Jury hears ‘freak off’ details to open Diddy sex trafficking trial

MANHATTAN (CN) — Entertainment mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs and his inner circle used a pattern of “lies, drugs, threats and violence” to coerce women into drug-fueled sexual rendezvouses with male prostitutes while he watched and taped, federal prosecutors said during opening arguments on Monday morning.

“Kidnapping, arson, drugs, sex crimes, bribery and obstruction,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson told jurors. “These are just some of the crimes that the defendant and his inner circle committed again and again.”

Combs, 55, is standing trial on a five-count indictment charging him with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.

The Bay Boy Records founder, who has been held at a federal jail without bail since his September 2024 arrest in a New York City hotel, wore a light-colored sweater on top of a white collared shirt, with khaki pants.

At the center of the sex trafficking conspiracy claims are so-called “freak off” extended sex parties since as early as 2004, which prosecutors say Combs manipulated female victims into participating in “as part of his pattern of abuse.”

Johnson told jurors Combs and his inner circle supplied women with the drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy or molly, which made the participants “more uninhibited and sexually aroused."

Prosecutors claim the “freak offs” took place at luxury hotels across the country, and involved the coordinated transportation of commercial male escorts hired by Combs to have sex with women while he watched, masturbated and sometimes recorded.

Johnson told jurors they will be shown some of explicit videos Combs recorded and later used as blackmail material against the women in the tapes. “You will see them put on a performance high on ecstasy, where they pretend to enjoy themselves, because that is what the defendant said he wanted."

Combs directed every detail of these sexual performance in dark hotel rooms, prosecutors said, including demands that the women dress in lingerie, wear tall platform heels and have manicured white nails.

According to the indictment, Combs and the victims typically received IV fluids to recover from the physical exertion and drug use — including ketamine, ecstasy and GHB — during the marathon sexual exploitation.

Prosecutors said Combs deployed a loyal inner circle of bodyguards and close confidants, who helped for facilitate the hotel sex parties and “closed ranks” to handled damage control covering up evidence of the alleged crimes.

Central to the case is the March 2016 video showing Combs violently hitting and dragging his then-girlfriend, R&B singer Cassie Ventura, in a hallway of the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles. Prosecutors say Combs and his chief of staff paid a $100,000 bribe in cash hotel security to bury surveillance footage of the violent incident.

Combs sat stone-faced, with his hands clasped across his lap, while prosecutors described the alleged physical abuse and sexual coercion leveled at Cassie. “Time and again, the defendant hit Cassie in the head, threw her to the floor and dragged her by the hair … stomped repeatedly on her face,” Johnson told jurors.

“Cassie will tell you how she felt like she was choking when the defendant made an escort urinate in her mouth, and how she overdosed during a ‘freak off’ when she still had an open wound on her face from the defendant’s most recent assault,” Johnson said.

The violence recorded on the video footage of the Cassie attack weighed heavily on multiple judges’ decisions to deny bail to Combs, keeping him detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since his arrest.

Combs is also accused of physically beating another woman, who will testify under the pseudonym “Jane,” when she hesitated to participate in the extended “freak offs.”

“You’re not gonna fuck up my night,” prosecutors claim Diddy told her, directing her to hide a black eye with makeup before having sex at a hotel with one of the hired male escorts.

Jane is expected to testify about she wanted the hired escorts to wear condoms, but many times the Combs did not let them.

Cassie, who is currently pregnant with her third child, is expected to testify during the first week of the trial.

Combs’ defense conceded to jurors there was domestic violence fueled by “primal jealousy,” but insisted he is “simply not guilty” of the federal racketeering and sex trafficking counts he has been charged with in the case.

“Domestic violence is not sex trafficking,” defense attorney Teny Geragos repeated during opening statement. “Had he had been charged with domestic violence, we would not be here.”

“This is a case about Sean Combs’ private, personal sex life, which has nothing to do with his lawful businesses,” Geragos told jurors. “The government can say over and over again that this is not about his private sex life, but the evidence will show you that it is.”

Combs’ defense argued the so-called “freak offs” were actually consensual threesomes with “willing” partners as part of Combs’ non-monogamous “swingers lifestyle.”

Geragos said the admitted episodes of anger and domestic violence were principally caused by “jealousy or drugs.”

“The role of jealousy is critical here and it’s pervasive,” she said.

Geragos conceded that Combs paid the $100,000 bribe to the Los Angeles hotel staff to make the surveillance video of the Cassie assault, solely for publicity reasons, not to cover up or obstruct any evidence of a crime.

The first witness called by prosecutors on Monday was Israel Florez, a former security director at the InterContinental Hotel, who responded to Combs and Cassie’s hallway spat at the hotel in 2016.

Florez, currently a Los Angeles police officer, testified he accompanied the pair back to their hotel room. He said Combs gave him a tall stack of cash that he interpreted as “pretty much” a bribe to keep quiet about the couple’s fight that had spilled out of their room.

During Florez’s testimony, jurors were shown the hotel’s silent surveillance video showing Cassie brutally assaulted and dragged on the floor near the elevator lobby.

Florez said he recorded additional iPhone videos of the hotel security footage because he thought his wife wouldn’t believe him if he just told her what he’d seen at work that day.

Later on Monday afternoon, prosecutors called Daniel Phillip, a male dancer who was hired by Cassie to show up the Gramercy Park Hotel ostensibly to perform a striptease for a group of women at a bachelorette party.

Phillip testified Cassie handed him around $4,000 in cash, far in excess of the $200 required by his company upon his arrival as a private dancer, and asked if he would give her a baby oil massage.

He testified Combs sat in a corner and masturbated while the dancer and Cassie had sex, a pattern they recreated at different locations in Manhattan, including the Jeremiah Essex House, the InterContinental, Combs’ apartment on 56th Street and Cassie’s home on the Upper West Side.

Phillip described Combs initially wearing white robe with a bandana concealing his face and, but said he recognized Combs as soon as the rapper-producer spoke.

“He told me he was in exporting and importing,” Phillip recalled Combs telling him.

He said Combs took a cell phone picture of his driver’s license. “He said it was for insurance purpose, just in case,” Phillip testified. “I understood it to be that he was threatening me.”

Phillip testified he began experiencing erectile dysfunction around the couple after he first witnessed Combs violently hit Cassie into submission.

Phillip said he was shocked by the violence but did not intervene out of fear of retribution by Combs.  “My thoughts were that this was someone with unlimited power,” he testified. “And chances are that, even if I did go to the police, I might still lose my life.”

Cross-examination of Phillip will continue Tuesday morning.

Combs’ mother and six grown children sat together in the second row of the courtroom gallery on the opening day of the trial.

Jury selection in the case was finalized earlier on Monday morning. The 12-person jury is composed of eight men and four women, while the six alternates are made up of four women and two men.

The trial is expected to run up to eight weeks into early July.

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