258: What Really Happened at Diddy’s Freak Offs? Diving Deeper into the Secret Hollywood Underworld ft. Beyond the Blinds

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Diddy Love or whatever? Daddy? Bad Boy? There is a lot, I think, that we don't know about Sean Diddy Combs, okay? And, I mean, is it Sean Diddy Combs? It's whatever. It's really whatever you want it to be. Is it? Oh, I didn't realize, is Diddy a real part of his name? I thought it was a nickname. Well, yeah, but he goes by that. Yeah.

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Got it. It's like Colin Jenner. Like, Diddy's on his birth certificate. No. No. Oh. Sean Combs. Sean Combs is his legal name. Got it, okay. But he's gone by many, many different names, as narcissists tend to do. Right. We're starting at the very beginning, everybody. We're starting at what is on the birth certificate. Yeah, yeah.

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I think we have a lot of questions. about what exactly he did, how he became the person he became. And we put out a call out on our Instagram and we were flooded with questions. So I think what we're doing is bringing on two experts. Tori and Kelly, you guys have unpacked the entire Diddy case on your podcast. You recapped the Peacock documentary on your Patreon.

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Yeah, you're welcome. OK, so this is what Diddy is charged with, according to the federal indictment. Combs, along with other members and associates of his enterprise, committed crimes including sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice. So before we get to his crimes, I would love to start at the very beginning, which is his childhood.

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You know, what made Diddy the person he is today? I watched the Peacock documentary and I was struck by the fact that he really grew up without a father. His dad was a gangster who unwittingly gave information to an undercover police officer about the gang he was a part of. And then it's thought that he was killed by that gang. He was shot in his car.

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So a very, very sad, tragic story of no parental father figure. And then another thing in the documentary that struck me was He grew up in a house where there was a lot of illicit activity, it seems like. There was a boy his age and he's interviewed on the documentary that lived with them. And he said, you know, you would walk into a room and you would see two naked adults.

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I mean, this is like a weird like niche obsession of mine is like discovering like the root of people's trauma. I get like kind of in the weeds about that sometimes, like obsessive. But yeah, like his childhood I think is so interesting because he lost his dad in such a violent way. And it's like violence that he then went on to kind of participate in himself.

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And then as far as his mom, I think, yeah, there was like a total desensitization of like sexuality, drug use, fluidity, just all of it. You know, like he was kind of like brainwashed as a kid to think that all of the things he does now is OK.

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Mm hmm. So his music producer, Rodney Little Rod Jones, he claimed that Diddy showed him a videotape of two men hooking up essentially a porn and was like, this is what you have to do to make it in the music industry. So part of me wonders if he ever had that experience where like someone told him that this is just the way the world operates.

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Yeah, pay your dues in order to get to where you need to be. And that might mean sleeping with a man, even if you're not into that. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

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And to your point, people have always said, like, the rumor has always been that, like, yeah, he was kind of, it's like he's this monster, this big monster, but he was, he's not the biggest monster. He was taught to be a monster by the bigger monsters, the people above him, you know, that gave him record deals and things. Right, right. You know, gave him bad boy, you know, allegedly. Clive Davis.

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Clive Davis, cough, cough, I mean, you know, spit. Talk about Clive Davis, because as a person who listened to the episode and watched the documentary, I didn't know anything about Clive Davis. I didn't know who this guy is that's my own, you know, I was just an idiot to know about what a legend he was. He's not an idiot. But yeah, please, talk about him. Showing your youth. Yeah.

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I feel like Troy explains the night that Whitney passed away so well in it. He paints the picture so well of why Clive Davis is an actual alleged piece of shit. I mean, it does give a good sort of well-rounded idea of him, I suppose. So Clive Davis is like the biggest person in music. I'm just like the one. He is like, he's the Bowser of the music industry.

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I mean, I'm sure I'd heard his name before this, before listening to your episode, but I had no clue who the man was. He's always like thanked during the Grammys. Okay. Yeah. He's big behind the scenes. Yeah. Right. He's not like out there tapping. He's like 90 years old. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. I mean, if you've probably seen him and thought that he was just some rickety old man. Like auditioning for the live action Mr. Burns, like The Simpsons. So Clive is like, he's known for discovering Whitney Houston. He's like a prolific figure in the music industry. And he's very, very closely tied to Diddy.

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Wow. Her daughter calls him dad, like grandpa or whatever. Wow. She dies in a hotel room. in a bathtub and he has a party for the grammys underneath her corpse she wasn't even taken out of the hotel and the press every celebrity that came knew that she was above them dead that whitney houston

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was dead above them while they're like drinking champagne he chose to have the party and the press was like why are you doing this like isn't whitney houston dead two floors up and he said that she would want the night to continue that's the kind of person huh yeah wait wait wait wait

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So she, like, she overdosed, right? That was, like, how she passed away, how she died? There's a lot of, like, yeah. Okay, okay. If you do, like, a deep dive in Whitney and, like, she had scratches on her. Like, there's a lot of weird stuff. Interesting. Bruises. Yeah. Okay. So she, like, passes.

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No, it happened hours later. What? Celebrities were arriving and giving interviews about what they thought of Whitney Houston's death. On the way to the party. On the way to the party. And she's still upstairs in the bathtub. Like Chaka Khan is like talking about like Whitney's legacy as she's like upstairs and that's her friend. And all these people are like at this party while she's upstairs.

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And he like raised her. Yeah. And that's how little he thought of her. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

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It's just so interesting the idea that you would have a very personal friend die and not be like, okay, well, the party's over. No one feels like doing this anymore. Let alone the body is upstairs. Right. And you're like, time to pop the dom. What? It's unimaginable. It's insane. Honestly, it's so dark. Also, he's known because Kelly Clarkson slapped him. Oh, really? No way. She hates her.

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Kelly Clarkson openly hates him. Her album, My December, is like a fuck you to Clive Davis. Really? He's evil. Wow. Okay, so back to Diddy, though. But he was like a part of Diddy's origin story as well in the music industry. He gave Diddy, what, $50 million to start Bad Boy or something like that? Like $55 million?

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And Diddy was very young. What did they say, he was 23? Or 22 or something? And yeah, he was like, here's $50 million and a record label. Yeah. So is there any theory that Diddy participated in the freak-offs before the freak-offs? There's theory. Before they were named freak-offs with, you know, a big head honcho. I won't even say the name. The pre-freak-off.