Drugs, sex, baby oil: The ‘freak-offs’ at the core of Sean Combs’ troubles

NEW YORK – A woman and a male prostitute meet for sex in a luxury hotel suite that, in the government’s telling, has been lit for filming and stocked with baby oil and drugs. Another man watches and sometimes captures the events on video. These sexual marathons, complete with a clean-up staff, sometimes went on for days.

To the people involved, they were known as “freak-offs”.

The 14-page federal criminal indictment of Sean Combs, the 54-year-old American music mogul known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, accuses him of

participating in many crimes including arson, bribery, kidnapping and obstruction of justice.

But the heart of the government’s case is the premise that the criminal “enterprise” he ran as an alleged racketeer was responsible for coordinating these freak-offs, and then covering up any damage to hotel rooms, or people, when they were over.

In the government’s portrayal, they were horror shows – “elaborate and produced sex performances”, according to the indictment – that involved copious drug use and coerced sex, leaving participants so exhausted and drained that they were given fluids intravenously to recover.

Then, the government said, Combs weaponised the videos he had shot to keep participants from complaining.

“Freak-off activity is the core of this case, and freak-offs are inherently dangerous,” Ms Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors, said at a hearing last week.

The government’s depiction closely mirrors allegations made by singer Cassie in a bombshell civil suit she filed in 2023 against Combs, her former boyfriend.

The indictment attaches no name to its account of the freak-offs, instead referring only anonymously to a “Victim-1”.

Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, said in her lawsuit that Combs directed frequent freak-offs at high-end hotels around the country, directing her at the events to pour “excessive” amounts of oil on herself and telling her where to touch the prostitutes while he filmed and performed personal sexual acts.

“He treated the forced encounter as a personal art project, adjusting the candles he used for lighting to frame the videos he took,” the lawsuit said.

Lawyers for Combs, who has pleaded not guilty to the sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges he faces, have presented an entirely different view of the freak-offs in court.

They cast them as consensual encounters between Combs and Ventura, long-time partners in a troubled and complex relationship. These trysts, they argued, may shock some people, but they did not involve sexual assault and did not involve “force, fraud or coercion”, as the main federal sex trafficking statute requires.

“Does everybody have experience with being intimate this way? No,” Mr Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Combs, said at a court hearing on Sept 17. “Is it sex trafficking? No, not if everybody wants to be there.”

The government, in contending that Combs ran a criminal racketeering enterprise, has sought to emphasise that the freak-offs were events coordinated by a team of enablers who worked for him. Prosecutors underscored that witnesses saw violence “during and in connection with” freak-offs, which the defence has denied.

None are named or charged in the indictment, but they are characterised as a team that was deployed to find the sex workers and the hotel rooms, deliver supplies and then fix any damage to the rooms after sessions.

“These occasions included instances in which a victim was required to remain in hiding – sometimes for several days at a time – to recover from injuries Combs inflicted,” the indictment said.

Citing the racketeering law long used against mobsters and drug kingpins, prosecutors have argued that Combs used the underlings to carry out his commands, expected “absolute loyalty” and ruled with threats of violence.

“Combs did not do this all on his own,” Mr Damian Williams, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a news conference on Sept 17. “He used his business and employees of that business and other close associates to get his way. Those individuals allegedly included high-ranking supervisors in the business, personal assistants, security staff and household staff.”

Asked why those people had not been charged, Mr Williams described the investigation as ongoing.

Although the indictment mentions only one specific victim, prosecutors have said there were multiple.

In a court hearing, they offered snippets of further evidence of women accusing Combs of using video footage from freak-offs to blackmail them. One said: “He just threatened me about my sex tapes that he has of me on two phones. He said he would expose me, mind you these sex tapes where I am heavily drugged.”

Though Ventura’s lawsuit was settled a day after its filing, and Combs denied its claims, it spurred a cascade of other civil suits against him. Several of the suits, all of which are being challenged by Combs in court, were filed by women whose accounts carry some similarities to Ventura’s, with descriptions of coerced, drug-fuelled sexual encounters.

In denying Combs’ bail on Sept 18, Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr stressed his concern that Combs would obstruct justice by tampering with witnesses.

Prosecutors said that, for months, Combs had been “feeding victims and witnesses false narratives”, while sometimes having accomplices record the conversations. His lawyers contend that he was merely informing contacts that his counsel would be reaching out to them.

But in court, prosecutors told a chilling story of an unnamed woman who texted Combs three days after Ventura’s suit was filed in November, with its depictions of the “freak-offs”.

“I feel like I’m reading my own sexual trauma,” she wrote. “It makes me sick how three solid pages, word for word, is exactly my experiences and my anguish.”

Combs then called her twice, the prosecutors said, while an accomplice recorded the conversation on another phone. “He gaslit her and he attempted to convince her that she had willingly engaged in sex acts with him,” Johnson said. “But she pushed back.” NYTIMES