Casandra “Cassie” Ventura recalled to the jury how she felt when her then-boyfriend Sean “Diddy” Combs allegedly asked to engage in his sex parties that have come to be known as “Freak Offs.”
Ventura took the stand in a Manhattan courtroom as Combs’ trial entered its second day on Tuesday, May 13. The singer testified that she had just turned 22 when Diddy first asked her to engage in the “Freak Offs,” which made her “confused and nervous.”
“I just remember my stomach falling to my butt,” Cassie said when asked how she felt about participating.
“In the first year of our relationship he proposed a sexual encounter he called voyeurism, a sexual encounter with a third party,” Ventura said in her testimony, according to NBC News. “It entails hiring an escort and setting up so I can perform for Sean…it involved Sean watching me with another person, and he would direct us in what we were doing.”
When Cassie was asked who hired those escorts, Ventura claimed, “Eventually it became a job for me, I had the contacts to set it up in the hotel room and all of that. At the beginning Sean set it up.”
Not long after they began, she said the sexual encounters became a job.
“There was no space to do anything else,” Cassie explained. “Staying out for days on end, taking drugs and drinking, having sex with a stranger, they would be 36, 48, 72, hours. The longest one was four days, even more on and off including recovering, recovering from the drugs, dehydration.”
The star went on to say that she felt she couldn’t refuse Combs because she “didn’t know what ‘no’ could be, or what ‘no’ could turn into,” implying that the repercussions for disobeying him were sometimes violent, per the Associated Press.
“Sean controlled a lot of my life,” she said, including her career, the way she dressed, “everything.”
“Sean is a really polarizing person; he was charming,” Ventura explained. “It’s hard to really be able to determine what you need when he’s telling you what he wants. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know what would happen…I was super young, I didn’t know if he would be upset enough to be violent or not want to be with me at all, over time if I didn’t do it.”
In her testimony, Cassie also alleged Diddy blackmailed her to participate in the freak offs using “actual videos and photos of the sexual encounters with the escort.” She said she feared the videos from the “Freak Offs” would end up on the Internet, a claim Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson made on the first day of the trial. Johnson said the tapes were “souvenirs of the most humiliating nights of [Ventura’s] life.”
Sean “Diddy” Combs is currently on trial for charges of racketeering, sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has denied all of these claims.
