Chloe Melas
Appearances
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
He is a bit of a conundrum. During his testimony, he talked about having participated in these freak-offs and that he developed a friendship with Cassie, or so he thought. On cross-examination, one of Combs' attorneys, Xavier Donaldson, really picked apart his testimony and said, look, some of the things that you're saying are not what you told investigators in the lead-up to this trial.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
On one hand, he says, I was so afraid for my life. I did not know what Sean Combs was capable of, which is why I didn't go to the police, which is why I didn't physically intervene. But then there's a text exchange between himself and Cassie Ventura after this incident where he claims he saw Combs be violent with Cassie where he says, I just love y'all. That's paraphrasing the text message.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And when Xavier Donaldson on cross-examination said, well, if you were so scared for your life or you were so disgusted by what you had seen, why did you write that? And he actually says, oh, well, I didn't mean what I texted.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
I just did that to bait Cassie because they wanted her to ask me to participate in another freak-off so that I could go see her in person and make sure that she was emotionally and physically okay because I was worried about her. But is that something that the jury's really going to buy?
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
You know, at one point, prosecutors introduced a photo as evidence just to establish the fact that Cassie was dating Combs, and it was early on in their relationship. And in the photo, it's Cassie, Sean Combs, someone else, and Kim Porter. Reportedly, the love of Combs' life died of pneumonia several years ago, and her children were in that courtroom.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And I looked over at them, and I thought that I was going to see tears, but they remained strong and very stoic.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
Yeah, I was actually surprised to see her in the courtroom. About a year ago, that's when she wrote, my heart goes out to her meeting Cassie, saying I know how she feels, also saying that Sean needs help. But she is sitting right there on Combs' side of the courtroom.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
He turned around and he watched her walk down the aisle of the courtroom and go up to the witness stand. And he really stared at her during her entire testimony. His face, expressionless. I saw him looking over into the jury box multiple times.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
When there was one of the breaks, everybody left the courtroom, and then when we all came back in, as Combs walked back in, he looked over at his family sitting behind him, and he opened his eyes really wide, and you could see him let out this big exhale.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
You can tell he's stressed, and this is very different than the Sean Combs that we've seen at all the pretrial hearings where he's smiling, and he's even yesterday blowing a kiss to his family. He looks stressed. Maybe that's because this is the first time that he's seen Cassie since they broke up several years ago. And also, I mean, because let's be honest, he faces up to life in prison.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
Oh, absolutely. There will be other witnesses. There are other alleged victims. But Cassie is the star witness.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
So Cassie is an artist, right, who had... a couple of hits very early on in her career. And she described being introduced to Combs because she was hoping to sign with Bad Boy Records. And she ultimately did land this 10-album deal with his company. And she said she knew him as this serial entrepreneur. He was a kingmaker.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
and you know she was just excited to be in his presence and in the beginning of their relationship he was really looking out for her she had a couple of bad performances and she said that he always had her back but then she says that it was her 21st birthday and she celebrated it in las vegas and that is the night that combs kissed her for the first time and she actually said in her testimony today that she
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
ran out crying because she was so taken aback by the fact that he was showing interest in her. He's essentially her boss. And she was really confused. And she described herself as just being just really naive when it came to relationships. But then she said shortly thereafter, their situation became romantic and that she started to fall in love with him. And that's when they became intimate.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And then they ended up staying together on and off for 11 years.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And what's also really interesting is that she said she thought that they were in this monogamous relationship, but it turned out that Combs had, quote, many girlfriends in his life, right? And she said on the stand today that she was jealous. And so that is something that we heard in Combs' defense's opening statement yesterday, that this, all of this rage was fueled by jealousy on both sides.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
Cassie said that early on in the relationship, he introduced the idea of having threesomes. And ultimately, they had a threesome with an escort. And she said that she didn't want to do it, but that she didn't really vocalize it because she wanted to make Sean happy. And she said that once they did it, it just kept going. And that at one point, these freak-offs were happening weekly.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And some of these freak-offs would last days. At a certain point, she said Sean was essentially controlling most of her life. I mean, she said that, look, I mean, he was the head of Bad Boy. He controlled her career. He told her what to wear, allegedly. She said that she was the one that was instructed by Combs to go and hire these escorts. Sometimes she would book the hotels.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
She would pay the escorts. And that she would even bring candles and baby oil and help really arrange the hotel room before these freak-offs happened. Cassie got emotional at times, Chloe? Yeah, so pretty early on in her testimony, you saw her holding a Kleenex, and she was wiping her nose and kind of wiping her eyes.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And then when she started talking about how she really felt forced into these freak-offs and that she really was in love with Combs and really just wanted to make him happy, that's when she broke down crying. So it was a very emotional day.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
She's eight months pregnant and walks into this courtroom wearing this fitted brown dress, this long brown overcoat. Her husband was sitting right in front of me and you could hear a pin drop. This has been the most anticipated testimony for
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
So early. But I was not the earliest because there actually are a lot of people that have been camping out since yesterday. So tell us everything about how this all started this morning. So they finally settled on 12 jurors, six alternates, and that 12-person jury is made up of eight men and four women. I think that's really interesting to point out here that it's a male-dominated jury.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Even the alternates... There's more men than women. We know some of the professions. There's a physician's assistant. There's someone who works at a deli, a massage therapist, even a scientist. So there's a really wide-ranging group of people. And these individuals, they hail from the Southern District of New York. So they come from all of the areas in and around New York City.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
So much of their case centers around their star witness, which is Combs' former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura. They say that he ran this criminal enterprise that he used employees to carry out.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
illegal activity, they helped him organize these drug-fueled sex parties, that he forced women in his life, these alleged victims, to partake in these parties, have sex with male escorts, force them to take drugs.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Some of them. So it turns out that Combs did film some of these encounters. But what's really interesting is that during the defense openings that were done by Tenny Garagos, she said, you're going to learn that these videos were not found at his home.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
during the raids, these were actually videos provided by Cassie to the prosecutors, that you think he had the power, but she actually had the power.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Well, this is not your average trial because he has so many attorneys. I think I counted six or maybe seven at this point. We know that he's recently added Brian Steele. He recently represented Young Thug in his Rico case. You have Mark Agnifilo that also represents Luigi Mangione. As for Combs, he had on what looked like khaki pants, a sweater. He's hot.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
He had, again, his gray hair, a gray goatee, but he was smiling. He blew a kiss to his family behind him. His children were there, his mother. He hugged all of his attorneys.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
His team recently put in a motion to actually get sweaters. So you're not going to see him in suits. He's going to be in sweaters and khaki pants, shoes without laces. And I was told that this is something that dates as far back as Menendez. The Menendez brothers, when they wore sweaters, is to make them look more approachable to the jury.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
So the first person was a security guard. This was someone that was actually working at the hotel when Cassie was brutally beaten in that hallway in 2016. He testified that on that night, he got a call about a woman in distress on the sixth floor of the hotel. So he went up to go see what was going on. And when he got there, that's when he recognized, oh, Cassie.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
This is Sean Diddy Combs, and he was there in a towel and socks, and he actually said that Combs had a, quote, devilish stare. He then said that he asked Combs what was going on, and Combs said, look, we were arguing, we were just having a dispute. But then he testified that he heard Combs tell Cassie, you are not going to leave. OK, so how did the defense cross-examine the security guard?
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
So Brian Steele handled the cross-examination. You have Brian Steele saying what you wrote in your incident report to your employer is not what you're describing to me now on the stand. So he pointed out that in his report, he did not write that Combs told Cassie, you're not leaving. He never said that Combs had a devilish stare on his face. And he also asked, why did you not call 911?
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Why did you not get authorities involved?
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
This individual calls himself a stripper, but prosecutors had called him an escort. He does say that he had been paid by Ventura, actually, to take part in sex acts where he would have sex with Cassie while Combs watched. And he also testified that on two occasions, he actually remembers Combs physically assaulting Cassie.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
He said in one instance he saw Combs grab Cassie by the hair while she was sitting in front of her computer, pulled her off of a chair and dragged her into the bedroom and that he could hear slapping sounds coming from the other room. And he was asked by prosecutors, why did you not call the police? Why did you not intervene? And he said more than once that he was scared for his own life.
Dateline NBC
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Yes. So Cassie is the main witness for the government. She's victim one. She's heavily pregnant. She's in her third trimester. She's pregnant with her third child. But she's going to take the stand, and it's going to take multiple days for her testimony. According to opening statements, this will actually be the first time that Cassie has been in the same room as Combs since they broke up. Wow.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
He is a bit of a conundrum. During his testimony, he talked about having participated in these freak-offs and that he developed a friendship with Cassie, or so he thought. On cross-examination, one of Combs' attorneys, Xavier Donaldson, really picked apart his testimony and said, look, some of the things that you're saying are not what you told investigators in the lead-up to this trial.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
On one hand, he says, I was so afraid for my life. I did not know what Sean Combs was capable of, which is why I didn't go to the police, which is why I didn't physically intervene. But then there's a text exchange between himself and Cassie Ventura after this incident where he claims he saw Combs be violent with Cassie where he says, I just love y'all. That's paraphrasing the text message.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And when Xavier Donaldson on cross-examination said, well, if you were so scared for your life or you were so disgusted by what you had seen, why did you write that? And he actually says, oh, well, I didn't mean what I texted.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
I just did that to bait Cassie because they wanted her to ask me to participate in another freak-off so that I could go see her in person and make sure that she was emotionally and physically okay because I was worried about her. But is that something that the jury's really going to buy?
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
You know, at one point, prosecutors introduced a photo as evidence just to establish the fact that Cassie was dating Combs, and it was early on in their relationship. And in the photo, it's Cassie, Sean Combs, someone else, and Kim Porter. Reportedly, the love of Combs' life died of pneumonia several years ago, and her children were in that courtroom.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And I looked over at them, and I thought that I was going to see tears, but they remained strong and very stoic.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
Yeah, I was actually surprised to see her in the courtroom. About a year ago, that's when she wrote, my heart goes out to her meeting Cassie, saying I know how she feels, also saying that Sean needs help. But she is sitting right there on Combs' side of the courtroom.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
He turned around and he watched her walk down the aisle of the courtroom and go up to the witness stand. And he really stared at her during her entire testimony. His face, expressionless. I saw him looking over into the jury box multiple times.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
When there was one of the breaks, everybody left the courtroom, and then when we all came back in, as Combs walked back in, he looked over at his family sitting behind him, and he opened his eyes really wide, and you could see him let out this big exhale.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
You can tell he's stressed, and this is very different than the Sean Combs that we've seen at all the pretrial hearings where he's smiling, and he's even yesterday blowing a kiss to his family. He looks stressed. Maybe that's because this is the first time that he's seen Cassie since they broke up several years ago. And also, I mean, because let's be honest, he faces up to life in prison.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
Oh, absolutely. There will be other witnesses. There are other alleged victims. But Cassie is the star witness.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
So Cassie is an artist, right, who had... a couple of hits very early on in her career. And she described being introduced to Combs because she was hoping to sign with Bad Boy Records. And she ultimately did land this 10-album deal with his company. And she said she knew him as this serial entrepreneur. He was a kingmaker.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
and you know she was just excited to be in his presence and in the beginning of their relationship he was really looking out for her she had a couple of bad performances and she said that he always had her back but then she says that it was her 21st birthday and she celebrated it in las vegas and that is the night that combs kissed her for the first time and she actually said in her testimony today that she
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
ran out crying because she was so taken aback by the fact that he was showing interest in her. He's essentially her boss. And she was really confused. And she described herself as just being just really naive when it came to relationships. But then she said shortly thereafter, their situation became romantic and that she started to fall in love with him. And that's when they became intimate.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And then they ended up staying together on and off for 11 years.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And what's also really interesting is that she said she thought that they were in this monogamous relationship, but it turned out that Combs had, quote, many girlfriends in his life, right? And she said on the stand today that she was jealous. And so that is something that we heard in Combs' defense's opening statement yesterday, that this, all of this rage was fueled by jealousy on both sides.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
Cassie said that early on in the relationship, he introduced the idea of having threesomes. And ultimately, they had a threesome with an escort. And she said that she didn't want to do it, but that she didn't really vocalize it because she wanted to make Sean happy. And she said that once they did it, it just kept going. And that at one point, these freak-offs were happening weekly.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And some of these freak-offs would last days. At a certain point, she said Sean was essentially controlling most of her life. I mean, she said that, look, I mean, he was the head of Bad Boy. He controlled her career. He told her what to wear, allegedly. She said that she was the one that was instructed by Combs to go and hire these escorts. Sometimes she would book the hotels.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
She would pay the escorts. And that she would even bring candles and baby oil and help really arrange the hotel room before these freak-offs happened. Cassie got emotional at times, Chloe? Yeah, so pretty early on in her testimony, you saw her holding a Kleenex, and she was wiping her nose and kind of wiping her eyes.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
And then when she started talking about how she really felt forced into these freak-offs and that she really was in love with Combs and really just wanted to make him happy, that's when she broke down crying. So it was a very emotional day.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Cassie Ventura takes the stand.
She's eight months pregnant and walks into this courtroom wearing this fitted brown dress, this long brown overcoat. Her husband was sitting right in front of me and you could hear a pin drop. This has been the most anticipated testimony for
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
So early. But I was not the earliest because there actually are a lot of people that have been camping out since yesterday. So tell us everything about how this all started this morning. So they finally settled on 12 jurors, six alternates, and that 12-person jury is made up of eight men and four women. I think that's really interesting to point out here that it's a male-dominated jury.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Even the alternates... There's more men than women. We know some of the professions. There's a physician's assistant. There's someone who works at a deli, a massage therapist, even a scientist. So there's a really wide-ranging group of people. And these individuals, they hail from the Southern District of New York. So they come from all of the areas in and around New York City.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
So much of their case centers around their star witness, which is Combs' former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura. They say that he ran this criminal enterprise that he used employees to carry out.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
illegal activity, they helped him organize these drug-fueled sex parties, that he forced women in his life, these alleged victims, to partake in these parties, have sex with male escorts, force them to take drugs.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Some of them. So it turns out that Combs did film some of these encounters. But what's really interesting is that during the defense openings that were done by Tenny Garagos, she said, you're going to learn that these videos were not found at his home.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
during the raids, these were actually videos provided by Cassie to the prosecutors, that you think he had the power, but she actually had the power.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Well, this is not your average trial because he has so many attorneys. I think I counted six or maybe seven at this point. We know that he's recently added Brian Steele. He recently represented Young Thug in his Rico case. You have Mark Agnifilo that also represents Luigi Mangione. As for Combs, he had on what looked like khaki pants, a sweater. He's hot.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
He had, again, his gray hair, a gray goatee, but he was smiling. He blew a kiss to his family behind him. His children were there, his mother. He hugged all of his attorneys.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
His team recently put in a motion to actually get sweaters. So you're not going to see him in suits. He's going to be in sweaters and khaki pants, shoes without laces. And I was told that this is something that dates as far back as Menendez. The Menendez brothers, when they wore sweaters, is to make them look more approachable to the jury.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
So the first person was a security guard. This was someone that was actually working at the hotel when Cassie was brutally beaten in that hallway in 2016. He testified that on that night, he got a call about a woman in distress on the sixth floor of the hotel. So he went up to go see what was going on. And when he got there, that's when he recognized, oh, Cassie.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
This is Sean Diddy Combs, and he was there in a towel and socks, and he actually said that Combs had a, quote, devilish stare. He then said that he asked Combs what was going on, and Combs said, look, we were arguing, we were just having a dispute. But then he testified that he heard Combs tell Cassie, you are not going to leave. OK, so how did the defense cross-examine the security guard?
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
So Brian Steele handled the cross-examination. You have Brian Steele saying what you wrote in your incident report to your employer is not what you're describing to me now on the stand. So he pointed out that in his report, he did not write that Combs told Cassie, you're not leaving. He never said that Combs had a devilish stare on his face. And he also asked, why did you not call 911?
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Why did you not get authorities involved?
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
This individual calls himself a stripper, but prosecutors had called him an escort. He does say that he had been paid by Ventura, actually, to take part in sex acts where he would have sex with Cassie while Combs watched. And he also testified that on two occasions, he actually remembers Combs physically assaulting Cassie.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
He said in one instance he saw Combs grab Cassie by the hair while she was sitting in front of her computer, pulled her off of a chair and dragged her into the bedroom and that he could hear slapping sounds coming from the other room. And he was asked by prosecutors, why did you not call the police? Why did you not intervene? And he said more than once that he was scared for his own life.
Dateline: True Crime Weekly
Sean Combs: Opening statements and the first witnesses.
Yes. So Cassie is the main witness for the government. She's victim one. She's heavily pregnant. She's in her third trimester. She's pregnant with her third child. But she's going to take the stand, and it's going to take multiple days for her testimony. According to opening statements, this will actually be the first time that Cassie has been in the same room as Combs since they broke up. Wow.