Singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, a former girlfriend of Sean “Diddy” Combs and a key witness in the federal sex-trafficking and racketeering trial of the music mogul, returned to the witness stand in New York City on Wednesday morning, as the high-profile trial entered its third day.
Ventura, who is eight and a half months pregnant, began her second day of testimony by revisiting the hotel surveillance footage of her 2016 assault by Combs. She said Combs was yelling at her and then threw a vase at her in the elevator lobby.
“I didn’t get hit. I remember it hitting the wall. He was yelling at me and threw it at me,” Ventura said, adding that Combs told her “that I wasn’t going to leave him there. That I couldn’t.”
The jury was then shown two photos of Ventura, that she says she took of herself after the hotel assault where she is seen with a swollen lip. She said she also had a black eye beneath her sunglasses.
The jury was also shown text messages between Combs and Ventura after the assault, where she told him “you’re sick for thinking it’s OK to do what you did to me” and told him that she “had a black eye”.
Ventura was asked again about the various escorts she says she was forced to hire, with Combs’s money, to take part in increasingly extreme sexual scenarios over marathon sessions Combs called “freak-offs” – she has named more than a dozen since her testimony began on Tuesday.
“That was just my job, really. It was expected of me,” she said. She told the court that if she said no to a freak-off or told Combs she didn’t want to do it, “it would be a problem, we’d end up fighting” adding that violence was “always a concern if we weren’t agreeing on something”.
In a 2016 text message shown in court, Combs is seen asking Ventura to have a “proper” freak-off without the use of ketamine. Combs claimed that a “successful” freak-off was only “when we remember”, while Ventura noted that she preferred ketamine during “freak-offs” because “it was very dissociative.”
Combs would often threaten to release the videos he had of Ventura taking part in the freak-offs, she said. She noted that on her birthday one year, Combs reminded her of the videos he had in his possession after she refused to leave her friends to go with him to a freak-off.
“I feared for my career, my family … It is horrible and disgusting, no one should do that to anyone,” she said. “It could ruin everything I worked for, make me look like a slut … I wasn’t supposed to be on those videos. I didn’t want to be in them.”
“I felt trapped,” she told the court. “Whatever was going to not make him angry or threaten me I was going to do.”
Ventura testified that she would ask Combs to delete videos of freak-offs that were on his phone and that he would tell her he did. She would later see the videos still on his phone.
Ventura said she experienced persistent urinary tract infections due to the constant freak-offs. but was still forced to take part even when the pain was “horrible”.
After such sessions, Ventura said that she felt “empty” emotionally and “gross”. Sometimes, she said she would leave freak-offs if she felt “unsafe”, but would often return to the hotel room because Combs or one of his employees would find her and bring her back.
During some freak-offs Combs would “hit me on the side of the head” and kick Ventura, which she said would prompt escorts – who could hear the violence occurring – to ask her afterward if she was OK.
On Combs’s violence outside the freak-offs, Ventura said there was an instance in 2013 when she was in her apartment and Combs tried to attack her. Her two friends, who were in the apartment at the time, “jumped on his back” to protect her. Combs was still able to throw Ventura down, cutting her eyebrow on the corner of her bed.
Combs took her to a plastic surgeon’s office in Beverly Hills to fix the cut; Ventura later texted him a photo of the wound “so you can remember”.
Ventura told the court that sometimes she fought back against Combs, but that fighting back would lead to “escalating” the fight, which sometimes made “him more violent”. Multiple employees of Combs saw him abusing her over the years, she said, including members of his security team, management and assistants. Ventura even noted that one assistant told her that they quit because of how Combs treated her.
She also said Combs, who is 17 years her senior and first met her when she was 19, would often show up unannounced to her apartment.
On Wednesday afternoon, Ventura said that Combs was violent with others as well as her, something the jury can expect to hear more about from later witnesses for the prosecution. She told the court that he would assault some of his employees, both male and female, and had also attacked friends of hers, including punching people and throwing them into furniture. He dangled a friend of hers over a balcony, she said.
The 38-year-old testified on Tuesday that during her decade-long on-and-off relationship with Combs, she endured years of abuse.
Ventura filed a lawsuit in 2023 against Combs, accusing him of physical and sexual abuse. Though the two settled that lawsuit for an undisclosed sum, it prompted a federal investigation that led to Combs’s arrest in September 2024.
Combs faces charges including racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has pleaded not guilty and denied all allegations.
The trial, expected to last at least eight weeks, is not being televised.
If convicted, Combs, who has been jailed since his arrest last year, could spend the rest of his life in prison.
In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.
