Two months after Sean “Diddy” Combs, CEO of Bad Boy Entertainment, was found guilty of violating the Mann Act—while being acquitted of the more serious charges of human trafficking and racketeering—his ex-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, has sent an emotional letter to the court urging the judge to impose the maximum sentence.
Ahead of Combs’ sentencing, Cassie submitted a three-page victim impact statement to a New York court on Monday, September 29, and obtained by Rolling Stone, pleading with Judge Arun Subramanian to hand down a sentence that reflects “the reality of the evidence and my lived experience as a victim.”
The singer, who dated Combs on and off from 2007 to 2018, revealed that she is “so scared” Sean Combs might retaliate against her and other accusers if he “walks free.”
“For four days in May, while nine months pregnant with my son, I testified in front of a packed courtroom about the most traumatic and horrifying chapter in my life,” Cassie wrote in her letter. She testified that from the age of nineteen, Combs “used violence, threats, substances, and control over my career to trap me in over a decade of abuse.”
In the letter, Cassie detailed horrific allegations of prolonged abuse, including being groomed into performing repeated sex acts with hired male sex workers during multi-day “freak offs,” which she claims occurred nearly weekly. “I was forced into lingerie and heels, told exactly how to look, and plied with drugs and alcohol so he could control me like a puppet,” she wrote, stating that these events were “degrading and disgusting.”
She further alleged that Combs “controlled every part of my livelihood and threatened to destroy my reputation by leaking sex tapes, a threat he repeated often” if she did not participate.
Cassie refuted the defense attorneys’ suggestion at trial that her time with Combs was a “great modern love story,” writing, “Nothing about this story is great, modern, or loving—this was a horrific decade of my life stained by abuse, violence, forced sex, and degradation.”
Currently living “as private and quiet as I possibly can,” Cassie concluded by urging Judge Subramanian to deliver a sentence that reflects “justice and accountability.” She identified Combs as “the manipulator, the aggressor, the abuser, the trafficker” in her ordeal and expressed hope that the judge would “consider the truths at hand that the jury failed to see.”