Dawn Richard faced a formidable adversary during cross-examination in Sean “Diddy” Combs‘ sex trafficking and racketeering trial, as attorney Nicole Westmoreland brought to the surface some changes in the way the singer told her story over the past several months.
Richard, a former member of Bad Boy Records groups Danity Kane and Diddy-Dirty Money, began her testimony last Friday by recounting a 2009 incident in Los Angeles in which, she alleged, Diddy assaulted Cassie Ventura in front of her and her Dirty Money group mate Kalenna Harper. The following day, Richard continued, the mogul threatened her and Harper to keep quiet.
On Monday (May 19), Richard returned to the stand. She shared several other times she said she’d seen Diddy hit Cassie—something that she said happened “throughout” the three years she spent as a member of Diddy-Dirty Money.
Richard recalled a different incident in 2009, while preparing for a performance at a festival in New York City’s Central Park, where Diddy “punched [Cassie] in the face… Her eye was swelling.”
The jury saw photographs of Cassie, Richard, and Harper from that day, all wearing sunglasses — a move Richard said she and Harper made in solidarity with Ventura, who was wearing the glasses to cover up bruising from the assault.
Richard also recounted an alleged assault at a restaurant in West Hollywood in 2010. She recalled Combs punching Cassie in the stomach during a celebrity-filled dinner whose guests included Usher, Jimmy Iovine, and Ne-Yo. In the aftermath of the dinner, Richard claimed, Combs “slapped [Cassie] in the mouth and told her to shut the fuck up.”
Westmoreland, a recent addition to Combs’ legal team, did her best to throw Richard’s credibility into doubt by demonstrating some inconsistencies in the star’s story over time. With the 2009 Los Angeles alleged assault, for example, Westmoreland pointed out that notes from a few of Richard’s meetings with the government told slightly shifting stories of both the assault itself and the day after.
In one interview, for example, the government’s notes indicated that Richard said Diddy hit Cassie with a skillet, while in her testimony she said that the mogul had attempted to hit her with the skillet, but she fell to the ground before it could connect. Westmoreland also pointed out that government notes of Richard’s first few meetings with them didn’t mention Diddy’s alleged threat the following day — that it first came up at a meeting earlier this month.
In a more direct admission of a changing story (Richard hadn’t actually seen the notes of her prior government meetings), the Danity Kane member admitted that in meeting with the government last fall, she said she’d never seen Combs do cocaine. But, she continued, she later remembered that she had seen him do it.
“So you would agree with me that as time progresses, your story changes?” Westmoreland asked.
“Yes,” Richard said.
The singer accounted for the changes by saying that she had spent the nearly 15 years since ending her association with Combs’ Bad Boy label trying not to think about her experiences there.
“I have to go back to memories that I don’t want to,” she said. “It takes time to remember things that have happened during the time that you try to forget.”
Richard also admitted to reaching out to Combs several times since leaving the label: once in an attempt to be a part of Making the Band (which she said she only did as a way to reconnect with choreographer Laurieann Gibson); and another time to ask Combs if they could re-form Diddy-Dirty Money.
Westmoreland harped on this latter ask, which Richard said she brought up to Combs because “Kalenna was having issues.”
“You are fully aware that you would spend a lot of time with Mr. Combs [if you re-formed the group], right?” she asked. “Even though you’re telling us that he made death threats?”
After Richard testified, Cassie Ventura’s longtime (and now estranged) best friend Kerry Morgan took the stand. Morgan and Ventura met as teenagers in 2001 while modeling, and became roommates three years later.
The most dramatic parts of Morgan’s testimony involved her describing two alleged assaults of Ventura by Combs that she said she was present for. In both instances, Morgan described hiding with Ventura in the aftermath: once by lying face-down for around 20 minutes on the concrete steps of a neighbor’s house in Los Angeles; and once in Jamaica in 2013 by hiding in a ditch for a period that “felt like hours.”
The latter alleged assault, Morgan explained, happened because Diddy thought Cassie was taking too long to use the bathroom.
Morgan also described the dramatic aftermath of Combs’ infamous assault on Cassie in March 2016 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Los Angeles. She said that she was staying with Cassie at the time, and that the singer came home with a black eye.
She claimed that thirty minutes after Cassie returned home, Combs arrived at the door, yelling and banging on it with a hammer. Cassie, her former friend said, was “numb” at Combs’ aggressive approach.
“I don’t think she cared if he came in and killed her,” Morgan said.
Morgan recounted the end of her relationship with Cassie, which happened after a 2018 alleged incident where Morgan claimed that Diddy choked her and hit her in the head with a wooden hanger, concussing her.
In the aftermath, she said, she had a lawyer reach out to Diddy, with a plan to sue him. Instead, she testified that she met with Cassie at a pizza place about a month after the alleged incident.
“She told me she thought I was milking it, that I was over-exaggerating,” Morgan recalled of Cassie.
That meeting, Morgan said, ended with her signing an NDA in exchange for a settlement of $30,000 — money, she said, that actually came from Diddy. That was, Morgan explained, the last time she spoke to her best friend of 17 years.
Monday ended with Diddy’s former personal assistant, David James. James worked for Diddy for two years, from 2007-2009. He described a punishing schedule of 20-hour days, sometimes without a day off for weeks at a time.
He also testified about a conversation with Cassie that goes to the heart of the government’s case that Diddy used force, fraud, and coercion to run his empire.
“I said, ‘Cassie, if [the lifestyle is] so crazy, why don’t you just leave and get out?'” he said.
“She was like, ‘I can’t get out. Mr. Combs oversees so much of my life. He controls my music career, he pays for my apartment, he gives me an allowance, essentially a salary.’ I just didn’t think that she could easily leave.”
James’ testimony continues on Tuesday. Cassie’s mother Regina Ventura; an escort known as “Punisher”; and Diddy’s former personal chef Jourdan Atkinson, who the mogul has been accused of assaulting, are all expected to testify.
