The first week of Sean Combs’s sex-trafficking trial was dominated by four days of searing testimony by Casandra Ventura, the singer known professionally as Cassie, who told the jury that he had raped and abused her and subjected her to degrading marathon sex sessions with male prostitutes known as “freak-offs.”
Ms. Ventura, who is eight and a half months pregnant, stepped down from the witness stand on Friday afternoon after a long and sometimes meandering cross-examination by lawyers for Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty.
Here are five takeaways:
Mr. Combs’s lawyers suggested she was a willing participant in the “freak-offs.”
In contrast to the prosecution’s questioning of Ms. Ventura, which traced a narrative of a troubled relationship from its origins until a painful collapse after years of abuse, the defense’s cross-examination frequently jumped back and forth in time. By zooming in on dozens of text messages from throughout her years in a relationship with Mr. Combs, his lawyers tried to paint a very different picture of the freak-offs.
In many of those messages, which could be flirtatious in tone or matter-of-fact in setting up logistics, his lawyers noted, Ms. Ventura appeared to express willingness, or even excitement, about the sexual encounters.
But Ms. Ventura pushed back, saying that she was just acceding to his requests. “I would say loving FOs were just words at that point,” she said, commenting on a 2017 text message chain about planning a freak-off, or “FO.”
The sometimes repetitive pattern of the cross-examination led to a complaint by prosecutors. In a letter to the judge early Friday, they said that the “inefficiency of cross-examination” raised the possibility of a mistrial if Ms. Ventura went into labor before the questioning was completed. The judge urged the parties to stick to a schedule of completing Ms. Ventura’s testimony by the end of the week, and it ended midafternoon Friday.
Cassie said she would gladly “give that money back if I never had to have freak-offs.”
During Ms. Ventura’s testimony, she revealed that Mr. Combs had paid her $20 million to settle a bombshell lawsuit she filed against him in November 2023.
Under questioning from Mr. Combs’s lawyers, she revealed a second settlement: with InterContinental, the company that owned the hotel where Mr. Combs assaulted her in 2016. She testified that she had reached an agreement with the company over the past month and that she expects to receive about $10 million.
The defense used those settlement figures to suggest that Ms. Ventura had been motivated to go public with her account of abuse in the relationship because she was experiencing “financial issues,” at a time when she and her family had moved into her parents’ home in Connecticut.
Ms. Ventura denied that she had been motivated by money problems. She said that she had used her parents’s home temporarily during a move to the East Coast.
When the prosecutor Emily A. Johnson got a chance to question her again, she asked whether she would give the millions back if it meant never having had to participate in the sexual encounters at the center of her testimony.
“I’d give that money back if I never had to have freak-offs,” Ms. Ventura said.
Cassie was mostly calm, but wept a few times on the witness stand.
Ms. Ventura remained largely dispassionate throughout her hours of testimony this week, speaking in a soft but firm voice as she recounted incidents like Mr. Combs’s violence and her experience of degrading incidents like being urinated on during freak-off sessions. In the witness box, she sometimes placed a hand on her belly as she shifted around or got up during breaks in testimony.
On the stand, she frequently dabbed her eyes with a tissue but wept on only a few, brief occasions. She cried when saying she had considered suicide years after leaving Mr. Combs, and toward the end of her testimony on Friday, when she talked about Mr. Combs beating her during freak-offs. A defense lawyer then asked if she needed a break. “You can continue,” she said.
Baby oil and drugs were found in the hotel where Mr. Combs was arrested last year.
The government’s fourth witness was Yasin Binda, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, who searched Mr. Combs’s room at the Park Hyatt hotel in Manhattan, where he was arrested in September 2024.
Mr. Combs had traveled to New York expecting to turn himself into the authorities. But he was arrested in the lobby. Inside his hotel room, Ms. Binda testified, she found baby oil, the lubricant Astroglide, a “mood lighting” device and two small baggies of pink powder. One tested positive for ketamine and the other for ketamine and MDMA.
She also found a medication bottle for a benzodiazepine with the prescription made out to Frank Black — an alias that Ms. Ventura testified that Mr. Combs used. Ms. Binda also testified that a fanny pack with $9,000 in cash was hanging off the bed.
What’s next in the case?
Much of Ms. Ventura’s testimony was focused on the government’s allegations that Mr. Combs’s sex-trafficked her throughout their yearslong relationship. But the case against him is much broader than that, accusing him of running a criminal enterprise in which he and some of his employees conspired to commit a series of crimes over two decades.
While questioning Ms. Ventura, the government laid the groundwork for trying to prove several of those crimes. Prosecutors also asked her to identify employees and associates of Mr. Combs who were asked to do his bidding.
As the case proceeds, the prosecution is expected to try to prove that an inner circle of bodyguards and high-ranking employees helped him commit crimes, including kidnapping, arson, drug violations and sex crimes. The jury is also expected to hear from at least two other women whose accusations of sexual coercion are at the heart of the government’s case.
The defense is expected to try to flesh out the argument they made in their opening statements, that Mr. Combs is a flawed and sometimes violent man but that he is not guilty of a racketeering conspiracy or sex trafficking.
Anusha Bayya contributed reporting from the courtroom.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
