Celebrity stylist Deonte Nash has testified that Sean “Diddy” Combs’ girlfriend Cassie Ventura said she wanted to jump off a hotel balcony after the rapper threatened to release sex tapes from their “freak offs.”
Deonte Nash, a stylist for Ventura and Diddy from 2009 through 2018, took the stand Wednesday afternoon in Diddy’s sex trafficking trial to tell jurors about how the music mogul threatened, abused and controlled Ventura’s life and career.
Three violent incidents stood out in his mind, he said, including one in 2013 that began in Ventura’s Los Angeles apartment and ended with Ventura threatening to throw herself off a balcony.
Diddy is facing five federal counts of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has pleaded not guilty. The 2013 incident was just one of many eye-opening incidents the jury heard Wednesday.
- There was a black Escalade parked outside of the home of Scott Mescudi — better known as Kid Cudi — that belonged to Bad Boy Productions when police investigated a report of a burglary at the house.
- Arson investigator Lance Jimenez testified about the firebombing of Mescudi’s black Porsche, concluding that the incident was “targeted.”
- Jimenez said two fingerprint cards, obtained at Mescudi’s home after the trespassing incident weeks earlier, were destroyed in August 2012.
- Following this line of questioning, the defense moved for a mistrial over “prosecutorial misconduct.” The judge swiftly denied it.
Nash described how he and Ventura were hanging out in her kitchen in 2013 when Diddy came over and said he wanted to talk to Ventura in the bedroom. When they emerged, Nash recalled seeing Diddy “grab her by her hair and the back of her shirt” before pushing her halfway out the door while saying: “Get out of my house.”
Diddy then started doing the same to him, “popping me on the back of my head — because I didn’t have hair — and grabbed the back of my shirt,” he testified. The rapper told the stylist that Ventura would be down shortly.
When Ventura and Diddy came down, she got into Nash’s car, and Diddy approached. “He began to berate us both,” the stylist told the court. He recalled Diddy telling them to “take our broke asses and ride into the sunset.” Diddy then called Ventura and got her to pull over, approached the car and told her he was going to release the sex tapes.
Nash testified that Diddy threatened to send them to her parents’ places of work “to get them fired,” and said he was the “only one who could protect her.”
The stylist then described finding out Diddy was coming to his house and driving Ventura to Sunset Boulevard to get a taxi. She told him she would call him when she got to her destination.
He recalled Diddy arriving at his house with D-Roc, his head of security, demanding to know where Ventura was and searching closets for her. Diddy grabbed his phone, and when a call arrived from the Ventura at the Montrose hotel, he ordered Nash to drive there, with the mogul and security following behind.
At the hotel, Diddy told Nash, D-Roc and his chief of staff to get Ventura.
When he got to her room, she “jumped up…she was frightened,” Nash recalled. He said that when he told Ventura Diddy was waiting downstairs, she said “she was going to climb over the balcony” and “started heading that way,” Nash testified, noting “it wasn’t the first floor.”
Ventura was snuck out the side of the hotel and when Nash told Diddy that Ventura had already left her room the mogul accused him of “playing” him.
Nash said that when he left the hotel, he believed Diddy’s security team followed him, so he turned off his car lights and stayed at a hotel. Nash explained: “I didn’t think my home was safe that night.”
The stylist recalled seeing a string of alleged abuse of Ventura by Diddy.
Just months before this encounter, Nash recalled Ventura sustaining a gash to her eyebrow after Diddy hit and kicked her in her bedroom before she left for OVO Fest. Nash and Mia, Diddy’s assistant, both jumped on Diddy’s back to try to stop the abuse, to no avail, he said.
Nash recalled seeing Ventura over FaceTime with two black eyes during a trip to Las Vegas in 2015. At the March 2016 premiere of The Perfect Match, Nash also remembered Ventura with a black eye covered with “a lot” of makeup.
Diddy called Ventura many names, including “b***h,” “s**t,” and “h*e,” he testified. Asked how often he heard Diddy call his girlfriend a “b***h,” Nash replied: “Quite a bit. That was his favorite.”
