Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, began her second day of testimony on Wednesday morning in the federal trial of Sean Combs, her former boyfriend and label boss, by detailing the aftermath of his attack on her at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.
As recorded in a surveillance video that has been shown several times already at trial — and broadcast in parts by CNN last year — Mr. Combs struck, kicked and dragged her in the hallway of a hotel. On Tuesday, Ms. Ventura testified that Mr. Combs had just hit her in the face in their hotel room during a “freak-off” — the choreographed, drug-fueled sex marathons that are at the heart of the government’s case that Mr. Combs sex-trafficked multiple people.
Mr. Combs is accused of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. 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 in “freak-offs” and other sexual encounters involving Mr. Combs.
Ms. Ventura testified that after she left the hotel she took a selfie in an Uber that showed she had sustained a “fat lip” in the altercation. She added that Mr. Combs texted her repeatedly, pleading for her to respond.
“Yo pls call, I’m surrounded,” he texted in a message entered into evidence.
He repeatedly texted her to call him, saying “the cops are here.” (There was previous testimony from a hotel security guard that the police were not called after the altercation.)
“You’re going to abandon me all alone?” he texted her. “Call me pls.”
She replied in a text message that Mr. Combs was “sick” for thinking what he had done to her was OK. “Please stay far away from me,” she wrote.
Once Ms. Ventura arrived at her apartment, a friend who was visiting called the police on her behalf. When officers arrived, Ms. Ventura said, she answered some of their questions but did not want to say who assaulted her.
“Did you want to protect Sean?” asked the prosecutor, Emily A. Johnson.
“Yeah, of course,” Ms. Ventura answered.
After the police left, she said, Mr. Combs arrived at the apartment and tried to enter. “Just chaos outside the door,” Ms. Ventura testified about the scene. “Banging, kicking, yelling.”
Two days after the assault at the hotel in 2016, Ms. Ventura testified, she was scheduled to appear at her first big movie premiere, for a film she starred in called “The Perfect Match.” She said she went back to Mr. Combs’s house to be fitted for her outfit; the jury was shown a photograph of the couple together at the premiere, with Ms. Ventura wearing makeup that she said covered bruises on her face.
Ms. Ventura’s testimony has been widely anticipated since Mr. Combs’s arrest in September 2024, if not before. She had sued him in late 2023 — in a case that was settled in just one day — over many of the same allegations contained in the government’s indictment, in which she was identified only as “Victim-1.”
The government is expected to continue with its direct examination of Ms. Ventura throughout the day. If that is completed Wednesday, it would be followed by cross-examination from Mr. Combs’s lawyers.
Source: nytimes.com
