Testimony in Diddy‘s federal sex trafficking and racketeering trial began on Monday, with one witness sharing details of what he said were his sexual encounters with Cassie that the mogul would watch and direct.
That witness, Daniel Phillip, recounted how while managing a male revue show around 2012, he got a call to dance at a bachelorette party at New York’s Gramercy Hotel.
When he got there, he said, he was met by Cassie, though he didn’t know who she was at the time. But he realized he was brought there under false pretenses.
“Cassie asked me if it was okay if it was just us,” he said.
He went on to explain that the singer said it was her birthday, and her “husband” wanted to do “something special” for her.
She asked him, Phillip continued, to rub baby oil on her and to see where things went, while her husband watched. She then gave him a few thousand dollars, far above the rate he was expecting.
“She said her husband wasn’t gay and wasn’t going to try and touch me,” he said.
Diddy, Phillip said, was in the room with a bandanna over his face, though the dancer figured out the mogul’s identity as soon as he spoke.
“I asked him what he did for a living, and he said he was in importing and exporting,” Phillip testified.
He said that he and Cassie rubbed baby oil on each other for a couple minutes, then had sex. Diddy, he said, was “sitting in the corner, masturbating.”
That encounter, he said, led to numerous others with Cassie and Diddy over the next year or so, paying between $700 and about $6,000, and all following the same script — including a second one that very first night. In all of them, Phillip testified, Diddy would direct the action: telling Cassie and Phillip, “Y’all need to rub more baby oil on each other,” telling Phillip to wait to ejaculate, and even one time telling the dancer and Cassie to role play as if they had just met at an airport.
“[Diddy] would tell us to rub each other and touch each other,” Phillip said. “He would tell her to give me oral sex.”
The sessions, Phillip remembered, could last up to ten hours, alternating for him between sex with Cassie while Diddy watched, and hours-long waits while Diddy and Cassie went to a separate room.
On two separate occasions, Phillip said, he witnessed what seemed to be abuse: he said he heard Cassie, while she was in a room with Diddy, scream that she was sorry, while hearing sounds of someone being slapped. After one of those incidents, he continued, Cassie ran to him and jumped in his lap.
“She was shaking. She was terrified,” he recalled.
Phillip also said that he was fearful of Diddy, recalling that the mogul had taken a photo of his driver’s license, which he viewed as a threat.
The prosecution and the defense painted these sexual encounters in starkly different terms in their opening statements.
Prosector Emily Johnson, in her opening, described Cassie as “sexually exploited,” saying that Combs “manipulated” her and other women into having sex with escorts.
“Let me be very clear: this case is not about a celebrity’s private sexual preference,” Johnson said.
Instead, she continued, Diddy used “lies, drugs, threats and violence” to force Cassie (and another upcoming witness, who will be testifying as Jane Doe) to have sex in sessions that sometimes lasted multiple days, with multiple escorts.
Diddy, she said, “dictated every step” of the sessions: told the women how to look, what to do, and even selected drugs for them. These multiple-day sessions, Johnson said, would happen as often as once a week.
“[Cassie] knew it was not something she wanted to do,” Johnson continued. “But because of the defendant, it became almost everything she did.”
Cassie submitted to these sessions against her will, Johnson said, in part because Diddy had videos of her with escorts, and threatened to release them, which could destroy her career.
“Her livelihood and her safety depended on keeping him happy,” the prosecutor said.
Defense attorney Teny Geragos argued that her client is a “complicated” man who is guilty of many things — including, she admitted, domestic violence and assault.
But, Geragos continued, those crimes are not what he’s being charged with. She countered the government’s idea that Cassie and Jane Doe were coerced into what she called “the swinger’s lifestyle.”
“[They] made free choices every day for years,” she said. “These women are strong, capable, and they were in love with him.”
Another witness on Monday, Israel Florez, was the assistant director of security at the Intercontinental Hotel in Century City on March 5, 2016, when Diddy assaulted Cassie in an attack caught on video.
Florez recounted showing up in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Diddy, the security chief said, had “a blank stare, a devilish stare,” and Cassie appeared scared.
In the aftermath of the incident, Florez said, Diddy waved a stack of money at him in an attempt to bribe him to, as the witness characterized it, “take care of this and don’t tell anybody.” (Defense lawyer Brian Steel, in cross-examination, attempted to paint this as Diddy simply wanting to pay for damages to the hotel).
In the aftermath of the incident, Florez looked at the now-famous security footage, which was shown to the jury on Monday. He admitted to recording part of it on his phone, to show his wife.
The trial resumes on Tuesday with continued cross-examination of Phillip. Cassie Ventura is expected to testify shortly afterwards.
