Sean Combs’s lawyers cannot dispute that their client brutally assaulted Casandra Ventura, his girlfriend at the time, at the InterContinental hotel in Los Angeles in 2016.
Much of the public has seen the footage of the assault since it was shown last year on CNN. And now it has been shown to the jury that is hearing Mr. Combs’s sex trafficking and racketeering trial in federal court.
Wearing a towel around his waist, Mr. Combs approaches Ms. Ventura as she is trying to leave the hotel. He grabs the back of her sweatshirt and throws her to the ground, kicks her and starts to drag her around the corner of the hallway.
After Ms. Ventura takes the witness stand again on Friday morning for what will likely be her final day of testimony, the defense is expected to focus on the motivation for the attack.
Their goal is to undermine the government’s contention that the assault is evidence that Mr. Combs sex trafficked Ms. Ventura by coercing her into drug-dazed sex marathons at hotels with male prostitutes that could last days.
Based on Ms. Ventura’s account of the events surrounding that day — March 5, 2016 — the couple was at the hotel for one of those sexual encounters, called “freak-offs,” which typically involved alcohol and drugs such as ecstasy.
“In the middle of it, I’m not sure what happened, but I got hit by Sean and I had a black eye,” Ms. Ventura testified during direct testimony. “And at that point, all I could think about was getting out of there safely.”
When Mr. Combs was distracted, Ms. Ventura testified, she tried to leave the hotel with her belongings, which is when Mr. Combs attacked her by the hotel elevators.
In court hearings ahead of the trial, the defense has given a different account of events. They have asserted that the attack was precipitated by Ms. Ventura finding evidence of infidelity on Mr. Combs’s phone, then hitting him in the head while he was sleeping and leaving the room with a bag of his clothes.
During the trial, the defense has alluded to the altercation being a “fight about a phone” but it is not clear whether they will go deeper into Mr. Combs’s version of events.
During the cross-examination of Ms. Ventura on Thursday, the defense focused on the text messages between the couple leading up to the hotel assault.
Anna Estevao, the lawyer leading the cross-examination, highlighted texts from before the attack in which Mr. Combs indicated that he was sick. She suggested that he could have been experiencing withdrawal from opiates — which, Ms. Ventura testified, both of them were addicted to through much of their relationship.
“Drink water and Gatorade and get rest,” Ms. Ventura wrote to Mr. Combs a couple of days before the incident.
Mr. Combs’s lawyers have also highlighted texts between the couple before the hotel stay in an attempt to show that Ms. Ventura was a willing participant in the freak-offs.
“So what you gonna do so I can plan the rest of my night,” Mr. Combs texted her.
“Baby I want to FO so bad,” she replied, using an abbreviation for freak-off. But she also expressed some hesitation, noting that she didn’t want to mess herself up before a movie premiere that was quickly approaching.
“I don’t want you thinking I don’t want to,” she later wrote, before agreeing, “let’s do it.”
The exchange is emblematic of what Ms. Ventura has testified were complicated feelings about freak-offs: deep discomfort surrounding the sexual encounters themselves, but eagerness to please her boyfriend and fear of what he might do if she rejected him.
The jury was also shown a report written by a former hotel security guard, Israel Florez, who testified that he responded to a call about a woman in distress on the sixth floor of the hotel that day.
“Mr. Combs began to offer me a bribe ‘you take care of this I got you lets go to my room,’” the report said.
The report described a later confrontation between Mr. Combs, the guard and a member of the hotel’s staff, which it said ended when Mr. Combs “calmed himself down” and apologized.
“It’s just that I don’t want to lose anything and I can lose it all,” the report quoted Mr. Combs as saying.
The government contends that Combs later bought the surveillance footage of the assault from security for $100,000.
