Federal prosecutors called another alleged victim to the witness stand on Thursday in the sex trafficking trial against the hip hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs. The woman testified under the pseudonym “Jane.” Prosecutors said they would plan to finish their questioning of this witness by the end of next Monday.
Earlier in the day, before Jane began her detailed testimony, the presiding district judge, Arun Subramanian, reprimanded the defendant for nodding at the jury while the previous witness had testified.
The witness, Bryana Bongolan, who claimed that Mr. Combs had dangled her off a balcony on the 17th floor of an apartment building in Los Angeles, as the Sun reported, was being cross-examined by the defense.
Defense attorney Nicole Westmoreland questioned the time-line of the alleged incident. The witness had shown the jury a photograph of a bruise on her neck, which she said was caused by Mr. Combs, after he violently threw her onto the furniture on the balcony, where he had just threatened to throw her over the railing. According to the metadata taken from Ms. Bongolan’s phone, the photograph was taken on September 26, 2016.
But Mr. Combs, the defense argued, had performed in Newark, New Jersey, on September 25, 2016. Ms. Westmoreland also showed the jury records from the Trump International Hotel in New York City, where Mr. Combs checked in September 24, 2016 and out on September 29, 2016.
After the witness left the stand, the judge told the lead defense attorney, Marc Agnifilo, “I saw your client looking at the jury and nodding vigorously… That is absolutely unacceptable.”
“Is it going to happen again, Mr. Agnifilo?” The judge asked.
“It’s not going to happen again, judge.” the attorney responded.
“It cannot happen again. If it happens again, if it happens even once, I will hear an application from the government to give a curative instruction to the jury, which you do not want. Or I will consider taking further measures, which could result in the exclusion of your client from the courtroom,” the judge threatened.
Mr. Combs, however, seemed unphased. The New York Times reported that when he returned to the courtroom, “he turned to the reporters in the spectators’ gallery and nodded. Then, he sat down and began talking animatedly to a sketch artist, before blowing her a kiss.”
The music producer and rapper is charged with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation for the purpose of prostitution. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. He faces a maximum of life behind bars if convicted on all charges.
The next witness was Jane, who is listed in the indictment as “Victim-2.” She dated Mr. Combs from January 2021 until his arrest in 2024.
She told the jury that she remembered the night she first met the defendant on a “girl’s trip” to Miami in November 2020. “He was really charming, really nice. And I was already drawn to him, like, pretty instantly. And he was really hospitable, really sweet, really friendly.”
Jane, who had grown up in California but was living on the East Coast at the time, was a single mother. Because one of her girlfriends, she said, was romantically involved with Mr. Combs, he paid for and invited the group of friends to Florida. She said she had met him five years before that “in passing” at a Father’s Day celebration, but they had not really talked.
This time around, in Miami, at a party on a yacht, “We were just having drinks, partying, being friendly. There was a little bit of flirting going on.”
She said they exchanged phone numbers and that Mr. Combs saved her number under the nickname “Ernie” and she saved his under the nickname “Bert,” and they would use these names lovingly throughout their relationship.
Once her friend got engaged to another man and moved overseas, she felt that she “could potentially entertain this Sean thing” and in January 2021 they had their first formal date. Jane had come back to Miami for an event and was staying at a hotel, which Mr. Combs had offered to pay for.
“I remember when I first saw Sean, he walks in the door of the hotel room and he was just, like, larger than life. He had a very big personality, super charming, very, very passionate, even just in how he speaks, and just overall really charming. And he was just immediately immersed in conversation with me,” the witness testified.
They had dinner on the balcony of her hotel room, she said, and talked very openly about their past relationships. Jane has a son, she said, with a man whom Mr. Combs knew and disliked, but she said Mr. Combs didn’t care about her child’s father, nor about her girlfriend, whom he had been involved with, and they ended up “making lots of love” and spending the next five days together.
“I remember it was just amazing,” she said. She told the jury that they watched sunrises together from the hotel balcony and took a walk along the beach, and that when she left Miami, she was pretty “head of heels” in love with Mr. Combs
The fairy tale continued. In February, he invited her to a trip to Turks and Caicos and then to the Bahamas. She said his assistant was there and “the chef, the butler, (a) photographer. At some point there was a barber.” The trip lasted about 15 days.
Prior to the trip, she had only used drugs twice in her life, she testified, but on that trip Mr. Combs introduced her to ecstasy, and she took it almost every day. The first time, she said, didn’t go so well, she fell into the sand and “my body was just, like, almost like convulsing and I was — I think I was screaming a little.” But after Mr. Combs reduced the dosage, the drug would make her feel “relaxed, euphoric, sexual. It just enhanced touch and sense and made me feel even more loving and flirtatious with him.”
Jane said, Mr. Combs gave her a bracelet that said “love”, and wired her $10,000 after she got back home, for the time she had been away with him and hadn’t been able to work.
“I was very open about just that I was a single mother and for work I was just on social media. I would say — I would call myself a content creator, influencer. … I was advertising brands on my social media,” she told the prosecutor.
Regarding their relationship, she was head over heels in love with him, while he “had made it really clear to me that he really liked me, but that he was seeing multiple women.”
“Because I liked him,” Jane said, “I was okay with it.”
Jane relocated to California in June 2021, and began seeing Mr. Combs more frequently. She said she would take drugs during their sexual encounters, like ecstasy, molly, cocaine and ketamine, because that’s how Mr. Combs preferred to have sex. She also “learned how he liked to have pornography playing. I learned how he preferred me to dress, and I just learned the things that he liked sexually.”
“I really loved my partner,” she explained, “and I was just making love with my partner the whole time, and lots of affection and kissing and lovemaking.”
But then things changed. Jane wiped her eyes with a tissue when the prosecutor asked her to tell the jury what happened in May 2021.
It was the first time, she said, she had sex with another man, while Mr. Combs watched and pleasured himself. She said they were lying in bed together in Miami, after having made love for 12-15 hours, and he asked her if she would consider having sex with another man. She said she was high on drugs, and said ok, just sort of “playing into the fantasy,” not thinking it would happen right away. But Mr.Combs immediately took her to a hotel, where she saw his assistants setting up the room with lights, candles and baby oil. Then the assistants left and a man by the name of “Don” arrived.
Mr. Combs told her he had found him on Cowboys 4 Angels, an escort services featured in the Showtime series “Gigolos”. Jane was nervous, she said, but Mr. Combs told her he knew the man and that “he was really nice.”
Jane detailed to the jury what lingerie she put on and how she proceeded to have sex with Don, while Mr. Combs watched. She asked Don to use a condom, but Mr. Combs did not agree to that.
“He said like he didn’t want — he didn’t want that. He just said ‘why, just these guys are safe. They get tested all the time, and they’re some of the cleanest people, and he can show you his papers, and you don’t have to do that.’”
Jane said after Don left, she and Mr. Combs had sex, and were “happy.”
“I felt excited, I was happy, it was taboo, it was fun, I had a good time with my partner,” Jane testified.”I just took that as a night that we just did something so crazy, taboo, and fun, and sexy.”
She soon realized that the experience “completely set the tone for our relationship moving forward,” that it was a door she was “unable to shut for the remainder of our relationship.”
An assistant US attorney, Maurene Comey, daughter of the former Anti-Trump FBI Director James Comey, asked her why she wanted to shut that door. “There was so much of it after, and it was too much of it,” Jane replied.
“After that night in May of 2021, about what percentage of the time that you saw Sean did you end up having sex with another man in front of him?” Ms. Combs asked.
“90 percent,” the witness said.
“Did you want that?” The prosecutor went on.
“No,” the witness admitted.
“Did you want to have sex with other men?” Ms. Combs pressed.
Jane said she only wanted to have sex Mr. Combs. “I just wanted, as much as I could, just have, like, an old-fashioned type of relationship where it was just me and him, like how I met him, like how it was,” she said
When she would raise the issue with Mr. Combs, Jane remembered, things would get uncomfortable.
“Whenever the topic came up it would start out really uncomfortable,” Jane said. “I could just feel that the tension was building and I would just kind of push down what I was going to say.”
She kept pleasing him, she explained, and sleeping with other men, while he watched and pleasured himself, because “I just really loved him at this point and I just wanted to make him happy and I feared losing him.”
The “hotel nights” always involved baby oil, she testified that they would sometimes use “two dozen or more” bottles of baby oil in one night.
“He really enjoyed watching me pour oil all over myself, all over the man.” Jane said.
The longer it went on, the more difficult it became for her. She testified she would tell him both “in writing and verbally” that she would rather just be alone with him. He would call her crazy, she said, and say “it’s ok” but then the hotel nights, as she referred to the encounters with the other men, would just happen again.
Jane said she and Mr. Combs had a “hotel night” every single time she saw him between May 2021 and October 2023 in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and the islands Turks and Caicos. The couple went on a break, she said, from October 2023 through February 2024.
When she would bring up the issue of the other men, he would sometimes, she testified, threaten to stop paying her rent.
“He would just start saying things like ‘if you want to break up, that’s fine. Do you need, like, what, three more months in the house, because I’m not about to be paying for a woman’s rent that I’m not even seeing,’” Jane remembered. “I felt frustrated. I felt just obligated… to perform these nights for him.”
Jane told the prosecutor that she would make sure she always looked beautiful for him. She would work out, she said, and spend time on her hair, her nails, her clothing.
“I always made sure that my nails were done, my hair was done, my glam, my tan,” she testified.
“Why did you do that?” The prosecutor asked.
“I just liked being beautiful for Sean, and I know he liked me looking beautiful for him.” She answered, and added that he liked very specific looks, like “straight hair and light-colored nails.”
When the prosecutor pointed out that these beauty treatments cost a lot of money, Jane agreed and said that Mr. Combs would give her money. S testified he would give her $5,000 to $10,000 if it was cash, larger amounts, he would send via wire transfer. The largest amount, she said, he ever gave her was $20,000 after she told him she needed furniture for her new home, which he also paid for.
When they got back together after their breakup in October 2023, they made a verbal and “flirtatious” contract, she said, that he would give her a monthly allowance. She asked for $15,000 a month, and he agreed to pay her $10,000. But then she decided she wanted to live in a nicer apartment, and he ended up paying her monthly rent, which was $10,000.
“I would say that when I was with Sean, I was really consumed by him. I was really consumed by Sean,” the witness testified, saying that her “presence on social media really declined” after she “prioritized this relationship.”
A friend of hers told her that she was making $4 million a year by modeling on the website “OnlyFans” and she testified that she spoke to Mr. Combs, and told him that she was interested in trying it also, but he kept telling her they would discuss it another time, and that he didn’t like the idea.
Prosecutors are possibly intending to establish how Mr. Combs would allegedly make women financially dependent on him so that they would have no other choice but to “perform” the sex acts he craved.
The direct examination will resume on Friday and last until the end of Monday, the prosecution told the court.
