Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, testified on Wednesday in the federal trial of Sean Combs, her former boyfriend and label boss, about living with the fear of going against his wishes — and especially his sexual desires.
In her second day of testimony, Ms. Ventura said she went along with the increasingly extreme and frequent “freak-offs” demanded by Mr. Combs because she worried that he would respond with anger or physical violence and follow through on his threats to leak explicit videos of her in degrading sexual encounters.
Mr. Combs is accused of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution, and the government contends that Ms. Ventura and others had been coerced into participating in freak-offs and other sexual encounters with Mr. Combs. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his lawyers have argued that Ms. Ventura, and other women who are part of the case, were willing participants and that his sexual arrangements were all consensual.
Ms. Ventura testified that Mr. Combs would take videos of the freak-offs — marathon sex sessions — that she participated in and that he later threatened to release what she called “blackmail material.”
During a 2013 flight from Cannes, France, she testified, Mr. Combs pulled up videos on his laptop of her in freak-offs, which she thought had been deleted. He threatened to release the videos to embarrass her.
“I just felt trapped,” she said.
During freak-offs, she said, Mr. Combs would grab her, push her down, kick her and hit her on the side of her head. At one point, she texted him, “You treat me like you’re Ike Turner,” referring to Tina Turner’s abusive husband and bandleader.
In her testimony on Wednesday, Ms. Ventura detailed how she used an expansive variety of drugs to numb herself to perform sex acts at Mr. Combs’s direction.
Ketamine became her preferred drug for freak-offs because “it was very dissociative,” she testified. “You can go in to something called a K-hole, where you’re not present in the moment.” The drug GHB, she said, caused her to black out at the site of a freak-off in the Hamptons. She testified that she developed an “on and off addiction” to opiates, which helped her come down from ecstasy and MDMA.
Ms. Ventura also said she developed frequent urinary tract infections as a result of the freak-offs but still took part in them while infected, which caused her “horrible” pain.
When Ms. Ventura, who is visibly pregnant and in her third trimester, entered the courtroom on Wednesday, Mr. Combs tracked her with his eyes as she walked to the witness box. She stared ahead. Ms. Ventura’s husband, Alex Fine, focused his eyes on Mr. Combs for part of his wife’s testimony, which has gone for long stretches of time with occasional breaks.
Mr. Combs’s three sons — Quincy Brown, Christian Combs and Justin Combs — were seated in the spectators’ gallery along with Mr. Combs’s mother, Janice Combs. But the three daughters of the mogul who had been present for the trial’s first two days were absent on Wednesday morning.
When Ms. Ventura began her testimony at the start of the day, she resumed recounting the aftermath of an attack by Mr. Combs at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016. A surveillance video of that attack — which was broadcast in parts by CNN last year — has been played several times already at trial, showing Mr. Combs striking, kicking and dragging Ms. Ventura in the hallway of the hotel.
According to Ms. Ventura, Mr. Combs had just hit her in the face in their hotel room during a freak-off. After she left the hotel, she said, she took a selfie in an Uber that showed she had sustained a “fat lip” in the altercation. She added that Mr. Combs texted her repeatedly, pleading for her to respond.
“Yo pls call, I’m surrounded,” he texted in a message entered into evidence.
He repeatedly texted her to call him, saying “the cops are here.” (There was previous testimony from a hotel security guard that the police were not called after the altercation.)
“You’re going to abandon me all alone?” he texted her. “Call me pls.”
She replied in a text message that Mr. Combs was “sick” for thinking what he had done to her was OK. “Please stay far away from me,” she wrote.
Once Ms. Ventura arrived at her apartment, a friend who was visiting called the police on her behalf. When officers arrived, Ms. Ventura said, she answered some of their questions but did not want to say who assaulted her.
“Did you want to protect Sean?” asked the prosecutor, Emily A. Johnson.
“Yeah, of course,” Ms. Ventura answered.
After the police left, she said, Mr. Combs arrived at the apartment and tried to enter. “Just chaos outside the door,” Ms. Ventura testified about the scene. “Banging, kicking, yelling.”
After the assault at the hotel in 2016, Ms. Ventura testified, she was scheduled to appear at her first big movie premiere, for a film she starred in called “The Perfect Match.” She said she went back to Mr. Combs’s house to be fitted for her outfit; the jury was shown a photograph of the couple together at the premiere, with Ms. Ventura wearing makeup that she said covered bruises on her face.
Ms. Ventura’s testimony has been widely anticipated since Mr. Combs’s arrest in September 2024, if not before. She had sued him in late 2023 — in a case that was settled in just one day — over many of the same allegations contained in the government’s indictment, in which she was identified only as “Victim-1.”
The government is expected to continue with its direct examination of Ms. Ventura after a lunch recess. If that is completed Wednesday, it would be followed by cross-examination from Mr. Combs’s lawyers.
Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.
