Four months after she gave harrowing testimony at Sean “Diddy” Combs’ criminal trial in New York, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura submitted a victim impact statement late Monday, urging a judge to hand the disgraced music mogul a sentence that reflects “the truths at hand that the jury failed to see.”
Ventura’s new three-page letter was filed along with prosecutors’ request that Combs be sentenced on Friday to at least 11 years and three months in prison for his recent conviction on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. At Combs’ eight-week trial, jurors found that he transported male escorts across state lines to engage in highly orchestrated sex marathons with Ventura and another ex-girlfriend who testified under the pseudonym Jane. The jurors acquitted Combs of his more serious charges of racketeering conspiracy and the alleged sex trafficking of Ventura and Jane.
“For four days in May, while nine months pregnant with my son, I testified in front of a packed courtroom about the most traumatic and horrifying chapter in my life. I testified that from age nineteen, Sean Combs used violence, threats, substances, and control over my career to trap me in over a decade of abuse. He groomed me into performing repeated sex acts with hired male sex workers during multi-day ‘freak-offs,’ which occurred nearly weekly,” Ventura alleged in her letter. “I was forced into lingerie and heels, told exactly how to look, and plied with drugs and alcohol so he could control me like a puppet. These events were degrading and disgusting, leaving me with infections, illnesses, and days of physical and emotional exhaustion before he demanded it all again. Sex acts became my full-time job, used as the only way to stay in his good graces.”
Ventura, 39, told U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian that when Combs, 55, requested a freak-off, she had no choice. “Refusing meant punishment — losing my car, my phone, or worse. He controlled every part of my livelihood and threatened to destroy my reputation by leaking sex tapes, a threat he repeated often,” she wrote. “When he believed I had wronged him or was not sufficiently responsive, he also threatened people around me and those close to me, including my family. I regularly worried that displeasing him meant putting my family and friends’ safety at risk.”
The singer claimed that beyond the alleged threats, Combs controlled her with brutal violence. “Over the nearly eleven years we were together, Sean Combs would hit me, punch me, stomp on my face, pull my hair, and throw my body to the ground and against the wall. The jury saw pictures of bruises on my back from Combs kicking me and saw the deep gash over my eye he caused when he slammed me into a bed frame,” she continued. “The entire courtroom watched actual footage of Combs kicking and beating me as I tried to run away from a freak-off in 2016. People watched this footage dozens of times, seeing my body thrown to the ground, my hands over my head, curled into a fetal position to shield me from the worst blows.”
Ventura wrote that she eventually became addicted to the drugs that she used to “numb” herself to the physical and emotional pain she was suffering. “While the defense attorneys at trial suggested that my time with Combs was akin to a ‘great modern love story,’ nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing about this story is great, modern, or loving — this was a horrific decade of my life stained by abuse, violence, forced sex, and degradation,” she said.
The “seemingly insurmountable level of trauma” she endured led her to thoughts of suicide, Ventura said. The artist credited intervention and support from her family for saving her.
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Ventura said that she still suffers from “nightmares and flashbacks” and continues to “require psychological care to cope” with her past. She wrote that she still worries that Combs or his associates will come after her and her family. Ventura added that although her family has moved out of the New York area, she keeps “as private and quiet as I possibly can because I am so scared that if he walks free, his first actions will be swift retribution towards me and others who spoke up about his abuse at trial.”
She added, “As much progress as I have made in recovering from his abuse, I remain very much afraid of what he is capable of and the malice he undoubtedly harbors towards me for having the bravery to tell the truth.”
Ventura scoffed at the claim by Combs’ lawyers that he is a changed man who now hopes to counsel others in the area of domestic abuse. “This disgusts me,” she wrote. “He is not being truthful. I know that who he was to me — the manipulator, the aggressor, the abuser, the trafficker — is who he is as a human. He has no interest in changing or becoming better. He will always be the same cruel, power-hungry, manipulative man that he is.” Ventura said that when she first sued Combs in November 2023, he denied her claims of abuse. It wasn’t until a video leaked to CNN showing Combs’ 2016 assault of Ventura inside Los Angeles’ now-shuttered InterContinental Hotel that he finally publicly apologized, she said.
“Thanks to the footage and my testimony, this is also something he will forever be associated with. For over a decade, Sean Combs made me feel powerless and unimportant, but my experience was real, horrific, and deserves to be considered,” she wrote. “While the jury did not seem to understand or believe that I engaged in freak-offs because of the force and coercion the defendant used against me, I know that is the truth, and his sentence should reflect the reality of the evidence and my lived experience as a victim.”
Ventura said that while she hopes for “justice and accountability,” she has learned “to not trust anything.” Still, she has some faith that Subramanian will issue a sentence that “considers the truths at hand that the jury failed to see,” she wrote.
In their separate sentencing memo filed last week, Combs’ defense asked for a sentence of no more than 14 months in prison. Subramanian will have wide latitude at Combs’ sentencing Friday. It’s not clear how he will rule, but on the day of the jury’s verdict, when many speculated that Combs’ acquittal on his top charges would lead to his immediate release on bail pending sentencing, the judge took a hard line. He denied the release on the basis that Combs’ defense voluntarily admitted during the trial that Combs was violent with Ventura and Jane.
Combs’ lead defense lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, explicitly told jurors in his closing argument that the defense wasn’t challenging the women’s claims of domestic violence. “In terms of owning, just as a matter of personal responsibility … owning the domestic violence, we own it. It happened,” Agnifilo told the panel in his final address on June 27. “If he was charged with domestic violence, we wouldn’t all be here having a trial, because he would have pled guilty — because he did that.”
In their own letter filed on Monday, Ventura’s parents urged the judge to consider the precedent the sentencing would set for future cases. “To sentence lightly in this case that involved such vicious abuses of our daughters’ body, safety and dignity is to dismiss her very existence,” her parents wrote. “To sentence lightly would also send a dangerous message. A sentence that is handed down in months instead of years, sends a message that such repulsive behavior can happen without meaningful consequence.”
From Rolling Stone US
