Editor’s Note: This story contains discussions of rape or sexual assault that may be disturbing. Reader discretion is advised. If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can find help and discreet resources on the National Sexual Assault Hotline website or by calling 1-800-656-4673.
(NewsNation) — Sean “Diddy” Combs’ ex-partner Casandra “Cassie” Ventura testified Wednesday that Combs threatened her several times with releasing recordings of “Freak Offs.”
Her testimony came a day after Ventura was asked about the sex parties called “Freak Offs,” which the prosecution claims were orchestrated by Combs. She said they would hire an escort to set up “this experience so that I could perform for Sean.”
Ventura testified Wednesday that she feared that the release of the recordings could ruin everything she had worked for during her musical career. She also said that the release of the video would “make me feel like a slut,” she told jurors.
“I feared for my career. I feared for my family. It’s just embarrassing. It’s horrible and disgusting. No one should do that to anyone,” she said.
During her first day of testimony on Tuesday, Ventura told jurors that she often was unable to say no to Combs, fearful of blackmail and violence.
She claimed Combs threatened to post videos on the internet if she didn’t follow his instructions.
“For me, it was dissociative and numbing. I couldn’t imagine myself doing any of that without having some sort of buffer or way to not feel it for what it really was, which was emotionless sex with a stranger that I didn’t really want to have sex with,” Ventura testified.
On Tuesday, Tamara Holder, a women’s rights and sexual assault attorney, called Ventura’s testimony thus far in the trial “chilling and graphic.”
“The prosecution brings the ‘I love you’ texts out to get in front of them; the defense will try to use these texts to say it was consensual and she was into all of it,” Holder told NewsNation during a break in the trial on Tuesday. “She helps the jury understand coercive control. The idea that you love someone who abuses you, and how you can’t escape the imbalance of the power dynamic.”
Holder continued, “This is the prosecution’s opportunity to paint Diddy as the worst monster ever before the defense gets to cross-examine her. They’re going to have to be careful as she is pregnant, credible and a victim of domestic abuse. It could backfire.”
Ventura also testified that after their trip to the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, Combs began playing a recording of a “freak off” on his laptop computer as he and Ventura sat together on a commercial flight to New York.
Ventura said Combs told her he was “going to embarrass me and release them.”
The prosecutor posing the questions, Emily Johnson, asked if there were “people around you” when Combs was playing the videos on the phone. Ventura said there were.
After landing in New York, she testified, they went to dinner and then had another “freak off” right afterward.
The Associated Press contributed to this story