminal trial. Guentert is hopeful that the attention around Ventura's lawsuit and the trial could help advocate for more lookback legislation in the future.
"My personal hope is that more [lookback windows] open and that they're open permanently because even just that one short window of one year wasn't enough for a lot of people," she says. "I'm sure that there are so many more people out there who have potential claims against their abusers who didn't have a chance to bring their case during that window."
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