Cassie breaks down in tears during Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial as she tells of ‘personal shame’ and alleged rape
Cassie Ventura broke down in tears in court as she described her “personal shame” at taking part in “freak off” sex sessions for Sean Combs – and also accused him of raping her as their relationship came to an end.
During her second day of testimony, the singer and model told jurors of several alleged violent incidents and said the hip-hop mogul, who was known as Puff Daddy and Diddy throughout his career, blackmailed her with compromising videos.
At one point, the courtroom in Manhattan, New York, fell silent as sexually explicit images from “freak offs” were shown to jurors, but kept private from the public gallery. These included images of Ms Ventura and escorts.
Combs asked his lawyer Marc Agnifilo to see a binder of the images, and thumbed through it for a few moments before handing it back.
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial: Day 3 – As it happened
Combs watched as hotel CCTV was played in the courtroom
The 55-year-old, once one of the most powerful men in the music industry, has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex-trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution.
Prosecutors allege he used his fame and fortune to coerce Ms Ventura and other women into abusive sex sessions with escorts. His lawyers have conceded he could be violent, but argue that all sexual encounters were consensual and he never veered into sex trafficking and racketeering.
Ms Ventura, who is heavily pregnant with her third child, kept calm and composed for most of her evidence on Wednesday, but broke down at the end of the day when asked why she had chosen to testify.
“I can’t carry this anymore,” she told the court. “I can’t carry the shame, the guilt, the way he treated people like they were disposable. What’s right is right, what’s wrong is wrong. I came here to do the right thing.”
Early in 2023, she said she started suffering from “flashbacks” and had suicidal thoughts, so went to rehab and trauma therapy.
Jurors were shown images of bruises on Ms Ventura’s body
It is “impossible to know” how many “freak offs” she participated in, but it was in the hundreds, she told the court. Asked if she has been involved in any since ending the relationship in 2018, she replied: “No.”
Ms Ventura, 38, alleged that Combs raped her at her home in Los Angeles, after she told him she was ending things.
“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she said, her voice trailing off.
She told jurors she did have consensual sex with the rapper on a subsequent occasion. “We’d been together for over 10 years. You just don’t turn feelings off,” she said.
Ms Ventura sued Combs in November 2023, and settled within 24 hours. She received £20m, the trial was told.
Combs ‘threatened Cassie and Kid Cudi’
Ms Ventura’s second day of testimony also included details of how she briefly dated Scott Mescudi, better known as singer and rapper Kid Cudi, during a low point in her relationship with Combs in 2011.
Combs lunged at her with a corkscrew and kicked her in the back when he found out, jurors heard, and threatened to blow up Mescudi’s car.
These allegations were also detailed in her lawsuit, which alleged his car did “explode in his driveway” around this time.
During several hours on the stand, Ms Ventura told how she hid the extent of Comb’s alleged violence from loved ones, and described one incident when she allegedly suffered a “pretty significant gash” above her left eye after he threw her into a bed frame.
Rather than go to hospital, his security staff took her to a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, she said.
The hotel CCTV ‘attack’
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CCTV footage shows Diddy ‘attacking’ Cassie in hotel
An incident at a hotel in Los Angeles in March 2016, which has come up several times during the trial already, was also discussed again.
CCTV from the hotel, which was first released by CNN in May 2024, showed Combs allegedly beating Ms Ventura in a hallway.
Jurors were shown photos of her with a swollen lip following the incident as she testified. She said a friend of hers saw her injuries and was “super upset” because she’d “seen me with black eyes and busted lips before”.
She also spoke about a trip to Cannes in 2013, after which she said the rapper began playing a recording of a “freak off” on his laptop on a commercial flight to New York, with other people around them – telling her he was “going to embarrass me and release them”.
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Combs allegedly threw a vase during the hotel incident. Pic: Department of Justice via Reuters
Asked if the freak offs impacted her health, Ms Ventura said she had stomach problems and frequently developed urinary tract infections. She was also affected mentally, she told the court, saying they made her feel “really empty” and “gross”.
Throughout her testimony, Ms Ventura has maintained she never wanted to have sexual experiences with other people but did it at first to please the man she loved, and later out of fear. She was 22 and inexperienced when she started dating Combs, who was 17 years older, she said.
The trial continues with cross-examination of Ms Ventura from the defence tomorrow.
A painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust has become the most expensive piece of modern art and the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction.
The Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, was bought for $236.4m (£180m) by an unnamed buyer after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday.
Its sale price beat the previous record for 20th-century art set by Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe bought for $195m (£148m) in 2022.
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn by Andy Warhol. Pic: Associated Press
The most expensive painting ever sold at auction was Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which fetched $450m (£342m) in 2017, Christie’s said on its website.
Sotheby’s said on X the price for the Klimt was “astonishing”, making the piece “the most valuable work of modern art ever sold at auction”.
The portrait, which Klimt worked on between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families wearing an East Asian emperor’s cloak.
Evaded fire and Nazi looters
Measuring 1.8m (6ft), the colourful piece, which was completed in 1916, illustrates the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938.
It was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that burned in a fire at an Austrian castle.
It also escaped being looted by the Nazis, who plundered the Lederer art collection.
They left only the family portraits, which they held to be “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan.
Father lie saved her life
To save her own life, Elisabeth Lederer made up a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father.
It helped that the artist spent years working meticulously on her portrait.
She convinced the Nazis to give her a document stating that she descended from Klimt, which allowed her to live safely in Vienna until her death from illness in 1944.
The painting, which is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned, was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire, who died this year.
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Five Klimt pieces from Lauder’s collection sold at the auction for a total of $392m (£298m), which also included pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch, Sotheby’s said.
An 18-carat-gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan – the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall – sold for a reported $12.1m (£9.2m).
The fully-functioning toilet, one of two he created in 2016 satirising superwealth, was stolen while on display at Blenheim Palace, the country manor where Winston Churchill was born, in 2019.
Two men were convicted of the theft, but it’s unclear what they did with the loo.
Investigators believe it was likely broken up and melted down.
A single loose wire on the container ship that crashed into and partially destroyed a US road bridge, led to the vessel losing of power just before the fatal collision, investigators have concluded.
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has found that the unconnected electric cable meant the Dali experienced a loss of propulsion and steering less than a mile from Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.
The collision on 26 March 2024 that followed collapsed a span of the bridge and killed six construction workers who were unable to escape in time.
It led to the blockage of the mouth of one of America’s busiest ports for almost three months.
Investigators found that an improperly placed label on the wire prevented it from being fully inserted, causing an inadequate connection.
The NTSB’s chair said locating the loose wire was like trying to find a single loose rivet on the Eiffel Tower.
The board has praised the ship’s crew. “The crew’s actions were as timely as they could be, and they were appropriate and also impressive considering the circumstance,” board member Michael Graham said.
But he called on the maritime shipping industry to strengthen its safety systems and better manage risks to bring it into line with the rigorous approach taken in aviation.
“Many of these issues we have discussed today as part of this accident could have been identified, addressed, and either mitigated or eliminated,” Mr Graham said.
The far reaching consequences of the accident are continuing. State officials have more than doubled the projected cost of the bridge rebuild from an upper estimate of $1.9bn (£1.4bn) to $5.2bn (£3.9bn) – with the reopening date pushed back to late 2030.
The Baltimore bridge collapse. Pic: Reuters
How to prevent future tragedies
In March, the board called for urgent safety assessments of 68 bridges in 19 US states including famous crossings like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.
The organisation found that countermeasures to reduce the vulnerability of the bridge from ships could have been implemented if a vulnerability assessment had been conducted by the Maryland Transportation Authority
The board has now issued numerous recommendations to try to prevent future catastrophic collisions.
Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after its collapse in 2024
Major bridges should consider adopting motorist warning systems that can immediately stop motorists from entering bridges in an emergency.
The Baltimore bridge, like many others, was not equipped with a warning system to prevent vehicles entering.
But police managed to clear and halt traffic on the bridge before the collapse, despite only having about 90 seconds to do so.
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Drone view of the Dali after it crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Pic: Reuters/NTSB
If traffic had not been stopped, it is likely that the death toll would have been much higher.
Police officers were discussing how to best evacuate the six workers who were on the bridge moments before the entire structure collapsed.
Other recommendations include the periodic inspections of high-voltage switchboards and proposed changes that would allow ships to recover faster from a loss of power.
In a joint statement, Grace Ocean (the Dali’s manager) and Synergy Marine Group (the Dali’s operator) thanked the NTSB for its investigation and stressed that they had fully cooperated with the board.
It said: “Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine Group continue to extend their deepest sympathy to all those affected by the Francis Scott Key Bridge incident of 26 March 2024.
“Since the outset, Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine have fully cooperated with the Board, making personnel, records and technical information available as requested.
“We note the Board’s findings, including its observations regarding the vulnerability of the Key Bridge’s main support pier, as well as the comments relating to aspects of the vessel’s electrical arrangements. These matters will be reviewed in detail with our technical teams, the vessel owner and counsel.”
The NTSB also called on Hyundai Heavy – the company that built the Dali – to incorporate “proper wire-label banding installation methods”.
In response the company said that when it delivered the ship “there was no indication that any wire was loose”.
It added that if any wire were to come loose “over the course of a decade, through vibrations or otherwise, the owner and operator should have detected that in a routine inspection and through normal maintenance”.
Synergy Marine Group has been approached for a response to Hyundai Heavy’s comments.
The NTSB has not specified that the power outage caused the crash. A probable cause for the crash will be decided at a later date.
The FBI is conducting a criminal probe into the collapse.
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