Cassie fought back tears during her emotional testimony on the witness stand at Sean Combs’ sex trafficking and racketeering trial on Tuesday.
The 38-year-old mom-of-3 testified about the physical, mental and sexual abuse she suffered while dating Combs for over a decade.
Cassie, who is eight months pregnant, said she met Combs when she was a 19-year-old aspiring model and singer in New York. The then-38-year-old Combs gave her a 10-album record deal on his label, Bad Boy Records. Cassie described herself as young and naïve at the time. She said she was drawn to Combs because he was “entertaining,” “fun” and “larger than life.” Also, “he happened to have my career in his hands.”
She enjoyed spending time with Combs, but soon, their relationship turned sexual, and Combs “introduced” her to oral sex.
Cassie and music producer Ryan Leslie (left) were dating when she met Combs who coerced her to leave Ryan.
“I was just so young, I didn’t even have the vocabulary for some of the things we talked about,” she said. “I was sexually inexperienced.”
When she was 22, Cassie said Combs introduced her to “freak-offs,” which are days long sex parties at his home and hotels, where he would masturbate while Cassie had sex with male escorts. When Combs first proposed the idea to Cassie, saying he liked to watch, she felt “nervous” and “confused.” She didn’t “understand why it was a turn-on,” to him, but she “loved” Combs and she “wanted to make him happy.”
Cassie said Combs later instructed her to organize and arrange the freak-offs herself.
She would set up a hotel room for the three of them and pay the male escorts. The freak offs would occur as often as weekly and last for days at a time. Cassie recalls the longest freak-off lasted for 4 days,
“The freak-offs became a job, “where there was no space to do anything else but to recover and feel normal again,” she said.
Cassie said she didn’t want to have “sex with strangers” but she did it for Combs’ enjoyment.”I didn’t know what ‘no’ could be, or what ‘no’ could turn into,” she said.
Combs often videotaped these sexual encounters, and Cassie feared that he could “blackmail” her by releasing the footage online.
Cassie also testified that she got a vaginal “hood piercing” at Combs’ suggestion.
Soon, she saw a different side of Sean Combs. Their arguments would turn “violent,” she said, and Combs would “knock me over, drag me, kick me, stomp me in the head if I was down.”
When asked by the prosecution how frequently Combs would get “physical” with her, Cassie sighed and said, “Too frequently.” These violent fights resulted in injuries, like bruises, black eyes and knots in her forehead. Yet, “there was still love there,” Cassie said.
