As Sean Combs’ ‘Love’ Era Began, New Accusers Say He Was Still a ‘Demon’
On a balmy weekend last September, Sean Combs returned to Harlem to roam his old neighborhood with four of his seven children. He reveled in the attention from passersby who gasped and honked as the billionaire hip-hop mogul chatted and posed for pictures. Perhaps for a moment, he could pretend the most damaging year of his life hadn’t happened, that his former long-term partner Casandra “Cassie” Ventura had never filed the crushing sexual-abuse civil lawsuit against him in November 2023 that triggered his personal and professional implosion.
More from Rolling Stone
After spending the past year largely out of the spotlight in the comfort of his massive Miami Beach compound — one of two homes raided by Homeland Security officials last March — Combs was suddenly seen sunbathing in Central Park and traipsing around the city. As dusk approached on Monday, Sept. 16, he made a pit stop at the upscale Park Hyatt hotel, where premium suites run as high as $7,000 a night.
Combs was planning on heading back out that evening to look for a more permanent residence in the area. He was aware the Southern District of New York’s criminal investigation into his activities was well underway, and he was ready to turn himself in to avoid a dramatic, guns-blazing arrest, his lawyer said. But seconds after he crossed the lobby threshold, two plainclothes federal agents approached him, holding a 14-page criminal indictment that accused him of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution. The next day, Combs stood in front of a U.S. district judge and pleaded not guilty, wearing the same rumpled T-shirt and sweatpants he’d been hauled off in the night before.
The music executive had nothing to hide, Combs’ lead defense attorney, Marc Agnifilo, said at his initial bail hearing. The lawyer claimed Combs’ relationship with Ventura was “toxic” at times but nowhere near what prosecutors claimed. Agnifilo didn’t specifically name Ventura, but it was clear she was “Victim-1” in the indictment, the central target of the purported “criminal enterprise” that allegedly used violence, threats, and manipulation to fulfill Combs’ “sexual gratification.” The indictment said Combs’ “pattern of abuse” included forced participation in “highly orchestrated” sex performances called “freak-offs.” Referencing the damning video of Combs shoving, kicking, and dragging Ventura in a hotel hallway in March 2016 — footage unearthed by CNN that had made international headlines four months before Combs’ arrest — defense attorneys said Combs was coming to court a changed man. They said he’d sought professional help and gone to rehab years prior to address his substance-use issues.
“He has done tremendous things to try to change as a person since then,” Agnifilo told a judge last September. “He’s not the same person he was then.”
But in the days and hours leading up to Combs’ arrest last fall — when he supposedly was on his best behavior — he was still acting on his worst impulses, according to prosecutors. He allegedly called and texted a potential government witness 58 times over four days, in a barrage prosecutors later labeled potential tampering. Multiple bags of a pink powder were found in his plush hotel suite, prosecutors said, noting the substance appeared similar to stimulants previously seized from Combs that tested positive for Ecstasy and other drugs. Two hotel employees tell Rolling Stone that a woman was waiting for Combs upstairs when he was taken into custody. The staffers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Combs and the woman had planned to celebrate her birthday, specially decorating the suite for the occasion.
Combs also had been trying to persuade a different romantic partner to come to New York that weekend, in what she now believes was an attempt to keep her silent about what transpired during their four-year relationship. The last time the woman had seen Combs, she tells Rolling Stone, was when he summoned her to his Miami compound last July. In this final encounter, she claims Combs shoved two pills into her mouth, causing her to black out. She awoke to a destroyed room, with empty baby-oil bottles, a hookah, towels, food, and wine bottles strewn everywhere.
In the weeks following the alleged incident, the woman, who Rolling Stone is identifying by the pseudonym Nicole, returned home and kept her distance, ignoring Combs’ pleas to come back to Miami. Yet on the eve of his arrest, Combs reached out. “I really just need you to come to New York,” Nicole says Combs told her over the phone. She was weighing if she should go and confront him when news broke that he had been arrested. She filed a lawsuit against him as a Jane Doe for sexual assault and sexual battery, among other accusations, the next week.
“The person that I was so in love with, that I cared about like family — I’m finding out every single day that this person is a monster,” says Nicole. “I was making up excuses for [him] drugging and [sexually assaulting] me…. I’m finding out that maybe I didn’t know this person and I was just manipulated.”
During Combs’ final months of freedom before his arrest, with the government at his doorstep, Combs’ alleged depraved behavior continued. In the face of a rapidly developing crisis, sources say Combs returned to his trusted playbook of pulling strings privately while outwardly projecting an image of control and calm. As he had countless times in his past, he still believed he could bend people and circumstances to his will. While Combs’ legal team said he had reformed and proved his “trustworthiness” by coming to New York — and therefore deserved to be released on bond — prosecutors and some in and around Combs’ inner circle saw his actions as calculated and performative.
“It’s bullshit,” says Nathan, a sex worker who claims he was hired for several of Combs’ “freak-offs” and is being identified by a pseudonym for safety reasons. “He’s not reformed. He just wanted to get out of jail. He’s the same person.”
“It’s his world, and if you get in the way, there’s going to be repercussions,” Combs’ former executive assistant, Phil Pines, tells Rolling Stone. “He will find a way to get you. He got me. He gets everybody. That’s what he gets off on.”
Rolling Stone has reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents, transcripts, and multiple lawsuits connected with the Combs case, in addition to interviewing Combs’ former staffers, an ex-girlfriend, and other eyewitnesses. Contrary to Combs’ claims, these documents and accounts paint a picture of a man who remained sexually abusive, volatile, and wildly manipulative long after the 2016 hotel assault that he called his “rock bottom” in a since-deleted Instagram apology video.
Following Rolling Stone’s initial report on Combs that uncovered a pattern of alleged abusive behavior stretching back to his time in college, more than a dozen new accusers — several speaking publicly for the first time — have come forward with claims that Combs physically attacked, drugged, and/or sexually assaulted them between 2016 and 2024. (Some of these interviews appear in The Fall of Diddy, a two-night docuseries made in partnership with Rolling Stone Films that premiered this week on ID and Max.)
“When I watched that [apology] video, I knew he was lying because I knew what I experienced in 2021 — five years later,” actress and model Kat Pasion says in the documentary. In a harrowing account, Pasion alleges Combs had a nonconsensual sexual encounter with her. “I’ve decided to speak my truth and take my power back. This man is sick,” she says.
In response to Rolling Stone’s detailed request for comment on a list of questions and allegations for this article, Combs’ legal team sent over a previously issued statement. “No matter how many lawsuits are filed, it won’t change the fact that Mr. Combs has never sexually assaulted or sex-trafficked anyone — man or woman, adult or minor,” the statement read. “Fortunately, a fair and impartial judicial process exists to separate fact from fiction, and Mr. Combs is confident that he will prevail in court.”
IN NOVEMBER 2020, COMBS needed a change of scenery. He’d spent the better part of the year holed up at home due to Covid-19 restrictions, and he was itching to skip town. He wanted a 51st-birthday party in paradise. He called up his closest celebrity friends, including Mary J. Blige and French Montana, loaded up his private jet, and headed to Turks and Caicos. Guests were given tie-dye sweatsuits with “Diddy 51” stamped on the front, the same logo that was engraved on coconut drinks that people sipped as they partied on the beach.
Off camera, in the background of many videos documenting the trip’s festivities, was a gaunt and stressed Pines, 39, who was still reeling from an experience he’d just had with Combs. A few days prior, according to Pines, a belligerent Combs had coerced him into sex with a female guest, leaving him stunned and distraught.
Since 2017, Pines had been in Combs’ orbit, working with one of Combs’ ancillary businesses before becoming his personal assistant in December 2019. He wanted to be a music supervisor and jumped at the opportunity to learn from a man he considered a hero. But after two years of working closely with Combs, Pines now winces when he hears his former boss’ voice on a recording played for him.
“He’s a predator — in all shapes and fashions,” Pines says in the finale of The Fall of Diddy, his first interview since filing a December lawsuit against Combs citing sexual battery, harassment, and several workplace violations after resigning in December 2021. “I mean that in a sexually charged way, I mean that in a manipulation way. He’s just out for people. It’s always about him.” (Representatives for Combs did not specifically address any of Pines’ claims, referring instead to a previously issued generalized denial regarding Pines’ lawsuit.)
Pines discovered right from the beginning that working for Combs was all-consuming. He needed to be on call 24/7, as Combs and senior members of his team would send him constant directives. Some days, it might be work connected with a product launch. Others, it was about a guest coming to one of Combs’ many residences. A month or so in, Pines says in the documentary, Combs gave him a startling new task: Procure a specific and lengthy list of items for what Combs would call “Wild King Nights.”
Organizing these events would become a weekly, and sometimes daily, responsibility, Pines says. He’d have to make last-minute dashes to convenience stores to stock up on baby oil, lube, the contraceptive Plan B, and male libido pills, as well as obtain candles, alcohol, marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, and illegal drugs, he claims. Pines says he was also in charge of managing Combs’ sex toys, including a device known as a “power banger sex machine.” Supplies in hand, Pines says he’d set up a hotel suite or Combs’ bedroom with the requested items as well as red lights and ice buckets. Then he’d wait until the next part of his job: cleaning up the “wreckage.”
Pines struggles to describe dealing with the aftermath of what he refers to in his lawsuit as days-long “sexual escapades.” Not only was the duty in itself “demoralizing,” he says, but the rooms he’d walk into were scenes of complete, “disgusting” squalor. There’d be shattered glass, bodily fluid, and blood-stained linens; used condoms, half-eaten food, and drugs out in the open, Pines says. “You could slip because there was baby oil all over the floor,” he explains in the documentary. “When I would go into these rooms, it’s like no one had any consciousness of what took place, meaning that everything was everywhere.”
Pines believes it was a test of loyalty. Could he do what was being asked of him and not bat an eye? “It’s manipulation at its finest; it’s grooming,” Pines tells Rolling Stone. Over time, Pines says he was entrusted to handle more of Combs’ personal indiscretions, including deleting videos of sexual encounters that Combs allegedly filmed that would pop up on his electronics.
There has been much scrutiny around Combs’ famous White Parties and his other star-studded events, but Pines explains Wild King Nights were much more intimate and private. “It’s a small batch of people,” he says. He declined to say who else participated but said it wasn’t people he would consider celebrities.
Pines says Combs had a constant rotation of women and “just was never alone.” Pines came to view the steady stream of overnight guests as a sign his boss needed perpetual confirmation that he was the “macho alpha male” he projected in public.
“My observation was that a woman made him feel like a man. And always having somebody around [made him] feel like that. That was kind of his insecurity, in my experience,” Pines recalls in the series. “I never saw him sleep alone…. In two years, I think it was maybe seven to eight times when he would sleep by himself, and I started to kind of put it together that there was something wrong. Like, he needed somebody with him to make him feel comfort. And it was always a guest.”
Combs’ attorney Agnifilo previously argued that while many might consider his client’s sex life “unusual,” nothing about it was illegal. “We are not better off if the federal government comes into our bedrooms,” he said. “They are coming into this man’s bedroom, and they are making not just judgments, they are charging him with statutes that, as they said, could put him in jail for life.”
“The person that I was so in love with, that I cared about like family — I’m finding out every single day that this person is a monster.”
“Nicole”
Responding to Agnifilo, Pines says he’s not so sure. “Anybody who’s ever interacted with [Combs] in that setting, in those relationships, needs to be talked to [to] see how they truly felt,” Pines suggests. “I imagine there’ll be tons of people who will respond to that not in favor of the defense.”
Pines recalls two incidents in particular that weighed on him when it came to Combs’ treatment of women. In one, Combs allegedly turned violent. According to Pines’ lawsuit, he once intervened when Combs allegedly kicked a woman to the ground outside of his Miami home in January 2021. “I told you I was crazy,” Combs allegedly told the woman, kicking her in the stomach and demanding his sweatshirt back. The woman complied, ending up topless. Pines says he removed his own jacket so the woman could cover herself for her departing Uber ride. (The woman did not respond to a request for comment.)
Another time, Pines says he drove a woman back to her hotel following a Wild King Night with Combs. The woman looked “shaken,” he says. “I don’t know what took place,” Pines says in the episode. “All I can say is that when I brought her down to the car, she was shaking … she was obviously exhausted. She said something to the effect of ‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’”
Pines himself claims he had an encounter with Combs that would haunt him. During one party, as attendees began to dwindle, Combs instructed Pines to set the “vibe” up in his room, which Pines says he understood to be preparation for a Wild King Night. “It felt like this was a normal thing,” he says in the series. “But that turned very quickly.”
A wildly intoxicated Combs summoned Pines up to his room and had him take a shot with the group, Pines recalls. Then Combs called him up a second time, Pines says, encouraging him to take another shot. “He’s out of his mind at this point,” Pines says in The Fall of Diddy. “I remember hearing the words, ‘Prove your loyalty to me, King.’ He grabbed me by the shoulders, gave me a quick massage like a coach would give a player that’s about to enter the game, and handed me a condom, pushed me to a girl that was on the couch, a guest.”
Pines says he “froze” in that moment but ultimately acquiesced out of fear. “Is this fun for him? Is this a test?” he recalls thinking. He says he made sure the woman was OK and got her consent, then engaged in sex with her for a short time before abruptly leaving the room. “No one knows what it feels like to be in that situation,” Pines explains in the episode. “I heard about previous employees getting physically assaulted. I saw how angry and upset he could get from the most simplest thing. And I just thought to myself, ‘If I don’t do this, I don’t know what’s gonna happen.’ [I had] a great sense of remorse following that situation, right from the jump.”
Although Pines says he wanted to tell someone about what happened, he felt trapped. “There was so much at stake,” he says in the special. “My job could be in jeopardy. This was Covid; jobs weren’t coming across your desk every day.” Planning for the Turks and Caicos trip dominated his schedule. Pines describes having tunnel vision, needing to compartmentalize his feelings in order to soldier on with his job. “He has that ability to make you feel like his world comes first,” Pines tells Rolling Stone. “Even if it’s at your expense, his needs and his life [come] before yours.”
“This has been very difficult for me to put on full display because of the reaction to it,” referring to the physical and mental toll of coming forward. “As a man, you’re taught to endure a little bit more to maintain your masculinity. But for me, it’s bigger than that, because mental health is not gender-based.”
PINES IS AMONG AT LEAST a dozen people who have filed lawsuits alleging Combs preyed on them over the past eight years. It was the period after the hotel hallway assault, during Combs’ transition to his “Brother Love” era when he was projecting a more family-friendly image. (In total, more than 40 lawsuits have been filed against Combs since late 2023, the vast majority accusing him of sexual misconduct.) Combs’ team issued a broad denial of all the claims. “As we have repeatedly said, it is unfortunate that anyone can file a complaint even without any proof,” they said.
The new accusers say they were lured during this period to hotels, business meetings, and parties in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, where they were allegedly handed spiked drinks or forced to take pills that caused them to lose consciousness. Some say they met Combs only one time during a chance encounter that would upend their lives; others say they had worked with Combs, while a few detailed relationships that went back years.
For Nicole, who met Combs in 2020, a four-year romantic relationship began as many do, with Combs showering her with sentimental gifts. The couple binge-watched Dateline episodes and attended church together on Sundays.
At first, when news of Ventura’s lawsuit broke and subsequent lawsuits began rolling in, it was hard for Nicole to digest the version of Combs that was making headlines. “He wasn’t [this] all-bad person,” she explains. “He was very sweet. We talked about real-life stuff, about my childhood and his childhood.” But deep down, Nicole tells Rolling Stone, she knew shades of the Combs that others were describing. The man who could turn “demonic on benders” and would test, push, and flat-out break her boundaries. “He would always take it to a point that I was fearful of my life,” she says.
The model and entrepreneur alleges that Combs had a controlling side, telling her that she couldn’t post certain things on social media and discouraging her from working. Instead, Combs insisted on paying her an allowance to keep her at his beck and call, her lawsuit claims. She was expected to drop everything if Combs wanted her, and if she resisted, Combs and his staffers would “use coercive and harassing language to compel her to comply,” her suit alleges.
One time, Nicole says, she was adamant she couldn’t make a sudden trip to see him, only to receive a flurry of calls from a Combs staffer. “I just ignored the phone calls,” she says. “Then the next thing you know, the driver is outside of my door ringing the doorbell. I ended up giving in and going the next day.”
Gradually, Combs began pressuring her to add other people to their sexual encounters, Nicole’s lawsuit claims. It seemed innocent enough at first. Combs allegedly questioned if she’d be interested in having a threesome with a man. “I thought it was a test of my loyalty to him,” Nicole explains, assuming he wanted her to reject the suggestion. But Combs reassured her it was OK if she wanted to be with other men. Despite Nicole’s repeated insistence that she wasn’t interested, she says Combs would continually bring up the subject with her. “I feel like he was maybe grooming me to do things sexually with him,” she says.
Nicole’s visits with Combs would almost always include what she described as “performing a show” for him. Nicole claims Combs would want to take Ecstasy together before she would have to coat herself in warmed baby oil, similar to what Ventura alleged in her own lawsuit. Although social media ran rampant with jokes about prosecutors seizing 1,000 bottles of baby oil from Combs’ properties, Nicole explains Combs was serious about using it during sex. They could easily go through an entire bottle in less than five minutes, she says.
The sexual activity could go on for hours, and Combs would “ply her with alcohol and substances until she passed out,” her lawsuit claims. Upon waking up, Nicole would find herself covered in bruises with little memory of the night before. She claims that after one meeting, in spring 2022, she woke up to find a bite mark on her heel and her feet a purplish color.
She says she knew better than to push back against certain sexual requests. “I feel like the devil that would come out of him was during these turn-up times,” Nicole explains, alluding to Combs’ alleged heavy drinking and drug use. “It would be like a switch. We would be having so much fun, and then there’s like a time where he’s just taken it too far drug-wise, that he wants exactly what he wants.”
“He’s never put his hands on me,” Nicole says, denying any violence like what Ventura described. “But I knew what he was capable of.”
There were other moments when Combs allegedly violated her boundaries. She claims in her lawsuit that in April 2022, while she was staying with Combs at his Los Angeles mansion, he had sex with her without her consent. A few months later, in July, Combs allegedly forced her to take a drug that she now believes was ketamine. Throughout the ensuing night, Nicole says she lost “consciousness intermittently” before she blacked out. Later, Nicole says she learned she was pregnant but ended up miscarrying, leading her to take a months-long break from the relationship. (Combs’ representatives declined to respond on the record when sent a detailed list of questions regarding Nicole’s allegations.)
“When I watched that [apology] video, I knew he was lying because I knew what I experienced in 2021 … This man is sick.”
Kat Pasion
Combs lured her back into dating again by late 2022, but Nicole says she was growing increasingly wary. She says the final time she saw Combs was the July 2024 incident involving the two alleged forced pills. Once again, she claims Combs allegedly asked her about inviting over a man. He was in a state of desperation, Nicole says, both begging and insisting that the next time they were together, she would find a man to bring into the bedroom. “I was in and out [of consciousness] that night,” she says. “But I do remember I was just like, ‘I’m just gonna say yes so he leaves me alone, and I’m never coming back. I am never coming back after this.’”
She awoke the next morning feeling sick and having limited memory of what had happened, noting the bedroom was in a complete state of disarray. It was the final straw. She bided her time until she felt she could safely leave, avoiding Combs’ calls in the following weeks.
When Combs began messaging her again from New York, Nicole says she had a sinking feeling that Combs was going to try to make her deliver on the agreement she made under duress. “I feel like he was trying to get me to facilitate it, because then, now I’m not a victim,” she says. “I’m the doer.”
THE SHIFT IN COMBS’ public persona from Bad Boy to Brother Love had come following his split with Ventura and the death of his ex-partner Kim Porter. Pulling his family closer, Combs softened his image. He remained a shrewd businessman, but he also was a proud, doting father. He posted birthday shout-outs to his children and inked a deal with Hulu for a reality show about them, tentatively titled Diddy+7. In the corporate world, Combs positioned himself as a generous benefactor, launching a Black-owned entrepreneurship platform and offering Bad Boy artists their publishing rights back.
Now in the fourth decade of his storied career, he was experiencing a renaissance of sorts, transforming his perpetual party-host vibe into that of a distinguished elder ushering in a new era for both himself and hip-hop. BET awarded him a lifetime achievement honor in 2022, and MTV gave him its Global Icon Award a year later, two months before Ventura’s lawsuit. Accepting his golden Moonman with some of his children onstage beside him, Combs counted his blessings. “I thank God for this choice that he made for me to be able to touch you with my music, give you a good time, make you dance, make you feel good,” he said. “That’s the only intention.”
While Combs has long been considered a master of marketing and promotion, perhaps the most enduring product he ever pushed was himself. Time and again after a scandal, he shed his skin like a snake, emerging as a self-proclaimed better version of himself. This new “Love” phase seemed to be no different. But glimpses into Combs’ private world — gleaned from sources, lawsuits, and even snippets of Combs’ own social media — reveal behavior markedly different than the rehabilitated family man he and his lawyers described.
Combs’ holiday festivities aboard a 280-foot superyacht in the Caribbean around Christmas of 2022 offered one stark example of his polished public persona masking something more sinister, sources say. The gathering was depicted on Instagram as a wholesome family trip with his children and relatives. In reality, it was a “hedonistic” hellscape filled with “sex workers, suspected laced alcohol, violence, and sheer disrespect of women,” a lawsuit filed by yacht stewardess Grace O’Marcaigh alleges.
Women allegedly were coming on and off the boat, including an inconsolable woman who at one point locked herself in a room, saying she didn’t feel safe. (The guest had to be escorted off the vessel, O’Marcaigh’s suit alleges.) One crew member, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional retribution, corroborated the chaotic nature of the charter to Rolling Stone, saying there was a constant rotation of guests, heavy partying and that a crying woman had to be taken off the boat.
During raucous late-night parties with several A-list celebrities, “suspected sex workers were sprawled out unconscious” after having a single shot of tequila or one mixed drink, O’Marcaigh claims. The women would “be falling over themselves, panicking, or passing out,” leading her to believe they had been drugged.
O’Marcaigh herself alleges that she was drugged when Combs’ son Christian cornered and allegedly pressured her into taking multiple shots while she was serving him in the early-morning hours. Blocking the exit of the room, Christian allegedly stripped off his clothes and attempted to force O’Marcaigh to perform oral sex, according to her lawsuit. She says he only backed off when someone else entered the room, allowing her to escape. (The crew member corroborated details surrounding O’Marcaigh’s account of her encounter with Christian.)
O’Marcaigh claims in her lawsuit that she reported the alleged assault to the captain, whom Combs allegedly “paid off” with a generous tip. (Aaron Dyer, an attorney for Combs and Christian, previously called O’Marcaigh’s lawsuit “lewd and meritless” and promised to file a motion to dismiss, but has not yet filed. When contacted by Rolling Stone for this article, Combs did not respond on the record to any of the questions regarding O’Marcaigh’s claims. The captain did not return Rolling Stone’s request for comment. Through her lawyer, O’Marcaigh declined to comment for this article.)
Amid the alleged rampant debauchery, Combs was attempting to film a family-friendly reality show with Hulu, creating a bizarre and unsettling disconnect, sources say. Combs was frequently highly intoxicated, the crew member claims. “He would do certain things for the video cameras and then switch into a different person,” they explain. “He was high on some drug. We don’t know what it was, but his switching of personality was so unnatural.”
One minute, Combs was posing in matching striped onesie pajamas with his children, holding onto his newborn daughter Love. A short time later, he was fumbling over his words while drinking with his adult sons. “We litty like we got five titties in our mouths,” he yelled in an Instagram story. One of Combs’ male assistants allegedly openly discussed being forced to stay inside Combs’ bedroom while he had sex with multiple women, “just in case” Combs needed him. And during a card game, Combs allegedly accepted a dare, stood up, and exposed his penis to the room while sitting next to his mother, Janice, O’Marcaigh’s lawsuit says.
If Combs appeared at ease partying heavily with his family members nearby, that’s possibly because it’s what he allegedly grew up with. As Combs’ childhood friend and hip-hop producer Tim Patterson claims in the Peacock documentary Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy, Janice allegedly hosted free-for-all parties in Combs’ childhood home that could turn sexually charged. “It wouldn’t be a thing to mistakenly walk into one of the bedrooms and you got a couple in there, butt naked,” Patterson said. “That’s what we were privy to; this is what we were fed. Was it desensitizing us? I’m sure it was. Were we aware of it? No, that was just Saturday night.” (Natlie Figgers, an attorney for Janice Combs, called Patterson’s claims “disturbing and unfounded,” adding that “Ms. Combs is profoundly saddened and highly offended by these falsehoods.”)
“HEY YO, PHIL, CAN you give me 20 Xanax, please?” came Combs’ groggy voice in one audio recording sent to Pines, played in The Fall of Diddy. “I’m-a need 10 Adderall,” Combs said in another. “Mushroom capsules.” “Do we have any more chocolates? Cause she is going to need a chocolate in a minute.” “I need my Gucci bag up here.” These were the type of frequent, sometimes daily, commands Pines says he would receive from Combs.
Apart from fetching sex toys and supplies for Combs’ Wild King Nights, Pines says he was often tasked with delivering Combs a range of substances. Pines says Combs would take a combination of mushrooms, ketamine, and Ecstasy, on top of smoking weed around the clock. Keeping the substances on him in a black Gucci sling Combs and his team called an “MVP bag,” Pines says he was responsible for ensuring that Combs had access to such substances even while traveling abroad. In order to clear customs, Pines says in his lawsuit that he hid the drugs in a safe. Video shows Pines typing in a password of “1234” and the metal box springing open to reveal marijuana nuggets and psychedelic mushrooms packed in.
Music producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones seemed to corroborate Pines’ account in his own racketeering and sexual-assault civil lawsuit against the music executive. He claimed Combs had another personal assistant who acted as a drug “mule,” carrying around a fanny pack filled with illicit substances. The assistant, Brendan Paul, was arrested during the March raids after police claimed to find cocaine and marijuana candy in his bag. The charges were dropped in December after Paul completed a drug diversion program. (When questioned about Jones’ claims, Combs’ team referred Rolling Stone to a statement previously released by Combs’ attorney, Erica Wolff, in which she called Jones’ lawsuit “pure fiction.” “There was no RICO conspiracy and Mr. Jones was not threatened, groomed, assaulted, or trafficked,” it said, in part.)
As far back as 2008, Ventura alleged, Combs was leading a “drug-fueled lifestyle.” She claimed he was addicted to painkillers, frequently took Ecstasy, and regularly kept prodigious amounts of pills and other drugs out in the open like “candy.” His drug use went hand in hand with his sexual activities, according to various lawsuits. During freak-offs, Combs allegedly pushed the use of Ecstasy, cocaine, GHB, ketamine, and marijuana, and had an insatiable appetite himself. Even his own attorneys have acknowledged Combs’ history with drug usage. “Mr. Combs realized he has a problem with drug addiction and he has a problem with anger, and he went into a rehab program for a period of time,” his attorney Agnifilo said at a Sept. 18 court appearance.
Nathan, the sex worker who spoke with Rolling Stone, also describes Combs’ alleged fondness for drugs during sexual encounters. He cites ketamine and Ecstasy in particular, claiming they gave Combs “that ecstatic feeling he needs for sex.” He suspects Combs once drugged him during a freak-off, giving him a “horrible reaction.” “This stuff had me so out of my mind,” he says.
Nathan claims the last time Combs hired him for a freak-off was in late 2019. He says Combs met him at 1 Hotel in Miami for a threesome with a woman who was flying in from Hawaii. That final freak-off never happened, but Nathan says Combs typically enjoyed a buffet of drugs and seemed especially interested in ketamine. “I used to think it was insane — this guy would sniff things and black out for 30 minutes,” he says. “He’d sniff a lot of ketamine and kind of black out in the middle.”
Nathan, who says he was paid between $2,000 and $5,000 for the sexual encounters, says the freak-offs were “ritualistic,” with Combs choreographing every movement, at least while he was sober enough to wield control. Nathan recalls being summoned to “lavish” hotel rooms in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, surrendering his phone, undressing, and swiping a bottle of baby oil from a tub of hot water. “I don’t use baby oil to this day because of all the baby oil I used to put on me,” he says. “The hotel rooms were freezing. The baby oil was warm, so if you were cold and your clothes were locked in another room, the baby oil kept you warm.”
Combs would stage-direct the speed and other aspects of Nathan’s foreplay with the woman, Nathan says. “I think he would try to regulate her pleasure,” he claims. Sometimes, Combs would stand right behind him [and] other times he would act as a voyeur, Nathan says. “He would pretend to leave the room but, like, go around the corner and crawl in the room on the floor and peek around the corner or use the mirrors,” Nathan claims. “Really creepy shit, obviously. Because it’s, like, your girlfriend. Why do you even have to do that?”
Nathan describes Combs as “entrenched” in his alleged compulsions. “Puff has been super rich for decades,” Nathan says. “He’s a sex addict…. He’s an obsessive drug addict. That’s a major part of his problem.”
Combs’ lawyers declined to address Nathan’s claims, but Agnifilo told the court last September that the defense had already interviewed six male sex workers connected to Combs. “I have asked all the questions I could think of,” Agnifilo said, listing queries such as, “Was anybody too drunk? Was anybody too high? Did anyone express any hesitation? Was there the slightest inkling that possibly, possibly the woman wasn’t consenting?” The lawyer said the responses were, “No. No. No. No.”
Ventura alleged in her lawsuit that when Combs was intoxicated, he became “erratic,” leading to “terrifying behavior,” including physical violence. Nicole says she witnessed the shift as well. In the beginning, she blamed his emotional pivot on the psychoactive substances he ingested. She now believes the bingeing exposed something that was there all along.
“Now, I’m realizing that it’s just him,” she says. “The drugs fueled it — [but] it was in his personality.”
ON A JULY AFTERNOON in 2021, Combs clipped down the stairs of a rented $25 million Malibu oceanfront mansion. He wrapped a tight hug around a waiting reporter, who was there to profile him for a Vanity Fair cover story. Combs had an announcement to share with the world: The Bad Boy was breaking good. The man who had gone from Puffy to Diddy to Sean Combs now wanted to be known as “Love.”
The perpetual bachelor oozed manufactured charm, offering the writer a pashmina for warmth and instructing staff to put out a “sexy” spread of nibbles for the conversation. Yet despite Combs’ eagerness to introduce this new persona to the world, he couldn’t really deliver a solid reason for the rebrand. His team was protective and cagey, declining to provide the reporter any of his celebrity pals or industry colleagues to throw a supportive line — an anomaly for a friendly article.
When he not-so-subtly dropped a canned quote about his admiration for the #MeToo movement — “[It] inspired me. It showed me that you can get maximum change” — it rang hollow after writer Tressie McMillan Cottom tried to engage him further on the subject. “He did get very uncomfortable when I asked follow-up questions,” Cottom told British newspaper The Independent last October.
For Combs’ ex-girlfriend Kat Pasion, it was clear why he skirted any deeper questions about his “love” and “care” for women. It was in that same Malibu home, just a few weeks before that interview, that she claims Combs turned into a “monster,” waking her up in the middle of the night to have sex. “It wasn’t consensual,” Pasion says of the encounter in the docuseries. “I knew I was never going to see him again. I never wanted to remember or repeat what happened. I just was numb, and I suppressed it.” (Representatives for Combs did not respond directly to Rolling Stone regarding Pasion’s claims.)
Pasion first met Combs at Soho House in Los Angeles in 2013. The mogul made a beeline for the Canadian-born actress and model while she was at the members-only club with some girlfriends. He was persistent, Pasion says, making an effort to get to know her. Flattered but uninterested, Pasion says she declined to take Combs’ number, but he would later follow her on Instagram.
“Puff has been super rich for decades. He’s a sex addict…. He’s an obsessive drug addict. That’s a major part of his problem.”
“Nathan”
The two wouldn’t reconnect until Combs was rocked by back-to-back losses in 2018: the split with Ventura that September and the death of Porter, who Combs has called his “soulmate,” from lobar pneumonia in November. Pasion says she, too, was mourning the loss of a close friend, so when Combs reached out to meet up at the Hotel Bel-Air in December 2018, she accepted. “Something drew me into wanting to have the drink with him,” Pasion says in the documentary. “I felt like I saw somewhat of a grieving, vulnerable person. He felt real.”
The two bonded and became “inseparable” throughout 2019, Pasion says in the film. “It’s strikingly similar to how Cassie and Puff’s relationship started,” she explains of her early months with Combs. He was interested in her opinions and showered her with compliments.
Eventually, the veneer began to crack. In early 2019, Combs hosted Pasion on a yacht in the Bahamas and watched some of the documentary Surviving R. Kelly with her, she says. “There’s a little bit of R. Kelly in all of us,” Combs allegedly said as he walked away, leaving her dumbfounded. “I remember being like, ‘There is NOT a little bit of R. Kelly in all of us.’ But I wasn’t absorbing the severity of that statement until later.”
Pasion recalls once making a snarky quip to Combs, who abruptly brought his hand near her throat, as if he were going to choke her. “It was just kind of hovering,” Pasion says in the series. “We were looking at each other in the eye, and I was like, ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’” When she stood her ground, he attempted to laugh off the incident. “I’m trying to do things differently,” Combs allegedly told her at one point. In hindsight, Pasion says, she believes Combs was referring to his relationship with Ventura.
Combs and Pasion’s relationship fizzled during the pandemic but picked back up in 2021, when the two reconnected at Combs’ Malibu house while he was working on 2023’s The Love Album. On the last night Pasion was there, Combs, she says, “went dark.” At one point in the evening, Pasion says in the series, Combs locked himself in the bathroom with a baggie of “tusi,” a powder sometimes called “pink cocaine” that’s commonly a mixture of ketamine and Ecstasy. Hours later, Combs woke Pasion up. “He’s telling me I can’t go to sleep,” Pasion recalls in the series. “He’s expecting X, Y, and Z from me, and he forces himself …” she says before stopping herself. “I don’t want to go too much into it because I’m not trying to relive that memory. It was just scary, to be honest. His whole tone, everything changed.”
In journal entries shown in the docuseries dated June 14, 2021, Pasion wrote that the tusi “made him a monster.” She added, “He didn’t listen to my ‘no.’ I want to never speak about that night and [to be honest] wish I could erase him from my life completely…. He finally showed me his true self — exposing his darkness. I feel disgusted. I feel violated. I feel so insignificant/low.” She refused to talk to Combs after that.
Meanwhile, Combs’ team was arranging the Vanity Fair profile. In the midst of the activity, Pasion says, she received a call from a member of Combs’ staff, who said Combs wanted to speak to her. He was furious she was cutting him off, Pasion says. “He’s full throttle, pissed off,” Pasion says, alleging that Combs threatened to contact the embassy and have her deported back to Canada. “‘You don’t know who you are fucking with, you don’t know what I can do to you,’” Pasion says Combs yelled at her. “I said, ‘You’re a demon,’ and he hung up,” she recalls in the film.
The Vanity Fair cover story was published on Aug. 3, 2021, with Sean “Love” Combs hailed as the “original influencer.” In the accompanying photos, he’s seen raising his fist to the sky and posing like royalty with his teen daughters. The story touted Combs’ new good-vibes “frequency.” For Pasion, it proved he could weaponize his fame in a flash. “You feel so small and insignificant because this person has so much power and resources and all these people,” Pasion explains in the documentary. “It’s just very intimidating.”
COMBS’ SUMMER SCHEDULE IN 2024 looked vastly different from previous years. Normally, the highlight of the season was his annual European trip, where he’d bring his children, family members, and romantic interests along for weekslong stints in Italy and other international locations. Last year, he was unable to leave the country after his lawyers took possession of his passport in April. But if Combs was worried, he didn’t show it. Instead, he went on a road trip to Arizona with his family and jetted off to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in July, where he was pictured whitewater rafting with a rumored romantic partner and a personal photographer.
Meanwhile, a grand jury of 16 to 23 men and women were secretly convening in lower Manhattan for weeks, listening to witness after witness testify about Combs. Although the proceeding was supposed to be kept under wraps, Combs allegedly was fully aware it was happening. He had been texting and calling one grand jury witness in the run-up to and aftermath of the man’s testimony, prosecutors alleged, claiming it followed a long pattern of alleged obstruction.
Prosecutors described the unidentified man as a male sex worker who allegedly had participated in numerous freak-offs. While his association with Combs had since cooled, the man sporadically reached out to Combs between the end of 2022 and January 2024; Combs never responded. That changed when Combs “initiated” contact with the man in June 2024, allegedly “attempt[ing] to obscure” his communication by calling the man’s wife and speaking with him over a VOIP service, prosecutors claim. Up until August, Combs was allegedly in semi-frequent contact with the man. Combs allegedly checked in with the man following his testimony, asking how he was doing, despite his lawyers ceasing communication with the man due to his grand jury appearance. Combs would later be accused of deleting the messages from his phone.
Combs’ lawyers admitted to the court last November that Combs communicated with the man, but argued, “It’s certainly nothing that would rise to the level of obstruction … it is nothing that is corrupting in any way the grand jury process.”
At Combs’ first court hearing, on Sept. 17, prosecutors called him a “serial obstructor.” They said the deluge of 58 calls and texts he allegedly unleashed the week before his arrest was directed at a potential witness easily identified as Bad Boy artist Kalenna Harper. Harper and Combs were in a band together called Diddy-Dirty Money, and their other bandmate, Dawn Richard, had just filed a lawsuit against Combs claiming he once physically abused Ventura with both Harper and Richard present.
Amid “128 total phone contacts” with Combs that week, Harper released a public statement defending Combs. Prosecutors said the intense wave of communication was evidence of Combs’ “ongoing ability to keep witnesses, even witnesses who might have been around for very distant-in-time abuse, in his pocket and at his disposal.” (Harper did not respond to Rolling Stone’s multiple requests for comment, but said of Richard in an interview last October, “That’s not tampering … because that bitch is lying.” Through an attorney, Richard declined to comment for this article.)
Combs’ damage control allegedly stretched back to the days immediately after Ventura filed her lawsuit, prosecutors claim. One of his first calls was to a woman who prosecutors identified only as Victim-2. The woman had contacted Combs soon after news of Ventura’s lawsuit broke, saying it was like “reading her own sexual trauma,” according to prosecutors.
“It makes me sick how three solid pages, word for word, is exactly my experiences and my anguish,” the woman allegedly texted Combs. In another message to an unidentified person, the woman purportedly said Combs “threatened me about my sex tapes that he has of me on two phones. He said he would expose me. Mind you, these [are] sex tapes where I am heavily drugged and doing things he asked of me for the past three years.”
Combs allegedly tried to pacify the woman by feeding her a “false narrative,” prosecutors claimed at his bail hearing. In multiple phone calls — some of which were recorded on a “co-conspirator’s phone” — Combs “gaslit her and attempted to convince her that she had willingly engaged in sex acts with him,” prosecutors allege. In court filings, Combs’ attorneys denied the woman was a victim, but had no specific rebuttal to prosecutors’ claim that Combs instructed a staffer to ensure the woman’s rent would continue to be paid. Prosecutors alleged that Combs’ substantial, monthly financial-support payments to the woman were as recent as September. Combs’ team told the court last November that “there is simply no financial coercion at all.”
Prosecutors also pointed to Combs’ recent actions behind bars to dismantle his team’s argument that Combs was trustworthy enough to be released from jail. At his bail hearing, they said Combs flagrantly broke the Bureau of Prisons’ rules by paying at least eight different inmates to use their personal jail phone accounts to make calls. They said that practice, along with Combs’ alleged use of both an unauthorized messaging service and three-way calling, made it “difficult or impossible to monitor” his communications for obstructive conduct. Prosecutors also claimed that Combs had alleged plans to “discredit possible witnesses” and wanted to dig up “dirt” on purported victims. (In November, prosecutors conceded to the court that it was standard for criminal-defense teams to conduct their own investigations into potential witnesses and alleged victims in order to adequately prepare a defense.)
“It’s his world, and if you get in the way, there’s going to be repercussions. He will find a way to get you. He got me. He gets everybody. That’s what he gets off on.”
Phil Pines
In legal filings, Combs’ team asserted that inmates frequently use one another’s phone accounts and that Combs had never been told not to use a purported unauthorized messaging service. In a separate court filing from January, his lawyers noted that the Bureau of Prisons “has not taken any actions to discipline Mr. Combs for any purported violations of Metropolitan Detention Center policies [and Combs] has never received so much as a write-up in his four months in BOP custody.”
Intent on changing the public’s souring perception of him, Combs allegedly worked with his adult sons to roll out a social media campaign for his 55th birthday in early November. In a video posted to Combs’ Instagram, his children sang “Happy Birthday” to him over the phone, and his son Christan took over Combs’ page to take “y’all down memory lane and all the positive things [Combs] did.” The elder Combs wanted to “reach for this jury,” according to his monitored jail calls released by prosecutors. “I just need one.”
Referring back to the hotel hallway video, prosecutors claimed Combs’ immense power and wealth, like allegedly bribing hotel security $100,000 in cash to bury the footage, gives “him a unique ability to influence people and to intimidate witnesses and victims.”
Speaking to Combs’ ability to sway people and spin a narrative, Pasion says it took her many months to gather the courage to come forward. She believed Combs when he purportedly threatened to ruin her. “That’s the pattern of his behavior that he’s been doing for decades,” she says in the docuseries. “He uses his resources and uses what he can do for you and thinks that that can Band-Aid and solve the horrible things he does to people.”
SINCE HIS ARREST LAST September, Combs has been in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, bunking with crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and sharing a lawyer with recent arrival Luigi Mangione, the United Healthcare CEO murder suspect. There was no blowout birthday party, no supersize yacht to watch fireworks from as he rang in the New Year’s. Living off a bleak rotating menu of baked fish, beef tacos, and scrambled eggs, Combs spends his days preparing for his criminal trial. He’s ceded control over his media empire, Revolt, and is no longer a partner in the liquor brands that sent his net worth into the stratosphere. Instead of planning lavish trips and hosting parties packed with celebrities, he’s reportedly selling his Holmby Hills, California, mansion in an apparent effort to fund his defense.
“I know he’s gonna fight until the end, and it’s expected because freedom is what he wants,” Pines says. “But I think true freedom comes with the truth and taking some accountability.” Still, Pines is unsure what the outcome will be. “Like, man, is he gonna be able to pull this shit off? I’ve seen him get away with so much.”
“Lil Rod” Jones, the music producer, says Combs exploited and abused him — and then refused to fully compensate him for his work on The Love Album, confident his immense power and fame insulated him from any fallout. “For some reason, our culture worships [Combs] and his billionaire status,” Jones tells Rolling Stone. “They don’t want to see him fall because they’re living vicariously through him. They have to understand Puffy is no god.”
For now, Combs’ criminal trial is set to begin the first week of May. At a recent hearing, prosecutors said it’s possible they might seek a second indictment with new charges. But Elizabeth Geddes, a former Brooklyn-based federal prosecutor who helped convict R. Kelly, says she’s not sure a second indictment is necessary. Prosecutors have a “lot of leeway,” she says, to bring in newly acquired evidence and witnesses without having to return to the grand jury for new charges. Such new evidence could come in simply to support the broad list of alleged crimes already underpinning the racketeering charge, she says. (The itemized crimes range from sex trafficking and “acts of violence” to drug crimes, kidnapping, arson, and bribery.)
Either way, the trial will be complicated. Prosecutors estimate they’ll need three weeks for their side alone. Multiple alleged victims are expected to testify that Combs used force, threats of force, or other illegal tactics to fulfill his sexual desires. Combs’ lawyers will argue any sexual encounters were consensual. In a Jan. 14 letter to the court, his defense lawyers said nine videos preserved and handed over by Ventura support their claim she willingly participated in freak-off activities. (An attorney for Ventura did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)
While the alleged freak-off videos will be central to the trial, Geddes says proving the necessary element of force, fraud, or coercion will likely come down to witness testimony. She says any alleged victims will undoubtedly face fierce cross-examination, especially if they filed a civil lawsuit against Combs. “The defense will be in a position to use that to try to argue they have a financial incentive to say what they’re saying and therefore are worthy of less credibility,” Geddes says, adding that proving Combs guilty beyond a reasonable doubt is a “really high standard.”
“Karma’s a bitch,” Pasion says in the film. “Where is he sitting today? Not on a yacht in the Amalfi coast, I’ll tell you that.”
At trial, Combs will have to make the critical decision of whether to testify in his own defense. Experts agree such testimony is extremely risky. But if history is any guide — his testimony in his 2001 gun possession trial helped in his acquittal — Combs has the stomach. When he invited Vanity Fair into his home, he allegedly had much to hide. It wasn’t a deterrent. He was brazenly proclaiming himself a pillar of goodwill and an advocate for women while allegedly simultaneously silencing and intimidating his accusers. He was already on the offensive.
“This is a very serious mission, [a] very high-risk mission that God sent me on,” Combs crowed about spreading love in an accompanying behind-the-scenes video to his 2021 Vanity Fair cover. “And if you see the devil,” he deadpans, drink in hand, “tell him I’m looking for him.”
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
