In 10 months, 10 lawsuits. That is the track record of singer Sean Combs, known artistically as Puff Daddy or Diddy, who in less than a year has been accused — or at least that we know of — by two men and eight women, all of them accusing him of sexual abuse and/or rape. If on Tuesday a complaint was made by a Michigan prisoner who claims that he was sexually abused in 1997 and who has managed to get the judge to fine him 100 million dollars (mainly for not showing up to the hearing), just one day later it was learned that a singer named Dawn Richard has filed a new lawsuit against him. She accuses him of 21 crimes, including sexual abuse, mental damage and causing great emotional stress.
Richard, born in New Orleans 41 years ago, was the vocalist of a band called Danity Kane, which Combs formed through a talent television show called Making the Band of the music network MTV. She filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in New York, and in it she explains that she suffered abuse and intimidation from the rapper since she became a member of the musical group. In the suit, the singer accuses him of abusing his position since they began collaborating together back in 2005, when the band was formed with five women; Combs decided to do without two of them in the last episode of the season, in October 2008, and in 2009 they separated. Four of them got back together in 2013, to be three again in 2014. Since 2020, they have been on a hiatus. In addition, between 2009 and 2012 Dawn Richard was part of another band called Diddy-Dirty Money, also led by Combs.
As Dawn Richard describes in her harsh lawsuit, which has been accessed by American media such as The New York Times either VarietyCombs was an abusive boss who used physical and verbal violence. Combs, she says, manipulated her for more than a decade by suggesting that the only way she could advance in her career was by complying with his every whim. If she complained, he would not allow her to sing or turn off her microphone during performances. He required her to strip to her underwear in front of him, and she would attend meetings in lingerie. He would also trespass into her dressing room, grope her (in 2010 he groped her breasts and told her he wanted to give her a breast augmentation for Christmas), hit her on the buttocks, throw objects (food, laptops) at her when he got angry, and occasionally fail to pay her, such as on Danity Kane’s first album, for which she estimates he must have earned $1 million, and on her second, for which she estimates he owes her $500,000. Richard is demanding $1.2 million from Combs and another $350,000 for touring.
According to court documents, the rapper and businessman would sometimes send his collaborators to wake up the band’s singers in the middle of the night so they could rehearse whenever he wanted, and deprive them of sleep and food: “You don’t want this, bitches” or “You’re not that hungry” were some of the phrases he used to address them. He also says that he called the aspiring band members “ugly” and “fat.” The lawsuit speaks of “harmful and sexual contact” by Combs toward Richard, how she lost weight due to anxiety and overwork (although he kept yelling at her that she was “lazy”) and how she became so dehydrated that she vomited. In 2010, she was hospitalized for anemia and joint pain; when she showed the singer her medical records, he ordered her to go to work the next day.
In addition, Dawn Richard also claims that on more than one occasion she witnessed Combs’ abuse against his long-time girlfriend, singer Cassie (Casandra Ventura), who was in fact the first to report him, last November 2023, although she withdrew the complaint just one day later. She remembers, for example, observing physical abuse as early as 2009, or seeing him push her against a wall and strangle her and then throw a hot pan full of eggs that Ventura was preparing for him at her. The day after that incident, the rapper threatened Richard: “If you say anything, there will be consequences,” he said, “people end up missing.” In 2010, she saw Combs punch Ventura in the face at a party in Los Angeles. Combs often threatened her with phrases like: “You want to die today” or “I’ll kill people.” According to the lawsuit, “on many occasions Richard tried to intervene, offering Ventura support and encouragement to leave Combs.” In fact, Richard now admits that, until the rapper’s ex-girlfriend decided to file her harsh complaint telling her story, she had not realized how she had normalized the abuse.
This is the tenth person to accuse Combs so far. The first was Ventura, but then came Joi Dickerson-Neal (accusing Combs of raping her and recording it in 1991, when she was 19) and Liza Gardner (who claimed that he assaulted her and a friend in 1990). In December came one of the most serious, the complaint of a fourth woman, so far anonymous, who told how she was sexually trafficked by being flown from Detroit to the musician’s studio in New York to be raped when she was a minor. In February, Rodney Jones Jr, a producer and regular collaborator of Combs, accused him of non-consensual touching. In May came the complaints of Crystal McKinney, who explained that in 2003 he forced her to perform oral sex after drugging her in his studio; and that of April Lampros, a former fashion student, whom he assaulted in New York. In June there was another one that became known yesterday, already in September, by a man named Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith, 51, who accuses him of abuse at a party in 1997 and who has obtained 100 million dollars. The last one is from July by a woman named Adria English, who worked for him at a luxurious party in 2004 and accused him of a crime of sexual trafficking, of forcing her to drink alcohol and consume drugs and of offering her for “sexual exchanges”. Last March, the federal authorities of the United States carried out an investigation in Combs’ houses in Los Angeles (California) and Miami (Florida). At the moment they have not filed charges.
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