In September 2000, a 13-year-old girl who hoped to attend the Video Music Awards – or at least an afterparty – started asking limousine drivers outside the event in New York City for help getting into the festivities.
A driver allegedly told her that because of her age, she “fit what Diddy was looking for” and as such, he could take her to a party, according to court documents.
It turned out that offer meant Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul, wanted to have sex with her and allegedly used a date-rape drug to do so.
“You are ready to party!” Combs said as the girl, named as Jane Doe in the lawsuit, became disoriented. He and another male celebrity then allegedly raped her as a female celebrity watched.
The case, filed on 20 October in New York federal court, is part of the latest wave of federal civil lawsuits against Combs, who faces more than 20 lawsuits and was indicted in September on federal charges of sex trafficking, racketeering, conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution.
The charges against Combs, who pleaded not guilty, make him the latest person – joining the ranks of R Kelly, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein – to allegedly use employees, drugs and promises of access to celebrities and career advancement to lure young women into situations where the powerful men and, in some cases, others in their circle then sexually assaulted them.
Diddy, who is in federal custody in Brooklyn awaiting trial, has not only faced a reckoning in the court of public opinion but will probably also be convicted of the criminal charges and lose or have to settle the lawsuits, according to legal experts.
“It’s not one woman who usually gets raked over the coals. It seems to be a pile of evidence,” said Nancy Erika Smith, an attorney in New Jersey who represented former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson in a sexual harassment lawsuit against the network’s late chief Roger Ailes and a woman who said she was sexually harassed and coerced into sex by a supervisor at a Trump golf club.
“There are many women who witnessed their own experiences and will testify about that, but they also witnessed the abuse of other women in the same parties or orgies.”
Combs, a rapper whose success also included launching a record label and clothing line, faced a sexual harassment lawsuit in 2017, which was later settled. The public started paying more attention to his alleged predatory behavior in November 2023 when Combs’s ex-girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, filed a lawsuit alleging that he beat her, raped her and forced her to have sex with male prostitutes, which he filmed.
The parties settled in that suit, too, but more lawsuits began to come down with similar allegations of Diddy drugging and sexually assaulting women. Then in May 2024, CNN published hotel surveillance footage from 2016 that showed Combs grabbing Ventura by the neck, throwing her to the ground, kicking her and dragging her.
Diddy was arrested a few months later, in September, on the federal charges.
Earlier this month, Tony Buzbee, a Texas-based attorney, announced he was representing more than 120 men and women whose allegations against Combs include “violent sexual assault or rape, facilitated sex with a controlled substance, dissemination of video recordings, sexual abuse of minors”.
The criminal complaint states that Combs held “freak offs”, where he “distributed a variety of controlled substances to victims, in part to keep the victims obedient and compliant”.
Combs’s attorneys have repeatedly denied the allegations.
“Mr Combs and his legal team have full confidence in the facts, their legal defenses, and the integrity of the judicial process,” Combs’s attorneys said in the statement to CNN. “In court, the truth will prevail: that Mr Combs has never sexually assaulted anyone – adult or minor, man or woman.”
Despite those denials, “when you have a consistent line of victims alleging the same or similar claims, it just gives a lot of more credibility to the allegations”, said Tre Lovell, a Los Angeles-based entertainment attorney. He compared the scale of the allegations against Combs to those against Cosby, who was accused of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by more than 60 women.
“It’s the consistency and the multitude of the same stories,” Lovell said.
As more civil cases are filed, state prosecutors could also start to review those cases and file criminal charges, Lovell said.
“They are going to give more credibility to each other, certainly potentially more witnesses because these different plaintiffs could be witnesses for each other,” he said.
Also, given that celebrities attended Combs’s parties and – according to the young woman who attended the awards show afterparty – participated in at least one sexual assault, attorneys could start to try to add defendants to the civil lawsuits, Lovell said.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers could send their targets demand letters and a draft of a complaint and offer to resolve the allegations confidentially. If not, they could file a lawsuit, in which case their names would be publicized, Lovell said.
Combs’s attorneys have argued that the sexual activity with his accusers was consensual. The legal experts predicted that it would be difficult for the defense attorneys to prove that.
“They might have been at that location initially consensually, but they didn’t sign up for what happened to them there,” Smith said. “Having read several of the civil complaints and the criminal complaints, I think that’s going to be a fairly consistent story.”
If federal prosecutors decide to charge Combs’s alleged enablers, they could then decide to testify against Combs to save themselves. Smith says that could also strengthen the government’s cases.
Lovell thinks that is unlikely because prosecutors would have already indicted them, though he also suggested that prosecutors could be talking with people to get them to be government witnesses in exchange for not indicting them.
“It’s been pretty clear that they are just going after Diddy and his empire,” Lovell said.
Despite how strong the case against Combs may appear, Cosby and Weinstein also faced a multitude of allegations and were found guilty of sexual assault and rape, but some of those convictions were overturned. (Weinstein was also convicted in a separate case, which he is appealing, and remains incarcerated.)
Still, Smith expects Combs to be convicted.
“The evidence, I think, is overwhelming,” she said, adding that the lawsuits are helping to change the culture.
“I think that women are going to be less likely to tolerate it and be fearful to speak out, and other women are going to come forward.”
