For almost a year, rapper and businessman Sean Combs has been receiving, one after another, up to eight complaints from different people, mostly women, who accuse him of sexual assault, abuse, rape, sex trafficking and a series of chilling attacks that are specified in detail in these lawsuits. So far, none of them have reached trial. However, another small complaint, previously unknown, has managed to convict the musician formerly known as Puff Daddy or Diddy for the first time. What seemed like one more in his string of accusations has resulted in a sentence against the musician by a Michigan judge for the amount of 100 million dollars in a case of sexual abuse against a man, now in prison, who has represented himself in the trial. A stratospheric amount that he will have to start paying in a few days and that, more than for a crime, has fallen on him by a legal carom: for the fact of not showing up at the hearing.
This time, the plaintiff against Combs is a man named Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith, 51, who is incarcerated in a Michigan prison, the so-called Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Facility in the town of Muskegon Heights, in the western part of the State. There he is serving a 75-year prison sentence for sexual crimes and for a kidnapping. During his time in prison, Cardello-Smith has studied law, so he decided to file a lawsuit against Combs last June in which he accused the rapper of having sexually abused him in 1997.
According to court documents — obtained by media outlets including the local newspaper MetroTimes either USA Today— the two met when Cardello-Smith was working in restaurants and hotels in the Detroit area. He says he was drinking with Combs one night and went with him and two women to a hotel room. He began having sex with one of the women when Combs started groping his buttocks. When Cardello-Smith asked him to stop, Combs gave him a drink, and after drinking it he became dizzy and fell asleep. “I put a little something in it for you. I’ll get it one way or another,” he recalls Combs telling him. Afterward, he recalls, he woke up in pain and bleeding. He did file a complaint at the time, but admits that he decided to drop the case because, he says, he could never tell, Combs being a music industry mogul.
However, apparently moved by the complaints that the musician has received in recent months, in June he reactivated the process and filed a complaint, although this was not made public at the time. However, it did reach the ears of Sean Combs, who in fact went to the Muskegon Heights prison to see Costello-Smith; he has presented to the court the documents from the penitentiary center that show that the rapper’s name appears in the visitor’s register. Then, the winner of three Grammy awards offered him 2.3 million dollars (2.09 million euros) to dismiss the lawsuit, something that the prisoner refused.
Beyond Costello-Smith’s refusal to accept that payment, on August 7, a Lenawee County judge (also in Michigan) named Anna Marie Anzalone took a further step, and decided to place an injunction against Sean Combs to prevent him from selling assets that would provide him with cash to pay that money to the plaintiff. At that same hearing on the 7th, Cardello-Smith told the court about the conversation she had with Combs. When the plaintiff told her that he did not want to accept that out-of-court settlement, but that he intended to continue with the process, Combs told him a kind of threat: “You know how things are.” He, according to what he told the judge, responded with: “I do not agree with how things are for you.”
Judge Anzalone then set another virtual hearing for September 9, to which Combs or his attorneys were to appear. However, when Monday arrived, the artist did not appear at the Lenawee County courthouse, and that was when the judge decided to sentence him to pay $100 million, which he will have to pay in 10 installments of $10 million, starting this October 1. This is what is called a “default judgment,” which is issued in favor of the plaintiff when the defendant does not formally respond or appear in court, and according to court documents, Combs did not appear or respond.
A day later, Combs’ lawyers did make an appearance and sent a statement to several media outlets stating that their client “hopes this sentence will be quickly dismissed.” “This man is a convicted felon and sexual predator who has been convicted of 14 counts of sexual assault and kidnapping over the past 26 years,” they say. “His career includes committing fraud on the court from prison, as Mr. Combs has never heard of him, much less been notified of any lawsuit.” The artist has not issued any message.
Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith’s lawsuit joins the long list of complaints filed by various people against the musician since November of last year. The first to file the complaint, paving the way for many others, was his ex-girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, a model known as Cassie, with whom he dated for years and who, in her harsh lawsuit, recounted how Combs raped her, subjected her to constant beatings (as seen in an explicit CNN video), drugged her, forced her to participate in orgies and various sexual encounters, and kept her away from her family and friends. Although Ventura withdrew the lawsuit just one day after filing it, many other plaintiffs followed suit.
That same November, two women filed lawsuits: Joi Dickerson-Neal, who accused Combs of raping and recording her in 1991, when she was 19; and Liza Gardner, who claimed that he assaulted her and another friend in 1990. In December, a fourth anonymous woman filed one of the most serious lawsuits, alleging that she was sexually trafficked and flown from Detroit to the musician’s studio in New York to be raped when she was a minor. In February, a producer Combs regularly worked with named Rodney Jones Jr. accused him of non-consensual touching. In May, two others came forward: one from a model named Crystal McKinney, who said that in 2003 he forced her to perform oral sex after drugging her in his studio; and another woman, April Lampros, who recounted how he assaulted her when she was studying fashion in New York while making her promises of a better future. The last known case was in July, when a woman named Adria English, who worked at a party in the Hamptons in 2004, accused him of sex trafficking, of forcing her to drink alcohol and take drugs and of offering her to friends for “sexual exchanges” with them. In addition, in March, US federal authorities carried out an investigation at his homes in Los Angeles (California) and Miami (Florida).
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