After Sean Combs’ rape settlement, MAUREEN CALLAHAN reveals darkish previous

That’s it? Sean Combs simply walks?

If we’re to consider the allegations lodged in civil court docket final week by his former protégée Cassie, hip-hop mogul Combs — also referred to as Puffy, Diddy and, laughably, Love — is one very harmful man.

And within the wake of this submitting — which Combs, by his lawyer, mentioned was a shakedown — we’re reminded that different outstanding figures have mentioned sure, they consider Sean Combs could also be able to violence.

New York prosecutors: Are you listening?

Cassie, née Casandra Ventura, filed her civil go well with on November 16. One day later, a monetary settlement was reached.

If even half of what Ventura alleges right here is true, there is a good probability different victims exist. And if there is a sooner payout in current reminiscence, I am unable to give you one.

This is darkish stuff. It recollects the monsters we now know: R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein. And bear in mind, all three have been convicted. Only Cosby is free, on a technicality.

The Cassie-Puffy origin story, as relayed right here, feels acquainted. Ventura met Combs when she was 19 and he was 37; she was an aspiring star and he was a hip-hop mogul.

Months later, in February 2006, he had signed her to his document label and started to infiltrate each side of her life.

According to this lawsuit, Combs subjected her to violent bodily assaults and rape over greater than a decade and coerced her into having intercourse with male prostitutes whereas he watched, directed and masturbated — encounters he known as ‘freak offs’ — and plied her with medication and alcohol.

Ventura says he pressured her to carry his gun in her purse a minimum of twice, to remind her how harmful he was. She recollects Combs listening to that his rap trade rival Suge Knight — at the moment serving a 28-year-sentence for manslaughter — was close by and that Combs then ‘retrieved a number of weapons from a protected and ran out of his dwelling to the place he believed Mr. Knight was eating.’

In one other vignette that recollects Knight at his most fearsome — taking rapper Vanilla Ice out on to his resort balcony and, as Ice informed ABC News, attempting extortion by having ‘me look over the sting, reminding me how excessive I used to be up there’ — Combs as soon as allegedly ‘picked up certainly one of Ms. Ventura’s pals like a toddler and dangled the pal over the balcony of [a] seventeenth flooring resort suite.’

She was subjected to beatings all through the years, she claims. A very savage assault is recorded right here: ‘In January 2009, after Mr. Combs realized that Ms. Ventura spoke to a different music supervisor at a celebration in Los Angeles, he grew to become enraged. . .  In the automotive leaving the membership, Mr. Combs beat Ms. Ventura, pushing her right into a nook of the car and stomping on her face.’

His safety guard Roger Bonds, Ventura says right here, tried to cease Combs however couldn’t. When the automotive pulled as much as Combs’s home, Ventura made a run for it, ‘however Mr. Combs adopted her and proceeded to kick her within the face . . . [she] was bleeding profusely, and was ushered into Mr. Combs’s dwelling, the place she started to throw up from the violent assault.’

Who desires to listen to or see from Sean Combs once more?

Lest you assume this a rush to judgement, think about the deafening silence from the hip-hop neighborhood. Not one vital determine, as of this writing, has come ahead to say what a very good man Combs is. How he might by no means be able to such sadism. How this all have to be a set-up.

If something, it is the other. Consider this part of Ventura’s lawsuit, by which Combs reacts to messages between Ventura and the rapper Kid Cudi.

‘In February 2012, throughout Paris Fashion Week, Mr. Combs informed Ms. Ventura that he was going to explode Kid Cudi’s automotive, and that he needed to make sure that Kid Cudi was dwelling along with his pals when it occurred. Around that point, Kid Cudi’s automotive exploded in his driveway.’

‘This is all true’, Cudi, by a spokesperson, informed the New York Times final week, confirming Ventura’s declare that his automotive did, the truth is, as soon as blow up outdoors his home.

After that automotive bomb — significantly, are we within the Middle East? The mafia? — ‘Ms. Ventura was terrified as she started to totally comprehend what Mr. Combs was each prepared and capable of do to these he believed had slighted him.’

Kimora Lee Simmons — ex-wife of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, himself accused of sexual assault by over a dozen ladies — mentioned in a 2004 New York journal profile that Combs threatened to hit her.

‘I used to be pregnant!’ she mentioned. ‘The moron!’

Diddy, on the time, didn’t return a name for remark.

His purported violence is not restricted to ladies.

In 1999, document producer Steve Stoute filed felony prices alleging Combs and his bodyguards beat him up over a music video, utilizing a chair, a phone and a Champagne bottle. Combs ended up paying Stoute $500,000, pled responsible to harassment and was sentenced to in the future in anger administration.

That similar 12 months, Combs was charged with gun possession and bribery associated to a nightclub shootout in New York City that wound up getting his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez hauled to the police station. Combs was discovered not responsible.

In 2015, he was charged with assault with a lethal weapon, battery and making terrorist threats in 2015 after an incident with a UCLA coach. Those felony prices had been additionally dropped by L.A. County.

One might say there is a sample right here.

In one more heartening and miserable instance of girls within the trade, Kesha — whose 2014 lawsuit towards document producer Dr. Luke for drugging and raping her was supported by Taylor Swift, who donated $250,000 for any of her monetary wants — dropped Diddy’s identify from her hit tune ‘TikTok’ whereas performing this weekend.

None of that is proof, to make certain. But it lends credence to Ventura’s claims. So does Combs’s 180-degree turnaround: As of Nov. 16, the day Ventura filed the go well with, it was a money-grab. Within 24 hours, as soon as the gory particulars went public, Combs clearly provided Ventura sufficient to make it go away.

So for now, he is within the clear. But Sean Combs should not relaxation straightforward.

The man who way back misplaced the cultural relevance that made him untouchable finds himself in a brand new period, on a brand new precipice: One that begins with a ‘drip, drip, drip . . .’

It will solely take one or two extra courageous accusers. After all, take a look at how far, how briskly this self-appointed ‘dangerous boy for all times’ has folded already.