The woman identified as Victim-2 in Sean Combs’ sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy indictment testified for a fourth day Tuesday, pushing back as Combs’ lawyer hammered the defense claim she repeatedly returned and joined Combs for his “hotel nights” by choice.
“So you would get back together with him of your own volition?” Combs’ lawyer Teny Geragos, asked after returning to the woman’s testimony about the times she and Combs would argue and take breaks during their three-and-a-half year relationship.
“Yes,” the woman, who is testifying under the pseudonym “Jane,” responded. Jane said her love for Combs, which she admitted is ongoing, clouded her thinking. She described feeling “love and pressure” to indulge Combs’ desire for threesomes with male escorts. She said their relationship “was built under a lot of emotional manipulation and pressure.”
Jane said she felt obligated “to fulfill my duties as a girlfriend.”
In the packed lower Manhattan courtroom, Jane also described feeling a need to protect Combs because she thought he was sharing something very “vulnerable” with her. “I didn’t want to judge him for his behavior in these rooms,” she said.
Jane worried about Combs’ heavy use of drugs and alcohol as well, she said. During a trip to Turks and Caicos, she felt like Combs’ eyes looked jaundiced, his teeth and gums appeared gray, and his hands were shaking. She believed he was “not taking very good care of himself” and needed her, she said.
In her opening statement, Geragos described Jane as “a capable, strong, adult woman” who willingly agreed to engage in Combs’ “swingers lifestyle” because she loved the mogul.
On Tuesday, Jane repeatedly agreed she loved Combs. She said while she came to loathe the addition of so many male escorts to the relationship, the “hotel nights” generally afforded her extra love and attention from Combs, which she cherished.
Speaking while Combs’ mother, sister and two sons watched in the gallery, Jane confirmed Combs wired her a total of about $150,000 over the last few years and invested in her clothing business. She said he would use the financial support as leverage to get what he wanted. She believed he might stop paying her $10,000 monthly rent if she crossed him. “He used it kind of as a little tool. The rent was always just like a little reminder,” she testified.
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Jane dated Combs between 2021 and 2024. In her direct testimony, she described falling “head over heels” for the music mogul and said her initial willingness to fulfill Combs’ “fantasy” of watching her have sex with another man opened a “Pandora’s box” that led to countless marathon sex sessions with male escorts that Combs often recorded.
During her first day on the witness stand last week, Jane said Combs moved her to Los Angeles early in the relationship and expected her to be ready whenever he demanded a drug-fueled “hotel night” that could last several days and involve multiple male escorts and dozens of bottles of baby oil.
On Monday, Jane gave harrowing testimony about a night in June 2024 when Combs allegedly choked, punched and kicked her in a rage. She said the physical fight started when she confronted Combs over her belief he took a different romantic partner on a family vacation. She recalled being angry and said she “pushed” Combs’ head into a marble kitchen counter when he bent over “like he was about to tie his shoe.” The fight escalated from there, she said, leading Combs to bust down four doors in her house trying to get to her as she kept trying to run and hide.
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She said Combs lifted her onto her “tippy toes” in a chokehold before she ran outside barefoot and hid for two hours near a wall about six blocks away. When she returned to the house, thinking the coast was clear, Combs attacked her again, she said, punching her in the face and kicking her on the ground. After that, Combs cruelly demanded she use ice, makeup and a new hairstyle to camouflage her black eye and several welts on her head because he was booking a male escort for an impromptu “hotel night” to round out their evening, she testified.
The alleged attack was notable both for its ferocity and it taking place just weeks after Combs issued a public apology, saying he was “committed to be a better man each and every day.” The apology followed the release of video of Combs kicking and dragging his ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura inside L.A.’s InterContinental Hotel in 2016. (It also came after Rolling Stone published a May 2024 exposé breaking new details regarding Combs’ alleged history of violence.) The video was leaked in the wake of Ventura suing him for sex trafficking, laying the ground work for a criminal investigation that led to Combs’ homes being raided in March 2024.
On the witness stand, Jane told jurors she was blown away when she read Ventura’s lawsuit. “I almost fainted, in fact I think I did,” Jane said. “I just reacted like, ‘I can’t believe I’m reading my own story.’”
The woman testified that she repeatedly made it clear to Combs that she didn’t enjoy hotel nights and only engaged in them at his request. In a series of text messages sent in October 2023, just weeks before Ventura’s lawsuit, she told Combs that the sex sessions, also dubbed “freak-offs,” left her feeling “violated.”
“I’m not an animal. I’m not a porn star. Our experiences are desensitizing sex for me,” Jane said in the text exchange. “It’s been three years of me having to fuck strangers. I’m tired.”
Combs, 55, was arrested last September and has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, transportation to engage in prostitution and racketeering conspiracy. If convicted as charged, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Combs’ defense lawyers say the billionaire businessman may have been a bad boyfriend with a drug problem and a jealous streak, but they say his interest in “kinky sex” was not illegal. They say the two alleged sex-trafficking victims in the case were consenting, long-term girlfriends.
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“You will see that these women are strong, capable, and they were in love with him. You will see that breaches of trust, infidelity, and jealousy are what drove the domestic violence you will hear about. You will see that alcohol and drugs played a major role in his temper. 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,” Geragos said in her opening statement.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, allege that Combs ran a criminal enterprise that manipulated women into highly degrading hotel nights that they found humiliating. Prosecutors say Combs and his inner circle knew the women weren’t happy and used physical violence, threats, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice to fulfill Combs’ desires and protect his reputation at all costs.
