Tag: Docuseries

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images

More or less as soon as federal agents arrested Sean “Diddy” Combs in September 2024, the wheels started turning at the networks and streamers. At least nine investigative projects were announced, promising to probe the federal sex-trafficking charges against the music mogul and deliver new insight into the abuse that prosecutors say underpinned his business empire. The latest of these drops on January 27: The Fall of Diddy, a four-part docuseries from Investigation Discovery exploring Combs’s rise to the top of his industry and the collapse of a career allegedly built on intimidation, coercion, and sexual predation.

Like the other offerings in this category, The Fall of Diddy offers few answers to the many questions the allegations against Combs raise. But through interviews with people in his orbit — former staffers, childhood friends, colleagues, and musical artists — the series attempts to argue that Combs became so powerful, and so convinced of his own power, that he felt himself immune to consequences. “There are almost no lengths that Puffy won’t go to if he feels his ego has been hurt, if his pride has been hurt, if his demands haven’t been complied with,” says Mara S. Campo, a journalist and former anchor at Combs’s Revolt TV. That Combs has an explosive temper, which the smallest perceived slight can ignite, is a theme the docuseries’ producers flesh out with story after story about his domineering nature.

The rapper has denied all the allegations against him, and his lawyer offered the following statement to Variety: “These documentaries are rushing to cash in on the media circus surrounding Mr. Combs. The producers failed to provide sufficient time or details for his representatives to address unsubstantiated claims, many from unidentified participants whose allegations lack context. By withholding this information, they made it impossible for Mr. Combs to present facts to counter these fabricated accusations. This production is clearly intended to present a one-sided and prejudicial narrative. As we’ve said before, Mr. Combs cannot respond to every publicity stunt or facially ridiculous claim. He has full confidence in the facts and the judicial process, where the truth will prevail: The accusations against him are pure fiction.” The Cut has also contacted Combs’s representatives for comment.

The first episode of the series features recollections from Danyel Smith, formerly the editor of Billboard and Vibe magazines. Smith got to know Combs on a Vibe cover shoot in 1997 for which Smith and her crew cajoled the Bad Boy Records head into wearing angel wings. She says the styling decision apparently irritated Combs to the extent that — as Smith previously detailed in an essay for The New York Times Magazine — he started pestering her to show him the photo before it went to press. Smith says she repeatedly told him doing so would violate magazine policy; they didn’t preview covers for anyone. But then Combs showed up at the office, demanding to see her. Smith’s staff “shuttled [her] from office to office until the coast was clear,” she recalls in the doc. Ultimately, her managing editor bundled her into a cab to Brooklyn to get her out of the building — a series of events she said she learned about from her former co-workers, having blocked out the memory completely. What she does recall with perfect clarity is the phone call she received from Combs a few days later. Smith remembers him telling her “he would see me ‘dead in a trunk’ if I did not show him” the covers. She didn’t bend, but she did have to keep up a cordial relationship with him. “It was very difficult to work in the music media without having to deal with or work with or hang out with or negotiate with Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs,” she says. “It was impossible.”

Combs spent two formative years at Howard University in the 1980s and received an honorary doctorate in 2014. The school rescinded the degree in 2024, citing that it is “unwavering in its opposition to all acts of interpersonal violence.” But according to one unnamed alumnus — who appears on-camera totally in shadow — Combs was already abusing women even as an undergrad. The former student recalls a night in the 1980s when they heard a commotion outside their dorm. (This incident was previously described in a Rolling Stone investigation into Diddy’s alleged history of violence.) They say they cracked their window just enough to see Combs standing below, screaming at someone to “get your ass downstairs.” The former student says Combs then proceeded to remove his belt and began venting his rage on the building’s wall. When a woman — evidently the person Combs had been yelling at — came outside, he turned on her, they recall. Combs allegedly started whipping the woman with his belt, even as the student opened their window and shouted at him to stop. At that point, they continue, Combs shoved the woman into the building’s door and they couldn’t see what he was doing to her for the next few minutes. Eventually, Combs walked off, and even decades later, the source remains “absolutely nervous about sharing what I’ve seen him do to another human being.”

“From 2006 to 2012, nobody else spent more time with Puff than I did,” Combs’s former bodyguard, Roger Bonds, says in the docuseries’ third episode. Bonds alleges that he often saw Combs exercising violence against his partners, accusing his then-boss of going on multiday drug binges that left him especially erratic and paranoid. “Puff was definitely abusive toward Kim [Porter],” Bonds says of Combs’s late ex-girlfriend, with whom the rapper shares three kids. “I remember one time telling him, ‘I can understand you having a problem with one person, but when you have a problem with every woman you dealing with, then you’ve gotta look into yourself.’”

Bonds — who already spoke to the media about witnessing what he described as the mogul’s abusive patterns — also recalls one particularly severe instance in which Combs allegedly beat his ex Cassie Ventura outside a party on Sunset Boulevard in 2009. Bonds says Combs punched her “out of nowhere,” then started kicking her until she fell. Bonds claims he got in between them, then put Ventura in the back seat of his car and Combs in the front. The fighting continued until they reached Combs’s house, at which point, they went inside. “Next thing I knew,” Bonds says, “he came out and he said, ‘Get this bitch out my house.’” Ventura had clearly been crying, Bonds says; her hair was disheveled, and her face was swollen as if she’d been beaten. Shortly thereafter, Combs’s personal chef at the time, Jordan Cha’Taun, remembers Bonds telling her, “That dude went crazy on Cass again. I thought he was gonna kill her … he was beating the shit outta her.”

Speaking of Cha’Taun: As Combs’s personal chef between 2007 and 2010, Cha’Taun tells producers she unwittingly occupied a front-row seat for some of the rapper’s more combustible moments. “Puff would notoriously berate you, embarrass you, belittle you,” she says. Drawing on her old journal entries, Cha’Taun says she developed stress-induced alopecia during her time working for him. “I was having constant anxiety attacks and heart palpitations,” she says. “I saw a cardiologist, who said my body couldn’t handle the stress levels. He said to me, ‘If you keep this job any longer, within a year, you’ll be dead.’”

Cha’Taun shares that one particularly violent experience led to her departure. One day, she says, Combs came downstairs shouting, “I’m so fuckin’ tired of hearing about you and your fuckin’ attitude, and all you gotta do is cook the fuckin’ food!” She says he proceeded to get in her face, screaming at her from inches away and jabbing her in the forehead. He kept shouting and swearing at her, she continues, until she snapped and told him she quit. At that point, Cha’Taun says, Combs lunged at her and shoved her out the door. “I went flying outside of the doorway, and I ended up on my elbows and my butt,” she says. She wanted to sue, but was told by “the office” that “if you sue him, your career is over. You will be blackballed. He does have the power to do that, and he will do that.”

In December 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, along with the rapper Shyne, went to Club New York in Manhattan; both men would subsequently stand trial for allegedly opening fire into the crowd, and though Shyne was convicted, the jury acquitted Combs. But Natania Griffin, one of four people who suffered gunshot wounds that evening, reiterates to the producers what she told the court: that she saw Combs fire at her. She says she was on the dance floor when Combs and his entourage entered the V.I.P. section. Combs appeared to get into an altercation, and “next thing you know,” Griffin says, “we see pushing and shoving, the crowd is swaying, you hear angered voices.” She recalls watching Combs and Shyne make for the door and reach toward their waistbands. She saw both men with their guns drawn, she says, then saw “the muzzle flash — pow pow.” Griffin was shot in the face. “I was certain that I was going to be dead in that moment,” she says, “because I didn’t think a human could lose that much blood and still be alive.”

Wanita Denise Woodgett, known as D. Woods, met Combs on the set of his MTV reality show Making the Band in 2004 when he cast her in his girl group Danity Kane. According to Woodgett, Combs would insert himself and his cameras into fittings so he could watch the bandmates change. He would relentlessly disparage her for her weight and single out each of the girls for criticism on a rotating basis, but Woodgett claims Combs showed special attention to Aubrey O’Day. “I saw a lot of things that he would email her,” Woodgett recalls. “Very sexual in nature, very … overtly pornographic things that he wanted to do to her.” O’Day herself has not commented on the docuseries, but Woodgett says she believes Combs ultimately fired O’Day from the band because “she wouldn’t submit to his advances” and “he wanted her to feel powerless and question her worth.” Woodgett believes Combs fired her for the latter reason too: It was another opportunity to strike at her self-esteem.

Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones was thrilled at the opportunity to help produce Combs’s 2023 The Love Album: Off the Grid, at least at first. But his boss’s mercurial nature quickly colored the experience. On one occasion, Jones recalls Combs asking how much the producer planned to charge for his work, before biting back with “You don’t charge me no money. I’m Puff Daddy. I’ll eat your face off.” On another, Jones says, the team was working in the studio when Combs abruptly decided to move operations to his bathroom. Once there, Jones remembers, “He strips himself in front of us and jumps right into the shower, but he’s looking directly at me. I felt myself getting a pat on my butt.” The incident made him uncomfortable enough that he brought it up with Combs’s chief of staff, who dismissed the complaint as “just his way of showing he likes you.”

Jones says another of his assignments involved recruiting “multiple choices of women” from strip clubs and bringing them back to Combs’s homes for sex with the rapper. Jones recalls waking up next to sex workers on several occasions without any memory of what had happened the night before. Jones tells the producers he thinks his boss spiked his drinks: “Everybody was sippin’ on the Puffy juice.” Jones already made many of these allegations in a $30 million lawsuit accusing Combs of sexual assault, grooming, and drugging, all of which Combs’s attorneys have described as “a shameless attempt to create media hype and extract a quick settlement.”

One of the many women to have filed lawsuits against Combs is Thalia Graves, who has said in court filings that she was a 25-year-old single mother in a custody battle when she first met the rapper. In the docuseries, Graves explains that she was dating another Bad Boy executive in 2001 when she received a call from Combs asking if they could meet to discuss her partner’s performance. According to Graves, Combs picked her up in an SUV and handed her a glass of white wine. “By the time we got to Daddy’s House Studio, I was feeling a little woozy, lightheaded,” she recalls. Once they entered the building, she says, Combs led her to an unfamiliar room and sat her down on the couch. “The next thing I remember was I was slammed on a pool table,” she says. “I was naked … and my hands were tied behind my back” with what felt like plastic bags. Graves then noticed Combs, who she said was slathering a menthol-scented substance on his genitals: “Puffy came up behind me and went straight in my anus, to where I ended up throwing up on the pool table.” She tried to kick him as her legs dangled over the side of the table, she says, but Combs kept going; she says he eventually raped her vaginally as well.

She alleges that she blacked out again, and when she came to, she hastily got dressed and ran out of the building, calling a cabdriver she knew to come pick her up. Several days later, Graves claims, Combs called to threaten her, which prompted her to leave New York City. “Puffy has ways of finding things out and making things happen,” Graves tells the camera. In November 2023, she says, she learned from her ex-boyfriend that Combs had captured the whole thing on film.

Model and actress Kat Pasion told producers she dated Combs from 2018 to 2019. During their relationship, she says, she watched him devolve from a supportive and attentive partner to a jealous, suspicious “demon.” In one instance, she says, she snapped back at him when he made a snide remark, and he pretended to throttle her — “hovering” his hand around her throat while staring her dead in the eye. Pasion recalls Combs making bizarre comments from time to time, including when he walked in on her watching an R. Kelly documentary. She remembers him telling her, “There’s a little R. Kelly in all of us,” but says she didn’t witness any physical violence until 2021.

While Combs was working on the Love album, Pasion visited him in Los Angeles and found him mostly in good spirits — until their last night together. Pasion says she went to bed, but Combs allegedly stayed up snorting tusi, a psychoactive blend known as pink cocaine. He woke her up and started demanding “x, y, and z from me,” she says. “He forces himself —,” Pasion cuts herself off, saying that she didn’t want to go into specifics but that the experience was “scary” because “his whole tone, everything changed … it wasn’t consensual.”

“The person who came out of that bathroom and woke me up was someone that was — I didn’t even recognize him, and I knew I was never going to see him again and I never wanted to remember or repeat what happened,” she continues. Two weeks later, she says, he called her and threatened to have her deported back to Canada, warning her, “You don’t know what I can do to you.”