Singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, a former girlfriend of Sean “Diddy” Combsand a key witness in the federal sex-trafficking and racketeering trial of the music mogul, returned to the witness stand in New York City on Wednesday morning, as the high-profile trial enters its third day.
Ventura, who is eight and a half months pregnant, began her second day of testimony by revisiting the hotel surveillance footage of her 2016 assault by Combs. She said Combs was yelling at her and then threw a vase at her in the elevator lobby.
“I didn’t get hit. I remember it hitting the wall. He was yelling at me and threw it at me,” Ventura said, adding that Combs apparently told her “that I wasn’t going to leave him there. That I couldn’t.”
The jury was then shown two photos of Ventura, that she says she took of herself after the hotel assault where she is seen with a swollen lip. She said she also had a black eye beneath her sunglasses.
The jury was also shown text messages between Combs and Ventura after the assault, where she told him “you’re sick for thinking it’s OK to do what you did to me” and told him that she “had a black eye”.
Ventura was asked again about the various escorts she says she was forced to hire, with Combs’s money, to take part in the “freak-offs” – she has named more than a dozen since her testimony began.
“That was just my job, really. It was expected of me,” she said. She told the court that if she said no to a “freak-off” or told Combs she didn’t want to do it, “it would be a problem, we’d end up fighting” adding that violence was “always a concern if we weren’t agreeing on something”.
In a 2016 text message shown in court, Combs is seen asking Ventura to have a “proper” “freak-off” without the use of ketamine. Combs claimed that a “successful” “freak-off” was only “when we remember”, while Ventura noted that she preferred ketamine during “freak-offs” because “it was very dissociative.”
Combs would often threaten to release the videos he had of Ventura taking part in the “freak-offs”, she said. She noted that on her birthday one year, Combs reminded her of the videos he had in his possession after she refused to leave her friends to go with him to a “freak-off”.
