Last September, on the discharge of an anticipated comeback album, the hip-hop impresario Sean “Diddy” Combs, previously often known as P Diddy and Puff Daddy, spoke about how he had renamed himself Love, and his new album could be titled, The Love Album: Off the Grid.
Combs advised GQ he’d made the album as a result of he didn’t know the place the love was at. “I didn’t know learn how to flip it again on,” Combs stated. “After which, someday God got here to me – and God’s a girl. So She was like, ‘It’s time, child.’”
If God is exerting affect on Combs’s life, nevertheless, then She might be indignant and it has nothing to do together with his music, if a number of civil claims of intercourse trafficking and sexual abuse and federal brokers raiding his houses in Los Angeles and Miami are any indication of divine intervention.
Removed from driving a comeback wave on the again of his Love album, Combs’s fame is underneath menace greater than ever earlier than. As an alternative of taking place within the annals of hip-hop fame, Combs’s identify is now talked about within the US media alongside fallen stars and moguls like R Kelly and Harvey Weinstein.
The raid on Combs’s houses on Monday had been reportedly approved by a search warrant out of New York’s southern district as a part of an “ongoing investigation” into sex-trafficking allegations. At the very least three individuals at Combs’s residence in Los Angeles gave the impression to be cuffed by brokers, together with briefly Combs’s sons, 30-year-old Justin and 25-year-old King. In Miami, 4 individuals in Combs’s entourage had been equally restrained at his Miami Seaside mansion.
One other Combs affiliate, described as Diddy’s “mule” in a civil lawsuit in opposition to the music producer, was arrested on drug costs on the OpaLocka airport, north of town, the place Combs’s black Gulfstream jet had touched down.
The rap mogul was seen chatting with brokers earlier than the aircraft flew on to Antigua. However Combs didn’t be a part of the family-and-friends Caribbean trip journey, and his whereabouts are unknown. The 54-year-old, three-time Grammy winner was not arrested, nor has he been charged with any offenses. He has beforehand strenuously denied all allegations.
Aaron Dyer, an lawyer for Combs, protested that there was “no excuse for the extreme present of drive and hostility exhibited by authorities or the best way his kids and workers had been handled”.
Dyer referred to as the raid a “gross overuse of military-level drive”, an “unprecedented ambush”, and “nothing greater than a witch-hunt primarily based on meritless accusations”.
However the stunning raids got here a month after a lawsuit was filed in New York by the music producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones that accuses Combs of being the chief of a legal enterprise that might qualify as a “widespread and harmful legal intercourse trafficking group”.
Jones, who labored on the Love album, claims that he was compelled to “solicit intercourse staff and carry out intercourse acts to the pleasure of Mr Combs”.
Jones’s lawsuit alleges that bold-face names added “legitimacy” to Combs’ alleged sex-trafficking events due to his “entry to celebrities resembling well-known athletes, political figures, artists, musicians, and worldwide dignitaries like British Royal, Prince Harry”. Prince Harry is just not accused of any wrongdoing.
The raids punctuate a cascade of allegations leveled at Combs in latest months.
In November, Combs’s former accomplice, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, filed a $30m lawsuit in New York accusing him of urging her to have intercourse with male intercourse staff whereas he filmed and that he’d overwhelmed and raped her in 2018.
Combs denied Ventura’s allegations, and settled the lawsuit a day later for an undisclosed amount of cash. His former lawyer Ben Brafman stated Combs “vehemently denies” the allegations.
However different girls got here ahead. Joie Dickerson-Neal subsequently accused Combs of drugging and sexually assaulting her, and once more recording the occasion, whereas she was a university pupil within the early 90s when Combs was at Uptown Data, the label that launched Mary J Blige and Jodeci.
In a 3rd lawsuit, an nameless girl accused Combs and two co-defendants of raping her within the early Nineties after he based Dangerous Boy Data, the label that grew to become synonymous with the success of the Infamous BIG, Usher, Religion Evans and 112.
Then a fourth swimsuit claimed Combs drugged and raped an unnamed plaintiff in 2003, when she was 17, at a time when Combs had grow to be established because the de facto ambassador of hip-hop bling by way of the clothes model Sean John, a jewellery and males’s perfume Unforgivable, and later strikes into the spirits enterprise with Cîroc vodka and DeLeón tequila.
Like different high-profile males caught up in #MeToo accusations there was a way that problematic habits by Combs in direction of girls was an open secret.
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All through Combs’s profession there have been indicators that his model of present enterprise hip-hop capitalism had flaws that many had been prepared to miss.
“Puffy linked quite a lot of dots, linked individuals to a distinct sort of glamor and aspiration, and introduced hip-hop into a distinct place on the planet,” Vibe journal’s editor, Alan Gentle, advised the Guardian.
When Combs introduced his arrival in New York society with an all-white social gathering within the Hamptons in 1998, the primary installment of a collection that ultimately moved to St Tropez and Beverly Hills, Paris Hilton described him as a “modern-day Gatsby”.
He featured in Vogue alongside Kate Moss in Paris; editor-in-chief Anna Wintour contributed a spoken phrase passage to a 2011 album with a brand new group Diddy Soiled Cash. However the rock author Cynthia Fuchs had written a decade earlier that the “hypester-hustler-supreme model of Combs lengthy overstayed his welcome”.
Through the infamous east coast-west coast rap wars of Nineties, which noticed Loss of life Row Data’ Tupac Shakur and Dangerous Boy’s Biggie Smalls murdered, Combs offered as a would-be gangster susceptible to overreach to show his powerful credentials.
Combs was born in Harlem in 1970. His father was murdered when he was three and Combs was raised within the New York suburb of Mount Vernon. In distinction to his friends, he had a cushty middle-class existence – educated at a non-public Catholic college within the Bronx, he later studied enterprise at Howard College and hustled a job at Andre Harrell’s Uptown Data.
Indicators of Combs’s overreach got here as quickly as 1991, when seven individuals had been killed in a stampede at a celeb basketball sport he’d promoted. In Could 1999, Steve Stoute, Interscope information government, described how Combs and two accomplices had burst into his workplace in New York.
“One minute I’m in the course of a gathering,” Stoute advised the LA Instances, “and the subsequent minute I’m down on the ground and Puffy and his guys are kicking and pounding me. Then Puffy throws my desk over they usually simply stroll out like nothing occurred.”
Gentle says there was a specific amount of bother with Combs from the start. “There’s at all times been these things round him. Some is the world you’re shifting in, however some speaks to the way you’re doing enterprise.”
There have been latest indicators that Combs’s life-style of diamonds, furs and champagne is underneath stress. Final yr, he sued the British spirits big Diageo alleging that the corporate had uncared for the spirits underneath their joint management, accused the corporate of racism and resenting him for making an excessive amount of cash.
Diageo denied the claims and accused Combs of resorting to “false and reckless” allegations “in an effort to extract further billions” from the corporate. The case was resolved in January with Diageo buying sole possession of the manufacturers.
However as Combs’s story takes a brand new flip with the interjection of federal authorities, there could also be a bigger reckoning in play.
“Understandings round intercourse, medicine and rock’n’roll, the completely different guidelines underneath which the music enterprise operates, and the extent to which it’s a night-time factor, secreted from the general public, finished in studios or in golf equipment, might now be shaking out,” Gentle says. “I feel we’ve all been ready for extra individuals to be referred to as out for unacceptable habits.”
