Related Articles
Follow all our Sean Combs trial coverage
A former personal assistant for Sean Combs took the witness stand Thursday and claimed the Bad Boy Records founder worked her around the clock, physically abused her and subjected her to “traumatizing” sexual assaults that she had planned to take to her grave.
The woman, using the pseudonym Mia, often broke down in tears as she described working for Combs from 2009 to 2017. She said Combs was a mercurial and manipulative boss who might treat her as a best friend one day then hurl a computer at her head during a tantrum over his internet connection the next.
She claimed Combs repeatedly slammed her arm with a heavy door in 2012 after he snatched her phone and she tried to get it back. She recalled once jumping on Combs’ back to stop a violent assault, saying she was thrown off into a wall. She never went to authorities, she confirmed.
“I made a lot of excuses for him in my head,” she told jurors. “I believed Puff’s authority was above the police.”
Mia sobbed as she described the alleged sexual assaults at the hands of Combs, saying they happened randomly and that she always believed each one would be the last. She said the first started with Combs praising her work ethic in a hotel penthouse while he was celebrating his 40th birthday. He poured her two shots of vodka, which “hit” her much harder than she expected, she testified. Suddenly, Combs was leaning in for a kiss, and he put his hand up her dress, leaving her mortified, she testified.
“I was shocked and I froze. I didn’t process what was happening,” Mia said. Her next memory was waking up in another room on a chair. She later convinced herself Combs was drunk, and that “it was probably a huge accident,” she testified. But then it happened again, she said.
Mia said in 2009 or 2010, Combs snuck into her room and climbed on top of her while she was sleeping in a staff bunk bed at his Los Angeles mansion. She wasn’t allowed to lock her door and woke up to “the weight of a person on top of me,” she said. Combs told her to be quiet and “put himself inside of me,” she testified. “I just froze, I didn’t react,” she said. “It was very quick, but it felt like forever.”
Another time, Mia was in Combs’ closet, packing a bag, when he allegedly ambushed her and forced her into performing oral sex on him. She said the alleged assaults left her “terrified, confused, ashamed and scared,” but she felt trapped.
There were several other sexual assaults, Mia claimed, but she blocked many of them out, only able to recall a “dark horrible feeling” in the pit of her stomach surrounding them. Describing the sensation, Mia said she once was on a private jet flight with Combs when he allegedly pushed her into a bathroom. Mia said she tried to get away by warning Combs that others on the plane might notice. “It didn’t work,” she said, adding that when she tries to remember specific details of the alleged attack, her memory goes blank because she suppressed them.
Mia believed that if she spoke up, Combs would crush her. She said human resources was “only around if [Combs] wanted to punish you.” She claimed one of Combs’ assistants was fired for raising concern about the physical abuse Combs was inflicting on his girlfriend at the time, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura.
“I couldn’t tell him no. I couldn’t tell him no, even about a sandwich,” she said. As an example, she recalled how Combs got aggressive and pressured her to snort ketamine while at Burning Man, despite her refusals.“There was no way I could tell him no, [because] then he would know I thought that what he was doing was wrong, and I would be a target. He would fire me and ruin my future and somehow twist the story into making me look like a threat,” she testified.
Mia promised herself she would bury the trauma. “I was going to die with this. I didn’t want anyone to know ever,” she told jurors. “This is the most traumatizing thing that’s happened to me.”
Mia was identified as Victim-4 in the Southern District of New York’s criminal indictment against Combs, with her allegations tied to the racketeering charge against the music mogul. (Combs has pleaded not guilty to the five felony counts against him.)
She is one of two witnesses who the court is allowing to use a pseudonym after she declared that testifying about “extremely sensitive” details under her real name would result in “humiliating and retraumatizing publicity.” Mia’s lawyers also noted she was fearful of reprisal and harassment from Combs and his supporters.
On Thursday, she clasped her hands and looked at the ground when she entered and exited the courtroom. Arrivingwith a group of women, all wearing shades of pink, Mia was clearly nervous and often answered questions with a wavering voice. By the end of the day, she was in tears.
Mia told jurors she got the job with Combs after moving to New York and first working for fashion designer Georgina Chapman and later as an assistant to actor Mike Myers. She said Combs greeted her in his underwear for her first interview and that she worked 24 hours straight her first day. She once worked five days straight without sleeping, relying on Adderall to keep going, she testified. Part of her job included high-level development at Revolt Films, but she also had to clean up “nightmare” messes in hotel rooms after Combs’ “freak-offs.” She said the rooms would be littered with broken glass, candle wax, menstrual blood, and baby oil on the walls.
She wasn’t allowed to leave Combs’ residence without his permission, even if he was sleeping, she said. At a moment’s notice, he might ask her to crack his knuckles, write a film, or do his taxes, she testified.
“I had a physical breakdown. My hearing went; it felt like I was underwater, my equilibrium was off, blurred vision, out of nowhere I was hysterical and could not stop crying,” she testified, according to NBC News. “At that point, Puff said [I] could go to sleep.”
Mia said Combs would flip between treating her like a best friend and a work “partner,” promising her executive roles at his companies, to making her feel worthless and threatening to take away her credits.
Mia said most of her tenure overlapped with Combs’ relationship with Ventura, one of the women Combs is accused of sex-trafficking. Combs allegedly forced the R&B singer to have sex with male escorts in days-long, drug-fuelled sexual encounters that he called “freak-offs.”
There was only one time Mia said she saw Ventura in the middle of a freak-off —which she knew as “hotel nights” —was when she was summoned to Combs’ hotel room in New York City to drop off some supplies. Mia said Ventura answered the door in a bright blue wig looking different than Mia had ever seen her before. The singer looked “like she was struggling,” Mia said, adding that Ventura quickly said she was okay and shut the door.
Mia was privy to other alleged abusive behavior. She told jurors Combs closely controlled Ventura’s whereabouts, appearance, and career, and that part of her job was to “keep tabs” on Ventura. When she and Ventura, who became like a “sister,” did something without Combs’ permission, the punishment could be “unpredictable” and “terrifying,” she testified.
She claimed that she saw Combs chase Ventura, slam her to the ground, and “crack her head open.” She said Ventura did not fight back. “I’ve just seen her with her arms up,” she testified.
Mia recalled one incident in August 2013 when Combs appeared at Ventura’s apartment and allegedly turned violent. Echoing prior testimony from Ventura and celebrity stylist Deonte Nash, Mia said she jumped on Combs’ back to stop him. “I thought he was going to kill him,” she said, referring to Combs and Nash. She claimed Combs threw her against a wall. “His eyes turned black, there was no getting through. It was the first time I realized the severe danger we were actually in,” she testified.
In prior testimony, Ventura and Nash told jurors that Combs shoved Ventura into her bed frame that day, causing a deep gash in her eyebrow that required stitches. Ventura’s head “started gushing blood,” Mia testified Thursday. When Combs ordered Mia to call a plastic surgeon and report that Ventura injured herself while “drunk,” Mia complied, she said. “I thought that was the only way to get her help,” she testified.
Mia also recounted a scary encounter during a trip to Turks and Caicos with Combs and Ventura. She told jurors she woke up to Ventura racing into her room, begging for help. “You gotta help me, he’s going to kill me,” Ventura pleaded, according to Mia. The women barricaded the door with heavy wooden furniture and ran down to the beach to hide from a screaming Combs.
At another point during the vacation, the women fled from an “irate” Combs on paddle boards, she testified, leaving Combs pacing and yelling on the sand. She recalled the weather taking a dramatic turn and fearing that a storm was coming. “I was trying to weigh if it was scarier to face Mother Nature or Puff,” she testified. They ended up returning to land.
Before Mia’s testimony, not much was known about the employee, although her name was mentioned a handful of times during testimony from Ventura. The women were friends, Ventura said, hanging out socially, with Mia spending a week in South Africa with Ventura while she filmed a movie in 2015.
During her four days on the witness stand, Ventura testified that Mia was physically present on several occasions when Combs attacked her, including the alleged beating in August 2013. A few years earlier, during Grammy weekend in 2010, Ventura said she and Mia fled a party at Prince’s home that they attended without Combs’ permission. Back at Ventura’s hotel, Combs barged inside the room and beat Ventura, leaving her with a black eye, knots in her head, and a busted lisp, Ventura and her friend, celebrity makeup artist Mylah Morales, testified.
Testifying Thursday, Mia said she was suspended from work after attending the Prince party with Ventura. “Puff said I was being insubordinate,” she told jurors, because she had disobeyed him by going out that night. Mia also claimed Prince’s security “swiftly intervened” when Combs allegedly got physical with Ventura outside the party.
According to prosecutors, Combs wielded his vast wealth and “multi-faceted business empire” to fulfill his sexual desires with crimes including physical assault, threats, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice. He allegedly forced his sleep-deprived employees to do his bidding by subjecting them to physical force and threats of financial and reputational harm.
The government has already established that several of Combs’ employees and people on his payroll saw the mogul physically abusing Ventura over the course of their relationship. Mia is the fourth former personal assistant to testify against her former boss. Her testimony is expected to mirror that of George Kaplan, David James, and Capricorn Clark’s who all claimed they worked around the clock for Combs and were expected to be available at any second.
Clark alleged that she averaged between two and four hours of sleep a night while working as Combs’ assistant in 2004 and 2006. During a three-month period, Clark said she was owed $80,000 in overtime pay. When Combs was presented with the paperwork, he ripped it up, Clark testified.
In her own opening address, Combs’ attorney, Teny Geragos, told jurors to consider Mia’s motive. “What are the reasons she is saying what she might be saying now, what she never said before?” Geragos questioned. “And certainly never said when she first started cooperating with the government?”
However, prosecutors stated that Mia took years to “grapple” with her experience. “Mia will tell you how she could not talk about what happened to her until recently, how she wanted to take the secret of what the defendant did to her to her grave,” prosecutor Emily A. Johnson said.
