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P Diddy’s sex trafficking indictment has given our afternoon on a yacht a sinister new meaning

P Diddy’s sex trafficking indictment has given our afternoon on a yacht a sinister new meaning

“It comes as a surprise to realize that P. Diddy is just shy.”

Reading back about a Interview from 2008 Doing so with disgraced music mogul Sean “P Diddy” Combs was not a comfortable experience, but this reflection actively made me squirm.

Then there was Combs’ claim that even though he was “completely jaded” at age 38, there was still one person he desperately wanted to meet: “The Queen of England.” I don’t know why I never met her,” the rapper told me, visibly baffled by this mistake. “She’s never invited me to the palace – not yet, anyway.”

Today, this man with whom I spent an afternoon aboard a Fendi-upholstered yacht in Cannes – a man who was at the height of his career, worth more than $500 million and had a curious insecurity about his feet – is confronted with several federal ones allegations of sex traffickingextortion and transportation to engage in prostitution (all of which he denies). Awaiting his trial at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, P. Diddy’s prospects were already bleak. Last week it got much worse.

In the biggest acceleration yet, seven new civil lawsuits have been filed in the past week, including two from plaintiffs who say they were minors at the time they were allegedly drugged and assaulted by the music producer. Add these to the 120 plaintiffs that Texas attorney Tony Buzbee claims to represent, to the dozens of lawsuits already filed, and we may be looking at a bigger monster than R Kelly, then Cosby, then Weinstein – then Epstein? It is the breadth of its reach. We are talking about a time span of at least 30 years, with the alleged victims being almost evenly distributed by gender. We’re talking women, men, girls and boys, the youngest of whom says he was only nine when Combs sexually assaulted him, after promising him a record deal.

Combs has denied any alleged wrongdoing in all lawsuits. But whenever a celebrity scandal breaks, interviewers like to tell you that they “had a feeling.” That in those few hours spent with someone who consistently delivers for you and is clearly on his best behavior, they were still able to spot the cheater, the liar, the fraud. I could say that about Weinstein, whom I met about half a dozen times. In fact, I probably could have told you that in one meeting. But P Diddy?

I did indeed see a womanizer, a narcissist and a control freak, who was so concerned about our photographer getting pictures of his feet on board that yacht that we had to agree to a ‘no bare feet’ clause in advance. But I also believed the Harlem-born hip-hop mogul when he told me that his main motivation was to get away from his unhealthy background (his father, a drug dealer, was shot dead in his car when he was just three) and that he owed everything to his mother, Janice, who kept her son off the streets by making sure he completed his education at a Catholic school (where he was an altar boy, he said).

“I don’t know why anyone would do something where they know the outcome will be death or prison,” he told me when I asked about the rise of gang warfare on the streets of Britain and the US. And I had to listen back to this part on the tape once, and then twice – just to see if I could hear the insincerity, the deliberate lie. But it sounded… convincing. “If you don’t care about yourself, at least do it for your mother, and try to imagine how she will feel,” he said.

Other details from that afternoon have taken on sinister new meanings. How could they not? I think of how my interviewee chuckled as I choked on the industrial cocktail in front of me; about how he was clearly wearing no underwear under his white pants, and about the supine, oil-stained bodies littering the deck of that 180-foot yacht, chartered for the duration of the Cannes Film Festival. Were any members of that entourage involved in P. Diddy’s claim? “freak offs”? The elaborately produced sex parties that Combs, federal investigators allege, lured many victims to?

There were things he said that were absolutely sincere, that had the quaintness of truth even if they were interspersed with marketing spiel and machismo. How the smell of moisture always reminded him of his childhood. “That basement smell, you know? I love that smell.” But then the P Diddy brand would take over, and he told me he had to start getting ready for the next party because it took him two hours, because he was “worse than any woman I’ve ever been with.” ‘ and had a very ceremonial pre-party process. “I take a long bath and then moisturize with oil and perfume while I’m still wet so it all seeps into my pores. Then I let it air dry by dancing around to James Brown.”

P Diddy’s attorney, Erica Wolff, has said her client looks forward to “proving his innocence and defending himself in court,” and of course everyone deserves the opportunity to do so, just as any alleged victim should be treated. But if this turns out to be yet another case of the entertainment industry giving passes to powerful men who use their status to engage in systematic abuse, I’m not sure it will ever recover.

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