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      Combs Defense Seeks to Undermine Cassie’s Rape Allegation as Testimony Ends

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      The singer spent four days on the stand recounting what she described as an 11-year relationship in which she came to feel more like a sex worker than a girlfriend.Defense lawyers for Sean Combs pushed on Friday to undermine one of the most damaging allegations in the music mogul’s trial on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges — that he raped his longtime girlfriend, the singer Casandra Ventura, in 2018.On the last of four grueling days of Ms. Ventura’s testimony, Mr. Combs’s defense team pointed out inconsistencies in her recounting of when such an incident had occurred. They also noted that Ms. Ventura, an R&B singer known professionally as Cassie, never mentioned anything about an attack in a flurry of emotional breakup text messages that the couple exchanged soon afterward.The nature and history of the relationship between Mr. Combs and Ms. Ventura is central to the government’s case. Prosecutors have depicted the music mogul as a sexual predator whose employees helped stage marathon drug-fueled sessions, known as “freak-offs,” during which Ms. Ventura had sex with male prostitutes while Mr. Combs watched, and sometimes masturbated.Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and his lawyers have portrayed Ms. Ventura as someone who fell deeply in love, participated willingly in the freak-offs but then, bitter with jealousy, has recast the relationship as a grim 11 years of beatings, blackmail and coerced sex.In that vein, the defense questioned Ms. Ventura about consensual sexual intercourse she had with Mr. Combs about a month after what she said was a night when Mr. Combs raped her in her home. Ms. Ventura was already dating her now husband, Alex Fine, at the time of the consensual sex with Mr. Combs, and she testified that while together with Mr. Combs, she received, but didn’t answer, a FaceTime call from Mr. Fine.“Your now husband didn’t know that you were with Mr. Combs at the time, correct?” a defense lawyer, Anna Estevao, asked Ms. Ventura. She replied that Mr. Fine eventually found out about her rape allegation and the subsequent intercourse she had with Mr. Combs. Ms. Estevao said Mr. Fine punched a wall in response.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Takeaways From Cassie’s Final Day of Testimony in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial

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      Casandra Ventura, the singer known professionally as Cassie, ended four days of sometimes grueling testimony about being abused by Mr. Combs.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cassie Confronted by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Lawyer Over ‘Freak-Offs’ During Trial

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      During cross-examination, the defense team depicted Casandra Ventura as fully engaged in staging and participating in the marathon sex sessions she says were abusive.Lawyers for Sean Combs worked on Thursday in court to portray his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, as a willing and full participant in sex marathons with prostitutes, as they sought to undermine her harrowing account of an abusive, coercive relationship riddled with violence.Ms. Ventura’s credibility is central to the government’s case, in which they have charged Mr. Combs, the music mogul, with sex trafficking and racketeering. Earlier this week she told the jury of eight men and four women of how she had suffered through hundreds of degrading sexual encounters and many injuries out of a misguided attempt to please a man she loved.But on the fourth day of Mr. Combs’s trial, the defense tried to recast Ms. Ventura, a singer known professionally as Cassie, as not nearly the victim she had portrayed herself to be. During cross-examination, Anna Estevao, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, repeatedly had her read text messages in which she expressed graphic enthusiasm for their sexual encounters, including the now famed “freak-offs” involving paid escorts.“I’m always ready to freak off lolol,” Ms. Ventura said in a message from 2009.In another exchange from around the same time, Ms. Ventura expressed her excitement in graphically sexual 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.”Jurors gazed at the barrage of text messages, which were displayed on screens in front of them, sometimes leaning forward to get a closer look.Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges and his defense has argued that the government is trying to criminalize unconventional, but lawful, sexual relations between consenting adults. In her first two days on the stand, Ms. Ventura said that she might have feigned interest at times to avoid Mr. Combs’s anger, and she recited a litany of incidents in which she was beaten when she failed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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

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      On the first day of cross-examination, a defense lawyer asked Casandra Ventura about messages she wrote to the music mogul ahead of their sex sessions.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Expect From Cassie’s Cross-Examination at Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Trial

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      Lawyers for Sean Combs are expected to focus on moments of her agency in the relationship and on jealousy related to infidelities.Across two days on the witness stand, Casandra Ventura, a longtime girlfriend of Sean Combs, delivered hours of testimony about a relationship filled with harrowing physical abuse and meticulous control, and defined by the expectation that she would fulfill his sexual fantasies.Ms. Ventura, the government’s star witness, will now face questions from Mr. Combs’s lawyers. Some might even come directly from Mr. Combs, who has been passing notes to his legal team throughout the proceedings.The defense has acknowledged responsibility for domestic violence — including against Ms. Ventura — but has vehemently denied that his behavior warrants the charges against him of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.The lawyer expected to question Ms. Ventura is Anna Estevao, who has rarely been the lead voice for the team during court proceedings to this point. She faces the delicate task of challenging the testimony of a visibly pregnant woman who testified that years of physical violence and sexual coercion by Mr. Combs led her to such emotional distress that she considered suicide.Here are a few things we can expect from the cross-examination.The defense will try to highlight moments of agency.Mr. Combs is charged with sex-trafficking Ms. Ventura. To prove that, the government has to convince the jury that Mr. Combs forced or coerced her into sex parties with male prostitutes known as “freak-offs.”Ms. Ventura testified that during her relationship with Mr. Combs, she repeatedly followed his directions and felt powerless to do otherwise. But the defense is likely to try highlighting moments when she might have displayed agency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cassie Testifies Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Used Sex Videos as Blackmail

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      Ms. Ventura, Mr. Combs’s ex-girlfriend, said he threatened to use tapes of their sexual encounters, known as “freak-offs,” to control her behavior.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, told a jury in Manhattan on Wednesday that her life with Sean Combs had its moments, but was largely filled with beatings, threatened blackmail and even a rape.During more than five hours of testimony in Mr. Combs’s sex trafficking and racketeering trial, Ms. Ventura recounted how he had stomped on her in the back of his car and how she suffered a gash above her eye when he threw her against a bed frame.She also recounted how, after the pair had dinner in 2018, Mr. Combs raped her in her living room.“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she testified.At the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura said through tears that after she had broken up with Mr. Combs, the trauma remained and she enrolled in treatment for drug abuse. Even so, she said, she contemplated taking her life by walking into traffic. She said her husband stopped her.Ms. Ventura told the court she stayed with Mr. Combs despite beatings and other abuse partly because of the nagging, persistent fear that videos of their sexual encounters with male prostitutes, the hundreds of “freak-offs” that she said Mr. Combs enjoyed watching and recording, would be posted online.Hers was not idle anxiety based on what she viewed Mr. Combs might be capable of, she said, but the consequence of repeated threats he had made to use the material to damage her if she deviated from his wishes. In one case, she described sitting beside him on a flight when he displayed for her videos that she thought had been destroyed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cassie Says of Sean Combs Abuse: ‘You Treat Me Like You’re Ike Turner’

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      Casandra Ventura’s second day of testimony included her blunt response to the mogul about his pattern of physical abuse and details of her fear of blackmail.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, testified on Wednesday in the federal trial of Sean Combs, her former boyfriend and label boss, about living with the fear of going against his wishes — and especially his sexual desires.In her second day of testimony, Ms. Ventura said she went along with the increasingly extreme and frequent “freak-offs” demanded by Mr. Combs because she worried that he would respond with anger or physical violence and follow through on his threats to leak explicit videos of her in degrading sexual encounters.Mr. Combs is accused of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution, and the government contends that Ms. Ventura and others had been coerced into participating in freak-offs and other sexual encounters with Mr. Combs. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his lawyers have argued that Ms. Ventura, and other women who are part of the case, were willing participants and that his sexual arrangements were all consensual.Ms. Ventura testified that Mr. Combs would take videos of the freak-offs — marathon sex sessions — that she participated in and that he later threatened to release what she called “blackmail material.”During a 2013 flight from Cannes, France, she testified, Mr. Combs pulled up videos on his laptop of her in freak-offs, which she thought had been deleted. He threatened to release the videos to embarrass her.“I just felt trapped,” she said.During freak-offs, she said, Mr. Combs would grab her, push her down, kick her and hit her on the side of her head. At one point, she texted him, “You treat me like you’re Ike Turner,” referring to Tina Turner’s abusive husband and bandleader.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Are the ‘Freak-Offs’ at the Core of the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Case?

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      Casandra Ventura, the mogul’s former girlfriend, has described them as marathon sexual encounters that he directed, involving drugs and hired male prostitutes.The term first came to public awareness in November 2023, when the singer Cassie filed a lawsuit accusing Sean Combs, her onetime boyfriend and record label boss, of years of sexual and physical abuse: “freak-off.”According to the suit by Cassie, who was born Casandra Ventura, this was what Mr. Combs called the highly choreographed sexual encounters that he directed “to engage in a fantasy of his called ‘voyeurism.’” They involved costumes, like masks and lingerie. “Copious amounts of drugs,” including Ecstasy and ketamine. The hiring of male prostitutes. Mr. Combs watching and recording the events on a phone while he masturbated.Freak-offs have become a central part of the government’s case, which charges Mr. Combs with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual encounters with women were not consensual.In much-anticipated court testimony this week, Ms. Ventura — who is visibly pregnant with her third child — described the freak-offs in sometimes excruciating terms. During hours of testimony on Tuesday, she cried and occasionally dabbed her eyes with tissue.The first freak-off happened when she was 22, when Mr. Combs hired a male stripper from Las Vegas to come to a home that Mr. Combs was renting in Los Angeles, she testified. Ms. Ventura said she wore a masquerade-style mask and provocative clothing from a “sex store,” and that she and the man took Ecstasy and drank alcohol before they had sex and Mr. Combs watched.The freak-offs “made me feel worthless,” Ms. Ventura testified, “like I didn’t have anything else to offer” Mr. Combs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More