The second day of the Sean Combs trial ended in the middle of testimony from Casandra Ventura, his longtime on-and-off girlfriend and the prosecution’s star witness, as she described his brutal assault of her in the hallway of a hotel in Los Angeles in 2016.
Footage of the beating, caught on hotel surveillance cameras, has already been widely viewed by the public after CNN published the footage last year. But the testimony in Federal District Court in Manhattan, which Ms. Ventura will continue on Wednesday, is the first time she has given a detailed account of the events that day.
In early March 2016, she testified on Tuesday, she was preparing for her first big movie premiere — a romantic comedy called “The Perfect Match” in which she had a starring role. A couple of days before the premiere, she said, Mr. Combs asked her to participate in a freak-off, a drug-fueled sex marathon involving male escorts that she said had grown to define their relationship.
Ms. Ventura testified that freak-offs could last for several days and would require periods of recovery from drugs and sleep deprivation. She said she was worried about how participating in a freak-off would affect the movie premiere but agreed anyway.
“If I pleased him with a freak-off, then my premiere would run smoothly,” she testified. “That’s how I looked at it.”
She texted Mr. Combs: “I don’t want you thinking I don’t want to.”
At the InterContinental Century City hotel in Los Angeles, the couple was in between sessions of a freak-off involving an escort when Mr. Combs hit her in the face, Ms. Ventura testified. “I’m not sure what happened, but I got hit by Sean and I had a black eye,” Ms. Ventura said on the witness stand. “And at that point, all I could think about was getting out of there safely.”
When Mr. Combs was distracted, she testified, she grabbed her belongings and left the hotel room barefoot and reached the sixth-floor elevator bank.
“Then the next thing I knew, I was just thrown to the ground,” Ms. Ventura said.
The jury then watched the footage of Mr. Combs, who was wearing a towel around his waist, grabbing Ms. Ventura by the back of the hoodie she was wearing and throwing her to the floor.
“How many times had Sean thrown you to the ground like that before?,” asked Emily A. Johnson, the prosecutor who was questioning Ms. Ventura.
“Too many to count,” she replied. “I don’t know.”
Her voice measured and matter-of-fact, Ms. Ventura walked the courtroom through more of the footage, describing how Mr. Combs started to drag her around the corner of the hotel hallway and then took her purse and overnight bag back to their hotel room.
To convict Mr. Combs of sex-trafficking Ms. Ventura, the jury needs to find that he used force, fraud or coercion to secure her participation in freak-offs. The government is using the footage of the assault to show the jury that there was violence in the context of that March 2016 freak-off.
Mr. Combs’s lawyers have previously said that the assault was precipitated by Ms. Ventura’s discovering evidence of infidelity on Mr. Combs’s phone. They said she hit him in the head while he was sleeping and then left with a bag of his clothes.
In the defense’s opening statement this week, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, Teny Geragos, asked jurors to pay close attention to a part of the footage in which Mr. Combs approaches Ms. Ventura and appears to take a phone from her.
“He wanted this phone and he got it,” Ms. Geragos said.
When Ms. Ventura is cross-examined by a lawyer for Mr. Combs — which could happen as early as Wednesday — the defense will most likely press her on the motivation for the assault: Was he dragging her back to the hotel room to continue the freak-off, or did his behavior amount to a violent outburst over a missing phone?
“What Combs did to Cassie on this videotape is indefensible — it is horrible, it’s dehumanizing, it’s violent, it’s virtually every bad word you can think of,” Ms. Geragos said in her opening statement. “And while it is dehumanizing and violent and terrible, the second most important thing is that it is not evidence of sex trafficking. It is evidence of domestic violence.”
