Diddy’s Lawyers Work to Establish Cassie’s Agency in Freak-Offs

It was only about a half-hour into the cross-examination of Casandra Ventura that a lawyer for Sean Combs drew on messages the couple exchanged, in an attempt to establish one of the defense’s key arguments in the case: that Ms. Ventura was a willing participant in the sex marathons known as “freak-offs.”

Anna Estevao, the defense lawyer questioning Ms. Ventura on Thursday, presented a message the singer wrote to Mr. Combs in 2009, that read, “I’m always ready to freak off lolol.”

In another exchange from around that time, Ms. Ventura expressed her excitement in graphic terms, and he told her: “I can’t wait to watch you. I want you to get real hott.”

She answered: “Me too. I just want it to be uncontrollable.”

Conversations like those, which could involve both explicit flirtation and logistical planning about their meetings and preparations, were “somewhat typical” for the two, Ms. Ventura testified.

Those messages showed a very different side of the relationship than what Ms. Ventura described in the first two days of her testimony, under questioning by prosecutors. Over hours of sometimes excruciating testimony, she said that Mr. Combs had forced her to take part in “hundreds” of these episodes over about 10 years, and used violence and threats of releasing explicit videos from the freak-offs as what she called “blackmail materials.”

Mr. Combs, who is charged with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have vehemently denied that any of his sexual encounters were not consensual.