Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, said that the relentless sexual demands and routine violence she experienced from Sean Combs over the course of their decade-plus relationship left her emotionally devastated and led her to consider suicide. In dramatic testimony on Wednesday, Ms. Ventura spent a full day of Mr. Combs’s federal trial describing physical violence that she said culminated in a rape after she left him in 2018.
Ms. Ventura is widely considered the star witness at the trial, where Mr. Combs is charged with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have vehemently denied that any of his sexual arrangements were not consensual.
After maintaining her composure for most of her two days on the stand, where she had remained largely dispassionate, Ms. Ventura finally broke down while discussing why she entered drug rehab and trauma therapy in 2023. “I was spinning out,” she said. “I didn’t want to be alive anymore at that point.”
Beginning to cry, Ms. Ventura recalled putting their children to bed one night and telling her husband, “You can do this without me. You don’t need me here anymore.” She tried to walk out of the door into traffic, she said, but he stopped her.
It was the emotional peak of a day of testimony that saw Ms. Ventura spend lengthy stretches responding to a prosecutor’s questions about individual instances of physical violence delivered by Mr. Combs. Her testimony on Wednesday afternoon began with her recollection of the first time that he physically abused her in 2007 or 2008. It was early in their relationship, she said, and she had caught him flirting with someone else at dinner. Later, in a car, he hit her on the side of her head, in view of the driver and security guard, sending her flying onto the floor.
“I was just shocked,” she said.
Answering questions about events that did not always follow a linear timeline, Ms. Ventura appeared weary, even resigned at times, as she cataloged her injuries — bruises on her body, a gash on her eyebrow, a busted lip — which were documented in photos that were shown to the jury as evidence.
She testified that there were times she initiated violence against Mr. Combs and fought back against his abuse but, Ms. Ventura said, it did not stop his attacks.
During one night out early in their romance in 2009, Ms. Ventura testified, she punched him in the face after he insulted her. His demeanor changed. “I remember his eyes went black,” she said, and he beat her in a car, stomping on her face with his foot. She said she was then sneaked into a hotel to heal in secrecy.
When she went with some friends to a party in Los Angeles where Prince was to perform — a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” — she was afraid to tell Mr. Combs, she said. According to her account, he appeared at the event and she rushed out, falling into some bushes in out front, and fled to a hotel. He burst into the room, she said, where they fought, and he beat her. “He was throwing luggage at me, just calling me all kinds of names,” she testified.
Ms. Ventura also testified about Mr. Combs’s reaction when he learned — by looking through her phone during a freak-off — that she had begun dating the rapper Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi. Mr. Combs, furious, told her he was going to hurt both of them, and that Mescudi’s car would be “blown up.”
Later, the three had a meeting to “discuss the relationship that we were no longer in.” According to Ms. Ventura, Mr. Mescudi said, “‘What about my vehicle?’ And Sean said, ‘What vehicle?’” Ms. Ventura recounted. “And that was the end of the meeting.”
Mr. Combs was also violent with other people, Ms. Ventura said. She testified that she witnessed him assaulting employees and assistants, punching one man in the head and dragging another, a woman — known at trial as Mia, or Victim-4 — out of bed once during a vacation.
During the afternoon testimony, she repeatedly mentioned wanting to hide the abuse from her mother. After a fight led to her recuperating at a hotel, Ms. Ventura said, her mother sent her a blind item from a gossip publication that Ms. Ventura testified had reported the incident accurately. Her mother asked if it was her, and she denied that it was.
A couple of years later, in late 2011, she wrote an email to her mother saying that Mr. Combs had threatened to release two sexually explicit tapes of her around Christmas, and that he would arrange to have someone “hurt” her and Mr. Mescudi, while Mr. Combs was out of the country.
According to her testimony, Ms. Ventura was visiting her mother’s house in Connecticut at Christmas and showed her the bruises on her backside and thigh that were the result of Mr. Combs’s abuse. She said she lied and told her mother that it had been the first time he physically hurt her.
She wasn’t ready to tell her mother about the freak-offs yet.
“You can’t justify it to anyone,” she said. “Especially not your mom.”
Near the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura described a sort of farewell dinner in 2018 for her and Mr. Combs, seeking closure at the end of their relationship. She said that after a pleasant night, he raped her in her home. “I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she said.
After suing Mr. Combs in 2023, Ms. Ventura reached a $20 million settlement in one day, but that did not prevent her from becoming the central witness in the criminal case against him.
As the last hour of her testimony reached a tearful climax at its conclusion on Wednesday, Ms. Ventura addressed why she was choosing to testify. “What’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong,” Ms. Ventura said on the stand. “I’m here to do the right thing.”
When Ms. Ventura finished her direct testimony, Mr. Combs turned to his family members in the spectators’s gallery. He mouthed to them, “I’m OK.”
Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.
