Follow all of our Sean Combs trial coverage
Sean Combs’ ex-girlfriend returned to the witness stand Thursday and faced intense questioning over the night in January 2024 when she allegedly found herself in a Las Vegas hotel room with another world-famous rapper, a male escort and a group of other people. The rapper wasn’t identified by name, but Combs’ lawyer Teny Geragos referred to him as “an icon in the music industry.”
Geragos returned to the scene again and again, portraying it as another example of the so-called “swingers lifestyle” at the heart of Combs’ defense. At one point Thursday afternoon, Geragos quoted her client several times in rapid succession, saying Combs referred to the scene as “another man’s freak-off.”
The ex-girlfriend, identified as Victim-2 in Combs’ sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy indictment, said she ended up in the room after flying to Las Vegas on a private plane belonging to the unidentified rapper. She recalled taking the trip with a friend, saying Combs didn’t know about it. She had only recently confronted Combs with her “trauma” in the aftermath of Casandra “Cassie” Ventura’s 2023 sex trafficking lawsuit, so she and Combs were taking a break.
Testifying under the pseudonym “Jane,” the witness said the trip was to celebrate the birthday of the rapper’s girlfriend or wife. Echoing prior testimony, she described her surprise when the festivities included a male “entertainer” whom Combs had hired for their drug-fueled threesomes known as “hotel nights.”
Jane said she and Combs knew the escort sometimes traveled with the rapper and his significant other, but she was still taken aback when she saw him at the birthday dinner. She said the celebration moved to a private suite at Encore hotel, and the escort had sex with a woman while seven or eight people watched. She said the rapper, whom she agreed was “an icon” and a close friend of Combs, then approached her with “flirty banter.”
“He said something like he thought I was beautiful and always wanted to ‘blank’ me,” Jane testified. She also confirmed she flashed her breasts inside the hotel room at one point, and had been dancing around.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
The woman, who dated Combs between 2021 and 2024, said the other rapper and his partner also asked if she knew “anybody else in the lifestyle,” hoping she could recommend another male escort. Geragos pressed her on why the couple would ask her that. She said maybe the rapper suspected she and Combs engaged in “the lifestyle,” or maybe they picked up “that energy” from her.
The line of questioning was clearly important for the defense. Before the jury was seated, Combs’ defense team, Jane’s attorney and prosecutors had a nearly hour-long meeting to battle over the defense’s request to name the rapper in open court.
Later, addressing the judge while the jury waited outside, defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo said making more details about the Las Vegas hotel incident public was important because it could lead people who were in the room that night to come forward with more information.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey argued that naming the rapper wasn’t necessary and would only serve to “harass and intimidate” Jane. U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian said the defense could question Jane about the night but couldn’t publicly name the musician. The jury later saw a text message with the rapper’s name highlighted, but it wasn’t shown to the gallery.
Some of the tension spilled out of the courtroom on Thursday, with Geragos and Comey making a beeline out of the judge’s robing room and exiting the courtroom. Outside, a stressed-looking Geragos pointed to a list of Combs’ approved family members and friends allowed into the courtroom. She instructed a court security officer, “No matter who might come…,” and then walked out of earshot. Comey and Geragos then stood with a court officer, speaking in hushed tones for a few minutes, before the security officer left the floor. Amid the day’s commotion, Sean Combs’ youngest son Christian Combs appeared in the courtroom temporarily wearing a “Free Sean Combs” shirt.
In her opening statement, Geragos told jurors the evidence would show that Combs engaged in a “swingers lifestyle” with Ventura and Jane, “which is essentially just a fancier terminology for threesomes by adults.” She said the women willingly engaged in the “kinky sex” because they were in long-term relationships with Combs and loved him. She said Combs’ sex life was non-traditional, but it was “not evidence of sex trafficking,” as prosecutors allege in Combs’ indictment.
Over six days of testimony, Jane has tearfully recounted how her whirlwind, “head over heels” romance with the hip-hop mogul that began in early 2021 left her with extreme “trauma.” She said Combs introduced her to his predilection for “debauchery” with male escorts, and that she felt “obligated” to meet his demands.
On her first day of questioning, she described her first experience with a “hotel night,” saying it caught her off-guard, and she agreed to engage to please Combs. At first, she thought it would be a one-time, taboo-breaking experience to show her love for Combs. Instead, the experience opened a “Pandora’s box” of countless “hotel nights” that she felt helpless to stop despite repeatedly telling Combs that she only wanted to have sex with him, she testified.
According to prosecutors, Jane was predominantly sex trafficked by fraud. They say Jane was duped into continuing days-long hotel nights, also known as freak-offs, in the belief that Combs would then spend quality time with her afterward. But in the aftermath of the marathon sex sessions, the couple spent hours recovering from the excessive partying, and the meaningful one-on-one time that Jane craved with Combs never materialized, prosecutors allege.
In harrowing testimony, Jane also described Combs threatening to release intimate videos of her and turning violent at her home on June, 18, 2024, allegedly busting down four doors to get to her during a fight. She said he punched and kicked her repeatedly and then asked her to wear makeup to cover her injuries for a “forced” sex session with a male escort.
Geragos returned to the June 2024 physical altercation again Thursday. Jane said the escort who ended up joining them was the same one from the birthday party hosted by the unidentified rapper. She said Combs became suspicious, so she told him about the January 2024 trip to Las Vegas and the hotel room encounter with the escort. Combs was outraged. “How could you go to another man’s freak-off?” Combs allegedly demanded, according to Jane.
When her cross-examination ended, Jane resumed answering questions posed by prosecutors. Asked to describe Combs’ demeanor the night of June 18, Jane said it was “evil,” according to CNN.
Addressing the defense position that Jane was the initial aggressor that night, Comey asked Jane how she compares to Combs in terms of physical strength. “I don’t,” Jane replied. Comey also asked if Jane would return everything she ever received from Combs if she could go back and never engage in a single freak-off. “Yes,” she replied.
Throughout her time on the stand, Jane stiffened at any assertion that the heart of her grievance with Combs was really jealousy over the “quality time” he spent time with other girlfriends, who were being treated to designer gifts and luxury vacations.
Suggesting Jane was a possessive and materially motivated girlfriend, Geragos pointed to Jane’s texts where she complained how rapper Yung Miami (real name Caresha Brownlee) was flown on Combs’ private jet to the tropical islands of Turks and Caicos for her birthday, while Jane got a dinner at Nobu for her own birthday a few days earlier. Geragos pressed Jane on the $20,000 Combs invested in her swim line business, the $10,000 rent that Combs covered each month and the diamond jewelry, handbags, and two luxury Caribbean vacations she received.
Jane was adamant she loved Combs and only wanted to feel that her love was reciprocated. When Ventura filed her sexual abuse lawsuit against Combs in November 2023, Jane said she “fainted.” She said reading the “nightmare” filing was like reading her “own story.” Jane told jurors she’s still processing why she continued to date and participate in freak-offs with Combs until his arrest last September.
While Jane agreed with Geragos that she repeatedly got “back together” with Combs of her “own volition,” she explained her love for Combs — and the alleged “pressure” he applied — dominated her decisions to participate in freak-offs. She said their relationship “was built under a lot of emotional manipulation and pressure” and that she felt obligated “to fulfill my duties as a good girlfriend.” She also disclosed she felt entrusted with a “vulnerable” side of Combs after spending time researching Combs’ sexual interests, saying the term “cuck” was a “spot-on” descriptor for Combs.
While Jane spent her cross-examination on Tuesday reading aloud sexually explicit messages about male entertainers that she sent Combs — “[I’m] playing in this fantasy talk that I know that my lover likes,” she said — Jane was shown instances where she didn’t have to have freak-offs after she expressed hesitancy. She also read aloud loving messages she sent Combs in the days after the hotel nights, causing her to burst into tears.
When asked if she now regretted the freak-offs she “chose” to participate in, Jane said she resented Combs. Pressed further by Geragos, Jane explained she believes “resent and regret lie in the same feeling.” She added, “I resent him for knowing how much I loved him and how I couldn’t say no to him.”
Combs, 55, is being held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center and has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, transportation to engage in prostitution, and racketeering conspiracy. If convicted as charged, he could spend 15 years to the rest of his life in prison.
His high-powered attorneys say the one-time billionaire businessman may have been a bad boyfriend with a drug problem and a jealous streak, but they say his interest in “kinky sex” was not illegal. They say the two alleged sex-trafficking victims in the case were consenting, long-term girlfriends.
“You will see that these women are strong, capable, and they were in love with him. You will see that breaches of trust, infidelity, and jealousy are what drove the domestic violence you will hear about,” Geragos said in her opening statement. “You will see that alcohol and drugs played a major role in his temper. The evidence is going to show you a very flawed individual, but it will not show you a racketeer, a sex trafficker, or somebody transporting for prostitution.”
From Rolling Stone US
