Opening statements started Monday in the trial of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Combs was arrested in September 2024 in New York after being indicted by a federal grand jury on federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges.
His arrest followed a monthslong investigation and after a flurry of women came forward with allegations of sexual and other abuse.
Combs has been held in a federal jail in Brooklyn while awaiting his trial.
He has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors were using the trial’s first witness, Israel Florez, a former security officer at a Los Angeles hotel, to introduce recordings of Combs beating his then-girlfriend, the singer Cassie, at the hotel in March 2016.
Florez said that when he responded to a call of woman in distress on the sixth floor of a Los Angeles hotel in March 2016, he came across Combs, wearing only a towel and sitting on a chair “slouched down, like with a blank stare … like a devilish stare, just looking at me.”
After Cassie left, Florez said, he was getting ready to leave their room when Combs called him back. Florez said he was holding a stack of money with a $100 on top, telling him: “Don’t tell nobody.”
Florez said he considered it a bribe and told him: “I don’t want your money. Just go back into your room.”
After Florez got straight to the allegations of violence by Combs, the second prosecution witness, Daniel Phillip, took the trial to the allegations of sex parties.
Phillip said he was a male stripper for women when he was called by Cassie to meet her and Combs at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York in 2012.
Phillip said he was paid a few thousand dollars for the encounter in which Combs was wearing a white robe and watching as Phillip had sex with Cassie.
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