On the morning after Mother’s Day, Sean “Diddy” Combs’ mom made her way in a black suit through the crowd that had begun lining up outside Manhattan federal court the previous afternoon for a chance to attend the opening day of her son’s trial.
To see the 82-year-old matriarch’s measured steps into the courthouse and up to the metal detector was to marvel at her resilience. She did not hesitate in the face of the possibility that despite all her best efforts, her son might end up in a federal prison—the same fate that likely awaited his heroin-dealing father, if a bullet had not claimed him first.
Janice Combs’ son had been just 3 years old, and her daughter just 1 when 31-year-old Melvin Combs was found shot to death in a car parked just off Central Park West in Manhattan. Sean was about the age when early trauma can trigger narcissism and short-circuit empathy, turning intimacy to danger.
But the mother had done all any mother could. She settled in suburban Mount Vernon and worked as many as three jobs, including driving a school bus. She sent Sean to Mount Saint Michael’s Academy, an all-boys Catholic high school. He went on to Howard University, but detoured into the world of hip-hop.
With his mother’s determination and his father’s street cred, Sean Combs became a rap mogul, calling himself alternately Puff Daddy and Puffy and P Diddy and Love. But along with his fame and riches there was trouble involving guns and drugs, and a mean temper. He also had a troubled personal life, fathering seven children with four different women.
In 1993, a longtime girlfriend named Cassie Ventura filed a lawsuit charging him with decades of sexual and physical abuse, including drug-fueled “freak offs” in which she claimed to have been pressured into prolonged sex sessions with male escorts. He settled the suit the day after it was filed.
But federal prosecutors in Manhattan used the civil suit as a blueprint to charge him with an ongoing criminal enterprise whose alleged objective was not selling heroin—his father’s endeavor—but the decades-long sexual exploitation of women.
He was arrested last September for alleged sex trafficking, racketeering, and transportation to engage in prostitution. His mother responded with a statement befitting a music mogul’s mother.
“Sometimes, the truth and a lie become so closely intertwined that it becomes terrifying to admit one part of the story, especially when that truth is outside the norm or is too complicated to be believed,” she said. “It is truly agonizing to watch the world turn against my son so quickly and easily over lies and misconceptions, without ever hearing his side or affording him the opportunity to present his side.”
That opportunity was about to commence when the mother stepped up to the first security booth inside the courthouse on Monday morning. She received the standard instructions to place any electronics, along with her jewelry, purse, and jacket, in a plastic bin that went through an X-ray machine. She was then motioned through the metal detector, but it emitted an alert. She discovered she had forgotten to remove a bracelet. She passed through without event on the second try and a court officer presented her with a poker chip that she then exchanged for a metal disk when she checked in her cell phone.
Up in Courtroom 26a, Janice Combs sat in the first spectator’s bench beside her 18-year-old twin granddaughters, and directly behind where her son was seated at the defense table. Her other grandchildren were also there, and her son tapped his heart when he turned to look at those for whom family is family, whatever you are accused of doing.
In its opening statement the prosecution described the type of crimes routinely heard in domestic violence cases a block away in state court. But these were allegedly facilitated by power and wealth, and by a cadre of protectors and enablers dedicated to providing him with whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it.
“To the public, he was Puff Daddy or Diddy,” Asst. U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson said. “A cultural icon, a businessman, larger than life. But there was another side to him, a side that ran a criminal enterprise.”
Defense attorney Teny Gargos then had a turn. She admitted that Combs was guilty of domestic violence, but insisted it did not constitute the federal crimes with which he had been charged.
“These women were strong, capable, and they were in love with him,” Geragos said. “The evidence is going to show you a very flawed individual, but it will not show you a racketeer, a sex trafficker or somebody transporting for prostitution.”
She continued, “This case is about Sean Combs’s private, personal sex life,” says Geragos, Combs’s lawyer, “which has nothing to do with his lawful businesses.”
The first witness for the prosecution was Israel Florez, now an LAPD officer, head of security for the Intercontinental Hotel in Century City, California. He testified about the widely seen surveillance video of Sean Combs assaulting Ventura in a hotel hallway.
Janice Combs watched with her grandchildren and the rest of the courtroom as the monitors showed her son dragging and kicking Ventura.
Janice Combs stayed put, but the granddaughters stepped out of the courtroom as the next prosecution witness recalled in some detail how he took part in sexual encounters with Ventura while Sean Combs looked on, masturbating. There was at one point talk of the hired male escort being encouraged to urinate on Ventura.
The male escort was being cross examined when the day ended. Janice Combs only then departed, having sat through it all directly behind her son, listening to what is very far beyond the norm.
Ventura is due to take the stand on Tuesday as the prosecution’s main witness. And Janice Combs is expected again to sit directly behind her son, no matter what Ventura says or how outside the norm it gets.
