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Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura returns to the witness stand Thursday in Sean “Diddy” Combs’s Manhattan sex-trafficking case for cross-examination, following two days of direct testimony where she described a decade of harrowing abuse — including an alleged rape in 2018 after breaking up with him.

Cassie said she “didn’t want to be alive anymore at that point” of early 2023, before she came out publicly with allegations against the rapper. “I was actually shooting a music video with another artist and I just kept having, like, these horrible flashbacks,” she said on day two on the stand.

“After the video shoot, I went home and it was, like, late, super, super late, and my kids were asleep. My husband was there. And I just remember telling him, like, ‘You can do this without me. Like, you don’t need me here anymore,’” Cassie told jurors on direct, breaking into tears. “I couldn’t take the pain that I was in anymore, and so I just tried to walk out the front door into traffic, and my husband would not let me.”

Cassie alleged that Diddy coerced her into “hundreds” of “Freak Offs” — drug-fueled encounters where he coerced her into having sex with male escorts while he watched and masturbated — during their time together. She said that Diddy was able to control her with frequent beatings and “blackmail” threats that he would release video recordings of these events. The days-long “Freak Offs” laid waste to her body and mind.

“I had a lot of stomach issues and like gastrointestinal issues from taking drugs. I also would get frequent UTIs, which are, if you’ve had one, you know how painful that is,” Cassie testified. “When we were having frequent Freak Offs, it was — sometimes they were back to back. Sometimes I couldn’t get rid of it and I was actually doing the Freak Off with an infection.” The infections “got to the point where Cipro didn’t work anymore.”
The near-constant use of psychedelic stimulants, including MDMA and ecstasy, pushed her into a cycle of narcotic dependence. “I had an ongoing, off-and-on addiction with opiates. So I would take the opiates to come down from the ecstasy and MDMA from, like, turned up [partying],” she said. “Opiates ma[de] me feel numb, which is why I rel[ied] on them so heavily.”

“I didn’t want to feel what was actually going on in my mind, in my real life, in real time. It was just an escape for me.”

Coordinating and participating in Freak Offs at Diddy’s direction — some of which spanned four days — Cassie’s health continued to decline. “I was definitely going through a period of, like, these episodes that I later figured out were, like, PTSD episodes. I would black out,” she alleged. “Sean was concerned that I was having seizures. Um, sleep walking quite a bit. My body was — in my mind, my body was telling me that I needed to just chill out.” While Cassie was not having seizures, the fear of violence loomed heavily over her. Prosecutors showed a photo of the door at her apartment in 2018 — showing that she had placed a large kitchen knife in the handle.

“I was getting a lot of unannounced visits from Sean where he was angry, and trying to kill two birds with one stone, to lock it and have a weapon,” she said.

She alleged that Diddy raped her at this same apartment later that year after the two had dinner and a “kind of a closure conversation.”

Cassie said she felt that she and Diddy had already broken up. She was seeing now-husband Alex Fine, who has been at court during her testimony in support.

As Cassie’s direct testimony neared its end, Diddy’s once-upbeat courtroom demeanor shifted. Diddy, who greets family and supporters with gestures such as tapping his mouth in a kiss, did not motion to his sons while entering court after the lunch break. Diddy’s daughters, who have been sitting through Diddy’s trial, including day one of Cassie’s testimony, did not appear in the courtroom for day two.

 All eyes are on Diddy’s defense.