The second alleged victim to testify in Sean “Diddy” Combs‘ federal sex trafficking and racketeering trial took the witness stand on Thursday (May 29) to share her emotional memories of alleged abuse and mistreatment by the mogul — including what she said were repeated instances of sexual assault.
The identity of the woman, a former assistant of Combs’ who at one point during her tenure was promoted to a high position at Revolt Films, is being kept secret, and she is being referred to as “Mia” throughout the proceedings.
Mia began her time on the stand recounting what it was like to be an assistant to Diddy when she began her job in 2009. Things, she said, were off from the start — she remembered that during her initial interview with Combs, he answered the door in his underwear.
From there, in her telling, it was nearly constant work and almost no rest. She talked about one particular five day stretch where she was working around the clock and not allowed to sleep. By the end of it, Mia said, she completely collapsed.
“I had a physical breakdown,” she testified. “I remember my hearing went. It felt like I was underwater, and my equilibrium was off. I [had] blurred vision [and saw] lights that weren’t there. And then out of nowhere, I didn’t mean to, but I burst into tears, hysterical, and couldn’t stop crying.”
Mia described her assistant job in a 2011 email that she read to the jury.
“[Diddy] can ask you to do 17,000 things at one time that range from cracking his knuckles, to writing his next movie, to doing his taxes,” she wrote. “He can also just have you standing next to him for 22 hours and not ask you one thing.”
Beyond the inhuman work schedule and constant demands, Mia described a boss who kept control of her whereabouts. When she was staying in one of his homes, she testified, she had to ask permission to leave — or even to lock her bedroom door.
“Puff said, ‘This is my house. No one locks my doors,'” she said.
Before talking about alleged abuse against her personally, Mia gave her perspective on several alleged incidents about which Cassie had previously testified, including one before Drake’s OVO Fest and one at a party at Prince’s house.
Mia then moved on to discussing a few times she said Diddy stepped over the line with her. There was an incident during a party at Burning Man where she claimed the mogul forced her to take ketamine, even though she was scared to do it.
“I did not think that I had a choice,” she said.
Then she recounted a time at Combs’ house in Los Angeles. Mia remembered a gathering at 3 AM, and said that Diddy asked her to go to IHOP to get food for everyone “right now.”
Before going, she headed to her room because “I was on my period and needed to change my tampon immediately.”
She recalled Combs saying, “When I told you to go to IHOP, I meant now. I didn’t tell you could go to your effing room yet.”
She said that he then began berating her in front of everyone, while blood was dripping down her leg. After that, she claimed, he threw a bowl of spaghetti at her and chased her out of the house while she was barefoot.
After the incident, she said, she was suspended from her job without pay on Combs’ orders.
A good part of the end of Mia’s first day of testimony was given over to the multiple times she alleges Diddy sexually assaulted her. So many, in fact, that she claimed she could only remember a few of them with specificity, while when it came to the rest: “I just remember a feeling. A specific horrible dark feeling in my stomach that I would get surrounding certain places.”
The initial alleged sexual assault happened just a few months into her tenure at the job, at Combs’ 40th birthday party. She recalled her boss giving her two shots of vodka, and feeling surprisingly woozy. Then, she said, Diddy leaned in to kiss her and put his hand up the side of her dress.
The next thing she remembers, she says, she was sitting on a chair in a different room of the hotel suite, and it was hours later.
Mia never brought it up to Combs, she said, because she thought he was “so drunk” at the time.
“I thought that he would have never remembered that, and that it was a huge accident,” she continued. “I was going to act like nothing happened.”
One other alleged assault she recalled with clarity was at Diddy’s home in Los Angeles. She was, she said, asleep on a bottom bunk in a bedroom that was, per the mogul’s orders, not locked.
She woke up with Combs on top of her, she said. Speaking with long pauses, and in tears, she recounted what she said happened next: he took off his pants and “put himself inside of me.”
Mia recalled being frozen and unable to react. She said the alleged rape made her feel “terrified and confused and ashamed and scared.”
Mia went on to recount another alleged assault at the same Los Angeles house. She said she was in the mogul’s bedroom closet, packing. When she looked up, Combs was standing right in front of her, with his penis out. She said that he grabbed her head and forced her to perform oral sex on him.
In the aftermath, she said, she felt “like trash and scared and ashamed and defeated and like an idiot.”
When asked by prosecutor Madison Smyser if she said no to Combs during any of the assaults, Mia tearfully explained that she couldn’t.
“I couldn’t tell him no about a sandwich,” she said. “I couldn’t tell him no about anything.
“There was no way I could tell him no, because then he would know that I thought he was doing was wrong, and then I would be a target… He would fire me and ruin my future and somehow twist the story into making me look like a threat… I knew his power, and I knew his control over me, and I didn’t want to lose everything that I worked so hard for or this like world that was the only thing that I had anymore.”
Mia’s direct testimony continues on Friday, May 30 followed by cross-examination of her by Diddy’s attorney Brian Steel.
