Sean Combs is his mother’s child. According to Tim Patterson, a close friend who lived with the embattled Bad Boy Records label founder in the 70s, Janice Combs was famous for throwing parties at her home in Mount Vernon, New York, that were especially popular with pimps, drug dealers and other unsavory types. It wasn’t uncommon for the boys, still quite young at this time, to naively walk into rooms and find partygoers having sex. “That was just Saturday night,” Patterson said.
The legend of those first “freak-offs” is among the headline-grabbing revelations in Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy – a new Peacock documentary that attempts to trace the Combs bell curve from its middle-class start to the height of cultural influence to the crash that tipped with Cassie Ventura’s bombshell sexual abuse lawsuit. The film joins the tidal wave of Diddy docs that have flooded the market since Combs’s federal indictment for sexual crimes last September, dropping in between a three-part series from TMZ (The Downfall) that arrived in April and four-part Max series (The Fall) that’s slated to release later this month. Still to arrive is the Netflix production Diddy Do It that was loudly and proudly announced by the rapper mogul 50 Cent, a perennial Combs skeptic.
