Who was Sean combs girlfriend for a decade and his first complainant, Casandra Ventura, testified at the Manhattan court on Tuesday and Wednesday. Pregnant eight and a half months and as the main witness of the case, his statement has been one of the first of the trial. Faced with the questions of the Prosecutor’s Office, he gave a very hard testimony of physical, verbal and mental abuses, of violations, attacks and even suicidal thoughts. On Thursday, it is the team that defends combs who has been able to interrogate it from nine in the morning and, with pauses, until five in the afternoon, New York time. The questions have revolved around consent in their relationship.
The defense sought to draw the case as if the fights, the ill -treatment and the beatings were simply a quarrel, somewhat lower, as if their client were “evil” or “a cocoon”, as they said in their initial allegation, but not a criminal with a network of harassment behind. However, the very hard statements of Ventura have dislodged them and have had to emphasize the defense. The first issue has focused on your relationship. “You and be combs were in love for 11 years, right?” Asked the lawyer Anna Estevao. “Ajá,” said Ventura, singer and actress artistically known as Cassie. He also asked him if he knew it was “special” for combs. “No, she didn’t always know,” she replied. “Did I know sometimes?” “I think it’s sometimes correct, yes,” she said, almost among whispers.
Then, he has brought out messages where the couple declared their love. In the previous two days, Ventura has never denied that this feeling existed, but has insisted that he was intermittent, that they had other couples (whenever he wanted, of course) and that the toxicity was absolute. In fact, she was the first of the almost 200 victims to denounce, in November 2023. For half an hour, Estevao has continued to ask him about the romantic leg of the relationship and how they fell in love. Ventura has said that combs was “sweet” and “attentive” until he discovered his true personality. “To make you happy, you told you what I wanted to do Freak-offsRight? “, The lawyer has questioned in reference to the orgies in which Comps forced her to participate.” No, “Ventura said.” There was much more. “
The combs lawyers have tried to demonstrate that those dark parties of sex and drugs were not forced. Something difficult to prove, because Ventura has described them in that way during their two days of declaration. Estevao’s interrogation to Ventura has been kind, and has been relaxing throughout the day; On some occasion, even both have laughed. In addition, unlike during the testimony for the Prosecutor’s Office, with the defense asking there has been a number of objections from the other part, which has done the heaviest day, being difficult to advance. Also combs – known as Puff Daddy or Diddy – has been more restless, stirring in his chair, and has passed notes to his lawyer. His mother, Janice, and his three boys (has seven in total) were in the room.
The defense has brought out some messages from 2009 where Ventura and Combs talked about the Freaks-off. She said: “There were no questions, we were fine, as if it literally made sense for the next step in our sexual life together. It makes me nervous to think that I am becoming the girlfriend with whom you vent your fantasies and that’s it. I don’t understand the other part … at least for now.” In another of them, he wrote: “I’m always ready for a Freak-off“, And he replied:” I can’t wait to see you. “Com combs wants to see that there was consent in those orgies, that there was a previous preparation in which she was involved. On the other hand, during her first two days of testimony, Ventura has argued that she is more complex, which underwent” hundreds “of those very long Freak-offs forced by Combs, which blackmailed and mistreated it if he did not. The rapper and producer is accused of five crimes, two of sex trafficking, two of transport to exercise prostitution and one of illicit association.
Cassie has smiled in court when they have shown him a mail of 2007. In him he exposed his love to Comong, and that he felt “loved, safe, empowered” with him, “but, on the other hand” he always felt “tired” of her: “With you never seems to make the right decisions (…) for some reason, you don’t trust me.” “With messages like this, they were like a single direction path,” he said about the mail. The defense has also shown messages where she claimed that she did not answer the phone, but that she demanded to speak when he demanded: “This is not having a relationship with someone you want and loves you. I am hurt by how you treat me, I don’t need your money, I need some attention.” Ventura has also insisted that he did not want to be recorded, “in any case,” during those orgies. In another 2009 message, he explains that he wants to feel “safe” with him, but that “the last time was a mistake, since then I have felt something dirty, instead of sexual and spontaneous.”
The singer has explained how ComBs got to know. It was through a musical producer named Ryan Leslie, with whom he left for about three years when he was 18 or 19, he explained, and that he was 10 years older than her. When he signed with the ComBs Discs Company, called Bad Boy Records, they started a kind of Platonic relationship, where he supported her. After his 21st birthday, he used an event as an excuse to go to Miami and look with combs.
The intention of the defense is to demonstrate that the then couple led a lifestyle of pairs, of Swingerswithout exclusivity. The lawyer Estevao has asked Ventura about it and if the Freak-offs They had nothing to do with that: “In relation to the sexual, yes, but they were something very different,” he replied. In addition, he has made a clarification: combs never wanted his employees to know about those orgies in hotels and houses; In fact, he hid it. They sometimes carried condoms, lubricants and baby oil – with which Puff Daddy had obsession; They found hundreds of bottles in their home – to those hotels where the couple stayed, but never had details of what happened from doors inside and either attended any of the sexual encounters; At least he does not remember, since he took drugs to cloud his consciousness. She either told her friends anything about those Freak-offs.
During the interrogation of the defense, Ventura has told, as he did on his first day, that combs exercised intense control over his physical appearance. The singer has explained that she believes she had good taste, and a great impact on the world of fashion and culture. When asked about rapper’s addictions, he said he was addicted “to success.” But also to drugs: it varied for years, but above all to opiates.
This Thursday, lunch break has extended more than expected. The defense and the Prosecutor’s Office have been arguing with the judge about when Cassie’s testimony must end: initially it would be Friday, but perhaps the defense needs more time, they say. The judge, something angry, has asked them to end before, on Friday before eating, because the witness is broadcasting a very hard testimony and is pregnant eight and a half months.
The defense has continued to exhibit messages about celebrities Freak-offs, trying to see that the two planned them and that the witness accessed them voluntarily and because both members of the couple were looking for them. “To say that I loved the Freak-offs They were words without more at that time, ”she has argued. In general, her answers have been concise, with many lazy self (“forks“,”Yeah“,”YEP”, Little more).
For the first time since it started on Monday, the defense has also pronounced the name of Kim Porter, who was a girlfriend for years – although also intermittently – of combs and mother of three of his children. Porter died from complications of pneumonia in 2018. In a message of Ventura reads: “I am some jealousy of Mrs. Porter.” In other messages, Ventura demonstrates his frustration because, after years of relationship, he failed to create a link with the children of combs, although they had begun to leave when they were very small.
He has also said that it was combs who presented her to rapper Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, with whom she came out for a few years. He had a secret phone to communicate with him, because he didn’t want Puff Daddy to know about his relationship: “Tell him it would have been too dangerous.” Meanwhile, he continued to maintain the Freak-offsbecause “they were a job,” he says. Infidelities, having other relationships, was frequent. Ventura has said that in 2015 he was recording a film in South Africa and learned that Comps was with another girlfriend, a woman she saw sporadically. When he learned, he sent a video with another woman to a group where she was combs with some nearby employees, blocked her number and cut with him. Then she started dating actor Michael B. Jordan.
Ventura has explained that some friends knew about the abuses suffered at the hands of combs, because they were obvious and undeniable, with wounds and bruises. He has also told how drugs helped her, so much that sometimes she consumed them without combs, with friends, which made him get very violent; It was something that made him jealous and did not like it, which made him have a “quite explosive” behavior. He also consumed them, sometimes in excess, and went through an overdose in 2012 after a party at the Playboy mansion. Both tried to detoxify but only achieved it in stages, she has told, which has also rejected a bully that has moved online: the body oil they used for the Freak-offs It did not contain drugs.
At the end of the afternoon, the defense has continued to make temporary jumps in their questions and focus on its line: to demonstrate that Ventura consented to participate in those brutal sexual encounters with prostitutes and that the problems of their relationship, more than abuse, are moved by jealousy and toxicity. Instead of focusing on explaining their relationship more linear, with a narrative, as in the interrogation of the Prosecutor’s Office, they have insisted on the idea of consent with evidence and messages. The end of the day has dedicated him to asking about the episode of the intercontinental hotel of March 2016, when she ran out of the room and he caught her and dragged her around the hall. They have focused on whether it was she who decided to organize and carry out the orgy from a series of text messages where they wondered about their preferences.
Ventura, tired, has responded with monosyllables. About five in the afternoon the session is over, and Ventura must return to the podium on Friday, in principle, finally.
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