NOTE: The following article contains disturbing details and video footage. Please read at your own discretion.

As the sex trafficking trial for Sean “Diddy” Combs enters its third day, Combs’ ex-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, took the stand Wednesday to resume her testimony after a day spent recounting grotesque and humiliating details of her life with him.

Ventura is considered a star witness for the prosecution and her testimony is particularly valuable. Combs was captured on security video violently assaulting Ventura in a hotel hallway in 2016.

Ventura sued Combs in 2023, alleging years of rape and abuse. The suit was settled within hours, but was followed by dozens of similar legal claims and touched off a criminal investigation.

During her first day of testimony, on the second day of the blockbuster trial, Ventura described being pressured into degrading sexual encounters with paid sex workers. She also recounted being beaten numerous times by Combs when she did things that displeased him — like smiling at him the wrong way.

“You make the wrong face and the next thing I knew I was getting hit in the face,” she said.

Ventura accused Combs of gaining her subservience by threatening to publicly release videos of her with male sex workers.

Combs’ lawyers have acknowledged the rapper could be violent but maintain that the sexual acts were consensual. They say nothing he did amounted to sex trafficking or racketeering (the charges he faces), but insisted he just has unique sexual proclivities.

Day 3

Ventura returned to the witness stand shortly before 10 a.m. on Wednesday during Combs’ sex-trafficking trial, answering questions posed by prosecutor Emily Johnson for a second day.

For a third day in a row, the jury watched the hotel surveillance footage of Combs’ 2016 assault on Ventura but the video had no sound. She said she recalled Combs throwing a vase with flowers in it.

“I didn’t get hit. I remember it hitting the wall. He was yelling at me and threw it at me,” she said.

Ventura said that as she was trying to leave the hotel, Combs told her “that I wasn’t going to leave him there. That I couldn’t.”

The prosecution showed two photos of Ventura following the hotel assault and text messages between the former couple.

Ventura said that she took selfies on her Uber ride away from the hotel. She had a swollen lip and testified that under her sunglasses, she had a black eye.

Combs texted Ventura after the assault and said, “the cops are here,” begging her to call him. In response to Combs, Ventura said that she had a movie premiere for “the biggest thing I’ve ever done in my life” and now she had a “fat lip” and black eye.

“Please stay far away from me,” she texted him.

Ventura said Combs claimed police were about to arrest him and told her if she didn’t answer his phone calls she’d “never hear my voice again.”

Ventura’s friend called the police following the assault and they showed up to her apartment to question her, but she said that she did not want to say who assaulted her.

“Did you want to protect Sean?” Johnson asked.

“Yeah, of course,” Venture replied. “In that moment, I didn’t want to hurt him that way. I wasn’t ready.”

Ventura said that after the assault, Combs showed up to her apartment and she heard “chaos outside of the door” including “banging, kicking, yelling.”

She said that she went to the home of one of Combs’ security guards, D-Roc, not too long after the assault “to feel safe.” She then went to Combs’ house to do a fitting for her upcoming move premiere for a romantic comedy she starred in called The Perfect Match.

The premiere took place two days after the hotel assault and the jury was shown a photo of Combs and Ventura at the afterparty. She pointed out bruises on her body that were visible in the photographs and said she was unable to cover up all the damage with makeup.

The prosecution showed a 2016 text message from Combs to Ventura about the freak-offs. He proposed they have a “proper” freak-off without the drug ketamine involved.

In a text message, he wrote that a “successful” freak-off was “when we remember.”

“I won’t bring up again until you are in that mood,” he wrote.

Ventura told the court ketamine was her preferred drug during the freak-offs because “it was very dissociative.”

She then discussed how videos of the freak-offs were turned into “blackmail materials.” She said that when Combs was angry with her, he often reminded her of the sexually explicit videos he had saved.

“One time I dated someone else and that’s what it was all about — ‘I’m going to put out two embarrassing videos of you,’” she said, adding that she believed Combs “just wanted to hurt me.”

She said the videos could ruin everything she’d worked for and “make me look like a slut.”

“I feared for my career. I feared for my family. It’s just embarrassing. It’s horrible and disgusting. No one should do that to anyone,” she said.

In a 2013 text message, she wrote to Combs: “Please delete any video out of your iPhone if you have. Too many ppl have access to your stuff.”

Combs told her that he had deleted them but there were times in their relationship that she said she saw the videos he claimed to have deleted.

When Johnson asked Ventura if she ever tried to fight back when Combs picked a fight with her, she said she tried earlier in their relationship but learned “it could escalate the fight more, make it worse for myself.”

Ventura testified that she had an “off-and-on” addiction to opiates. She said she took them to come down off party drugs, including ecstasy, which she said she’d use during freak-offs.

“Opiates made me feel numb, which is why I relied on them so heavily,” she told the court, adding, “I didn’t want to feel what was actually going on in my mind, in my life, in real time. It was just an escape for me.”

She also testified that she had persistent urinary tract infections (UTIs) when she and Combs were having freak-offs. She said she would continue to take part in the freak-offs despite the infections, calling the pain “horrible.”

In another text message between Ventura and Combs, she told him that she had sores on her tongue. Ventura told the court that she thought the sores were from taking drugs and performing oral sex during the freak-offs.

Combs responded to Ventura, writing, “I’m sorry.”

After freak-offs, Ventura said, she felt emotionally “just really empty and I felt gross.” She also said she “felt like I did my job.”

Ventura said that Combs would “put his hands on me” during freak-offs with other male escorts.

“He would grab me up. Push me down. Hit me in the side of the head. Kick me. You name it,” Ventura said.

On one occasion in 2013, while packing to go to Drake’s OVO music festival in Toronto, Ventura said Combs “attacked” her friends and threw her into a bed frame.

She said when Combs went to “attack” her, her friends “jumped on his back.”

Venture said she suffered a “pretty significant gash” above her left eye, and Combs’ security brought her to a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills to get the wound stitched up.

She texted Combs a photo of her injury after and wrote: “So you can remember.”

“You don’t know when to stop. You pushed it too far. And continued to push. Sad,” Combs replied.

Ventura said that she has a permanent scar on her eyebrow from the 2013 altercation.

She also spoke about attending the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 and revealed that Combs had kicked her off the yacht they were staying on after getting into a fight.

Combs accused Ventura of taking drugs from him and made her leave the boat without shoes, her passport and other belongings.

She said she ended up staying at a hotel where Combs’ employees were staying.

She testified that when they were on a plane returning from the festival, Combs pulled up freak-off videos on his laptop and told her that he was going to “embarrass” her “and release them.”

“I just felt trapped,” she told the court.

After the plane landed in New York, she said, Combs said he wanted to have a freak-off.

“At that point, whatever was going to make him not be angry at me and threatening me, I was willing to do,” she said. “I just didn’t want to feel scared anymore. It was the one thing he made me feel like I was good at.”

Ventura read a text message she sent to Combs in 2017, in which she wrote that “nothing good” comes out of the freak-offs.

“You treat me like you’re Ike Turner,” she wrote, referring to Tina Turner’s former husband, who was physically abusive towards the singer.

There was discussion between prosecutors and the judge about showing sealed evidence to only the jurors, lawyers and Ventura while using privacy screens.

The prosecutor said videos of Ventura involved in sexual situations would not be shown during direct examination but it’s unclear whether the defence will show the footage.

Ventura was shown five images from freak-offs that only she and the jury could see.

In one of the images, Ventura identified a future witness for the prosecution who has been referred to as “Mia,” but is listed in court documents as “Victim-4.”

Ventura also identified images of herself having sexual contact with “Jules,” “Dave” and “Greg,” three of the escorts she has referred to in her testimony.

She said the images were taken from videos that were saved on an electronic device that she thought was broken, but was turned over to the government as evidence.

Ventura said that multiple employees of Combs witnessed him abusing her over the course of their relationship. She testified that one assistant told her they quit because of the way Combs treated her.

She conceded that she initiated physical fights with Combs at times during their relationship, but claimed he was not injured during those fights. Ventura added that when Combs was physical with her, there would be bruises that would require her to hide out in order to prevent anyone from seeing them.

Ventura also spoke about the first time Combs physically abused her, after she witnessed him flirting with someone else at a group dinner in 2007 or 2008. She said she shrugged her shoulders when somebody else who saw it looked at her.

She said when they got into his Escalade after the dinner, “he knocked me around and was just really mean.” She added that he hit her in the side of the head, which sent her flying onto the floor of the vehicle.

“I was just shocked,” she added.

When recounting another time she was beaten by Combs, she recalled hiding out at a hotel for a week so her wounds could heal. She said she wanted to go to her mother’s house but knew she was not allowed.

“It wouldn’t be safe. I understood Sean’s capabilities, his access to guns, the threats he made prior to that. I was privy,” she told the court.

Ventura also spoke about an incident in 2011 when Combs discovered that she had begun dating rapper Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi.

Combs went through Ventura’s phone during a freak-off and lunged at her with a “wine bottle opener” after he read text messages between the two.

Ventura and Mescudi. She said that Combs threatened to hurt her and Mescudi, as well as release two freak-off videos.

Ventura said Combs “attacked” her at his home and when she returned to her hotel room, it had been trashed, with urine and feces strewn in the bathroom.

She told the jury that she eventually went to see her mother in Connecticut, where she allowed her to take photos of the bruises on her lower back and right thigh.

“I believe I told her this was the first time, and I didn’t tell her about the freak-offs,” Ventura said, adding that she felt she couldn’t “justify it to anyone, especially not your mom.”

Ventura became emotional and requested a break after speaking about lying to her mother.

When she returned to the stand after a 10-minute break, Ventura testified that she ended things with Mescudi following Combs’ threats against them at the end of 2011.

“Too much danger, too much uncertainty of what could happen if we continued to see each other,” she said.

Ventura said that Combs threatened to blow up Mescudi’s car and that he wanted Mescudi’s friends to be there when it happened.

The court was shown a close-up picture of Ventura’s eyebrow and black eye. When asked who gave her the black eye, Ventura responded: “Sean.”

Combs didn’t want his family to see Ventura after she had sustained any injuries, she said.

“He told me to make sure his son couldn’t see me like that, the bruises on my face,” Ventura said.

As she continued her testimony about notable acts of violence she said she witnessed, Ventura brought up an incident where she said she saw Combs hold one of her friends over a balcony railing at her Los Angeles apartment.

On another occasion, she said, she saw him hit a different friend — with whom she had been close to for 17 years — in the head with a wooden hanger.

“It just ended our friendship,” Ventura said, adding that she hasn’t spoken to her since.

She also testified that her life reached a climatic moment in early 2023 when she had “horrible flashbacks” as she was shooting a music video.

She said she later told her husband at home that “you can do this without me. You don’t need me here anymore.”

She said she couldn’t take the pain anymore and “tried to walk out the front door into traffic and my husband would not let me.”

Weeks later, she was undergoing rehab and trauma therapy.

Asked why she was testifying at Combs’ criminal trial, she said: “I can’t carry this anymore. I can’t carry the shame, the guilt.”

What he’s on trial for

U.S. prosecutors allege that for 20 years, behind the scenes, Combs was coercing and abusing women with help from a network of associates who helped silence victims through blackmail and violence.

Combs faces an indictment that includes descriptions of freak-offs, which are defined in the court doc as “elaborate and produced sex performances that Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during, and often electronically recorded.”

Numerous witnesses have come forward to accuse Combs of terrorizing people into silence by choking, hitting, kicking and dragging them, according to prosecutors. One indictment alleges that Combs dangled someone from a balcony.

Although dozens of men and women have alleged in lawsuits that Combs abused them, this trial will highlight the claims of four women.

Combs is charged with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has denied all the charges against him and has rejected a plea deal, choosing to go to trial instead.

If found guilty in the New York court, he could face life in prison.

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Day 2 testimony summary

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Global News will be covering the Diddy trial in its entirety. Please check back for updates. 

— With files from Global News’ Michelle Butterfield and The Associated Press

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