The cross-examination of a man who had a voyeuristic sexual arrangement with Sean Combs and his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, will continue on Tuesday after he testified about witnessing episodes of domestic abuse by Mr. Combs.
On Monday, the first day of the music mogul’s racketeering and sex trafficking trial, the witness, Daniel Phillip, testified that over a decade ago, he would repeatedly meet the couple at high-end New York hotels and have sex with Ms. Ventura while Mr. Combs watched in a corner of the room and masturbated.
Mr. Phillip said he received between about $700 and $6,000 for each sexual encounter, though he was not paid every time.
Mr. Combs has been charged with sex-trafficking Ms. Ventura, a singer named Cassie with whom he was in a relationship for more than a decade. Any coercion or violence associated with the couple’s sexual relationship could be critical evidence in the government’s case.
While on the stand in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday, Phillip, 41, testified that he first met the couple around 2012 or 2013. He was managing a revue show with male strippers, and his boss asked him to take a shift as a dancer for a bachelorette party at Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan.
When he arrived, there was no bachelorette party. Ms. Ventura answered the door wearing a red wig and sunglasses, he said. “She basically said it was her birthday and that her husband wanted to do something special for her, and so she asked me if I would mind rubbing baby oil on her and giving her a massage,” Mr. Phillip testified.
Mr. Phillip said that he ended up having sex with Ms. Ventura while Mr. Combs watched, wearing a bandanna over his face and a baseball cap.
That arrangement was repeated several more times, he said. The meetings involved Mr. Combs directing them about how to have sex, and a couple of times he recorded on a cellphone or camcorder. The encounters could last as long as 10 hours, though Mr. Phillip testified that he often spent much of the time alone waiting for them.
There were two instances in which Mr. Phillip recalled witnessing or hearing Mr. Combs abusing Ms. Ventura.
The first time, Mr. Combs called out from another room for Ms. Ventura to come to him, but she did not go immediately. Then, Mr. Phillip testified, Mr. Combs emerged and a liquor bottle flew past Ms. Ventura and hit the wall.
“He grabbed her by her hair, and started dragging her by her hair into her bedroom,” Mr. Phillip recalled.
Ms. Ventura was yelling “I’m sorry,” he recalled, and Mr. Combs said something to the effect of: “‘Bitch, when I tell you to come here, you come now, not later.’”
“Cassie was visibly very upset, did not look like she wanted to continue doing anything,” Mr. Phillip testified. “But Mr. Combs asked, ‘Are y’all ready to continue now?’”
The second time he was present for violence, the trio was in a hotel suite in Manhattan. Mr. Phillip said he heard Ms. Ventura yelling “I’m sorry” from another room. He said it sounded like she was being “slapped.”
“Cassie came running into the living room and she literally jumped into my lap and she was shaking,” he testified, “literally, like her whole entire body was shaking.”
Asked by the prosecution why he did not go to the police, Mr. Phillip said he had felt threatened after Mr. Combs had taken a picture of his driver’s license.
In the defense’s opening statement on Monday, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, Teny Geragos, acknowledged that Mr. Combs was responsible for domestic violence and assault, but she argued that it did not make him guilty of racketeering or sex trafficking. She said the sex at the center of the case was all between consenting adults.
