Takeaways From Cassie’s Opening Testimony in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial

[ad_1] Her testimony at occasions contained graphic descriptions of intercourse acts she mentioned she didn't consent to. Mendacity on the ground, “ready I couldn't simply get out of,” she mentioned an escort urinated on her at Mr. Combs’s route, till, choking, she put up her arms. “Ultimately Sean noticed me, and instructed him to cease,” she mentioned.

She mentioned she stayed to maintain Mr. Combs completely happy. Ms. Ventura, whose relationship with Mr. Combs’s was intermittent over a interval of greater than a decade, described falling in love with Mr. Combs and taking part within the freak-offs as a result of she wished to make him completely happy.

“Whenever you’re in love with somebody you don’t need to disappoint them,” she testified.

However because the years handed, she mentioned that, at the same time as he she nonetheless sought to please him, she acknowledged that he had develop into more and more abusive, beating her and orchestrating ever extra degrading periods that made her really feel like her profession was now not music however performing for Mr. Combs’s sexual satisfaction.

Mr. Combs’s legal professionals have depicted the sexual encounters as consensual and denied there was something coercive about them. However Ms. Ventura, in search of to clarify why she didn't finish the connection, described being fearful, not simply of Mr. Combs’s anger, however of his energy over her profession and the truth that he possessed movies of the freak-offs that could possibly be used to blackmail her.

The decide denied a request to downplay Ms. Ventura’s seen being pregnant. Ms. Ventura was all the time anticipated to be the prosecution’s star witness. Her November 2023 lawsuit accusing Mr. Combs of rape and repeated abuse over their decade-long relationship helped start the federal investigation that led to his indictment. Questions on her profession — why she launched just one album on Mr. Combs’s Unhealthy Boy label, after which largely vanished from the music business — and Mr. Combs’s affect on it have lengthy adopted her.

However Ms. Ventura was an much more dramatic determine on the stand than anticipated, testifying whereas within the third trimester of her newest being pregnant — thus far alongside that the protection requested the decide to contemplate having her seated within the witness field earlier than the jury entered so the visibility of her being pregnant wouldn't prejudice the jury towards Mr. Combs.