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    Up Next at the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial: Dawn Richard and Former Employees

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    After four days with Casandra Ventura, known as Cassie, on the stand, prosecutors will be seeking to corroborate her testimony with additional witnesses.As the second week of Sean Combs’s racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking trial begins, the first witness is set to be Dawn Richard, a singer in two music groups backed by Mr. Combs who says she saw him physically abuse his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura.A performer in the now-defunct groups Danity Kane and Diddy — Dirty Money, Ms. Richard began her testimony on Friday, recalling an incident from 2009 in which she said Mr. Combs attempted to hit Ms. Ventura, known as the singer Cassie, with a skillet, then punched and kicked her.“She went into fetal position — you could see she was literally trying to hide her face or her head,” Ms. Richard testified. She also said that Mr. Combs threatened her and a bandmate to keep silent about the event, saying he told them that “where he comes from, people go missing if they say things like that, if they talk.”Ms. Richard filed a lawsuit against Mr. Combs last year, shortly before he was arrested. She accused him in the suit of threatening her, groping her and flying into “frenzied, unpredictable rages” while he oversaw her career. The girl group Danity Kane was formed during the third iteration of Mr. Combs’s MTV reality show “Making the Band.”After the jury had been dismissed on Friday, a lawyer for Mr. Combs called Ms. Richard’s accusation of abuse from 2009 a “drop-dead lie,” noting that Ms. Ventura had not mentioned it during her four days on the witness stand.Ms. Richard is the first of a series of government witnesses scheduled for this week who are expected to testify about what they saw of Ms. Ventura’s 11-year on-and-off relationship with Mr. Combs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Combs Defense Seeks to Undermine Cassie’s Rape Allegation as Testimony Ends

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      The singer spent four days on the stand recounting what she described as an 11-year relationship in which she came to feel more like a sex worker than a girlfriend.Defense lawyers for Sean Combs pushed on Friday to undermine one of the most damaging allegations in the music mogul’s trial on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges — that he raped his longtime girlfriend, the singer Casandra Ventura, in 2018.On the last of four grueling days of Ms. Ventura’s testimony, Mr. Combs’s defense team pointed out inconsistencies in her recounting of when such an incident had occurred. They also noted that Ms. Ventura, an R&B singer known professionally as Cassie, never mentioned anything about an attack in a flurry of emotional breakup text messages that the couple exchanged soon afterward.The nature and history of the relationship between Mr. Combs and Ms. Ventura is central to the government’s case. Prosecutors have depicted the music mogul as a sexual predator whose employees helped stage marathon drug-fueled sessions, known as “freak-offs,” during which Ms. Ventura had sex with male prostitutes while Mr. Combs watched, and sometimes masturbated.Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and his lawyers have portrayed Ms. Ventura as someone who fell deeply in love, participated willingly in the freak-offs but then, bitter with jealousy, has recast the relationship as a grim 11 years of beatings, blackmail and coerced sex.In that vein, the defense questioned Ms. Ventura about consensual sexual intercourse she had with Mr. Combs about a month after what she said was a night when Mr. Combs raped her in her home. Ms. Ventura was already dating her now husband, Alex Fine, at the time of the consensual sex with Mr. Combs, and she testified that while together with Mr. Combs, she received, but didn’t answer, a FaceTime call from Mr. Fine.“Your now husband didn’t know that you were with Mr. Combs at the time, correct?” a defense lawyer, Anna Estevao, asked Ms. Ventura. She replied that Mr. Fine eventually found out about her rape allegation and the subsequent intercourse she had with Mr. Combs. Ms. Estevao said Mr. Fine punched a wall in response.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cassie Confronted by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Lawyer Over ‘Freak-Offs’ During Trial

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      During cross-examination, the defense team depicted Casandra Ventura as fully engaged in staging and participating in the marathon sex sessions she says were abusive.Lawyers for Sean Combs worked on Thursday in court to portray his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, as a willing and full participant in sex marathons with prostitutes, as they sought to undermine her harrowing account of an abusive, coercive relationship riddled with violence.Ms. Ventura’s credibility is central to the government’s case, in which they have charged Mr. Combs, the music mogul, with sex trafficking and racketeering. Earlier this week she told the jury of eight men and four women of how she had suffered through hundreds of degrading sexual encounters and many injuries out of a misguided attempt to please a man she loved.But on the fourth day of Mr. Combs’s trial, the defense tried to recast Ms. Ventura, a singer known professionally as Cassie, as not nearly the victim she had portrayed herself to be. During cross-examination, Anna Estevao, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers on a team led by Marc Agnifilo, repeatedly had her read text messages in which she expressed graphic enthusiasm for their sexual encounters, including the now famed “freak-offs” involving paid escorts.“I’m always ready to freak off lolol,” Ms. Ventura said in a message from 2009.In another exchange from around the same time, Ms. Ventura expressed her excitement in graphically sexual terms, and he told her: “I can’t wait to watch you. I want you to get real hott.”She answered: “Me too. I just want it to be uncontrollable.”Jurors gazed at the barrage of text messages, which were displayed on screens in front of them, sometimes leaning forward to get a closer look.Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges and his defense has argued that the government is trying to criminalize unconventional, but lawful, sexual relations between consenting adults. In her first two days on the stand, Ms. Ventura said that she might have feigned interest at times to avoid Mr. Combs’s anger, and she recited a litany of incidents in which she was beaten when she failed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cassie Testifies Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Used Sex Videos as Blackmail

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      Ms. Ventura, Mr. Combs’s ex-girlfriend, said he threatened to use tapes of their sexual encounters, known as “freak-offs,” to control her behavior.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, told a jury in Manhattan on Wednesday that her life with Sean Combs had its moments, but was largely filled with beatings, threatened blackmail and even a rape.During more than five hours of testimony in Mr. Combs’s sex trafficking and racketeering trial, Ms. Ventura recounted how he had stomped on her in the back of his car and how she suffered a gash above her eye when he threw her against a bed frame.She also recounted how, after the pair had dinner in 2018, Mr. Combs raped her in her living room.“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she testified.At the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura said through tears that after she had broken up with Mr. Combs, the trauma remained and she enrolled in treatment for drug abuse. Even so, she said, she contemplated taking her life by walking into traffic. She said her husband stopped her.Ms. Ventura told the court she stayed with Mr. Combs despite beatings and other abuse partly because of the nagging, persistent fear that videos of their sexual encounters with male prostitutes, the hundreds of “freak-offs” that she said Mr. Combs enjoyed watching and recording, would be posted online.Hers was not idle anxiety based on what she viewed Mr. Combs might be capable of, she said, but the consequence of repeated threats he had made to use the material to damage her if she deviated from his wishes. In one case, she described sitting beside him on a flight when he displayed for her videos that she thought had been destroyed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Delays Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Jury Selection, Concerned About ‘Cold Feet’

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      Judge Arun Subramanian said he feared jurors might grow uneasy over the weekend and drop off the panel before the trial begins on Monday.Jury selection for Sean Combs’s racketeering and sex-trafficking trial was delayed on Friday over worries that some jurors might get “cold feet” before the start of the high-profile case.Judge Arun Subramanian, who is overseeing the case, expressed concern that if jurors were selected before the weekend, they could grow uneasy and drop off the panel before the trial begins on Monday. The decision came after one potential juror sent an email to the court asking to be left off the panel for “issues of personal well-being,” the defense said.Twelve jurors and six alternates will be selected and sworn in on Monday at Federal District Court in Manhattan, ahead of opening statements in the case.The jury will be tasked with deciding whether the music mogul was a “swinger” with unorthodox sexual proclivities, or a predator who used his power to abuse victims in drug-dazed encounters. If convicted, Mr. Combs, who was once a roundly celebrated figure in the music industry, could spend the rest of his life in prison.The jurors will be anonymous, meaning their names will not be disclosed in public court. They will not be sequestered, however, so it is up to them to shield themselves from the media coverage and other chatter about the case.Over three days, dozens of New Yorkers took the witness stand inside the courtroom, where they were asked to describe in detail what they had seen and heard about the case against the artist and executive, who has been the subject of swirling allegations of sexual abuse over the past year and a half.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Virginia Giuffre, Voice in Epstein Sex Trafficking Scandal, Dies at 41

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      She accused Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, of recruiting her to join their sex-trafficking ring and sued Prince Andrew for sexual assault.Virginia Giuffre, a former victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.Ms. Giuffre died by suicide, according to a statement from the family. Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) wrote in an Instagram post in March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in a crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 m.p.h.In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex trafficking and conspiracy, and was accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Ms. Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.In 2009 Ms. Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, had sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex-trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.Ms. Giuffre in 2023 with a photo of herself as a teenager. She said she was recruited to Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring as a minor and that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” among his powerful friends.Emily Michot/Miami Herald, via Tribune News Service, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Is Tren de Aragua?

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      A gang with roots in a Venezuelan prison, the criminal group was at the center of President Trump’s order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.President Trump’s executive order on Saturday invoking the Alien Enemies Act targeted Venezuelan citizens 14 years and older with ties to the transnational gang Tren de Aragua, saying they “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”Mr. Trump’s order was quickly challenged in court, but the gang has been a growing source of concern for U.S. officials over the last year. The Biden administration labeled Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization in 2024, the New York Police Department has highlighted its activity on the East Coast, and the Trump White House began the process of designating it a foreign terrorist organization in January.Here is what we know about the gang:A rising force out of VenezuelaTren de Aragua (Train of Aragua, or Aragua Train) has roots in Tocorón prison in Venezuela’s northern Aragua state, which the group’s leaders had transformed into a mini-city with a pool, restaurants and a zoo. They reportedly recorded executions and torture there to maintain control over other prisoners.As Venezuela’s economy collapsed and its government under President Nicolás Maduro became more repressive, the group began exploiting vulnerable migrants. Tren de Aragua’s influence soon stretched into other parts of Latin America, and it developed into one of the region’s most violent and notorious criminal organizations, focusing on sex trafficking, human smuggling and drugs.Colombian officials in 2022 accused the gang of at least 23 murders after the police began to find body parts in bags. Alleged members have also been apprehended in Chile and in Brazil, where the gang aligned itself with Primeiro Comando da Capital, one of that country’s biggest organized crime rings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Steeling My Daughters Against a New Kind of Misogyny

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      Since President Trump started announcing his cabinet picks, I have been trying to write a Very Serious Essay about the Current State of Feminism.When Pete Hegseth was confirmed, even after so many horrifying details of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, that seemed like an obvious blow to the basic ideals of gender equality. In a marginally just world for women, credible allegations of sexual or domestic violence would prevent a person from being considered for such a vaunted position in the first place.I started trying to write this essay by gathering data about women’s progress and trying to quantify how it has stalled. Though the vibes seem truly awful, I didn’t want to go by just potentially illusory internet trends or the vile choices of our commander in chief.Yet it would be disingenuous to ignore how far we have come since the 1970s, when most women didn’t even have access to credit. Women now outnumber men at American colleges and in the college-educated labor force. A higher percentage of Gen Z women say they’re feminists than women of any other generation.But: Roe is dead. Who knows what might happen with access to contraceptives or abortion medication in the next four years?We’re in a period of backlash against women’s progress, beyond what is happening in and around the Oval Office. “Surveys from 2024 show that support for traditional gender roles is increasing” among both Republican men and Republican women, according to the political scientists Michael Tesler, John Sides and Colette Marcellin in a guest essay for Times Opinion. They conclude that “any growing gender traditionalism may be a reaction to societal trends and not a cause of these trends.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      More Women File Lawsuits Against Brothers Accused of Sex Crimes

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      Tal Alexander and his brothers, Oren Alexander and Alon Alexander, who are twins, now face at least 24 civil lawsuits, as they await trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.Seven lawsuits were filed this week against one or more of the Alexander brothers, who are facing multiple accusations of sexual assault in both civil and criminal court. The newest allegations against Tal Alexander and his brothers, Oren Alexander and Alon Alexander, who are twins, came this week in a flurry of last-minute claims all brought against the men as a legal window for decades-old allegations is closing. Two of the lawsuits were filed on Friday night to meet a midnight deadline.The Alexanders are collectively now facing at least 24 lawsuits, deepening the legal troubles for the brothers once known for their jet-setting lifestyles fueled by the work of Tal Alexander and Oren Alexander in the luxury residential real estate. In the latest batch of lawsuits, the net of allegations has widened to include their parents; Douglas Elliman, the real estate brokerage where Tal Alexander and Oren Alexander once worked; the Alexander family business; and the owner of an estate in the Hamptons who frequently hosted parties that the brothers attended.The claims add new twists to the maze of sexual assault allegations against the brothers who were arrested in December in Miami Beach on federal sex-trafficking charges. Currently jailed in New York, they are scheduled to go to trial early next year. All three have pleaded not guilty.Just a few years ago, the brothers were fixtures of a social circuit in Miami and Manhattan, making their nightlife adventures part of their brand. Tal Alexander and Oren Alexander were among the country’s most prominent real estate agents, while Alon Alexander, who ran the family business Kent Security Services and did not work in real estate, accompanied them on the circuit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More