Online Reporter
NEW YORK. —“Can y’all come straighten it up over here? It’s not looking luxurious,” Sean “Diddy” Combs says in a voice note to his personal assistants as R&B music mellows in the background.
Hours before, a so-called “freak-off” — a drug-fuelled orgy also known as a “Wild King Night” — had been in full swing.
Now, staff were being called in to clean up.
“PD said he’s going to need emergency clean up at hotel,” his chief of staff texts after another of these events.
“Bring him stain remover (for a chair and couch) and black trash bags. And baking soda too, he said.”
The BBC has seen messages and recordings from former staff in Combs’ household.
The staff members have also given detailed accounts of what it was like to work on the multi-millionaire music mogul’s glamorous yacht rentals and inside his sprawling estates across the US — in the Hamptons, Beverly Hills and on Star Island in Miami.
Their experiences span the past five to 10 years, a period that was under scrutiny during Combs’ criminal trial in New York.
At the trial’s conclusion on Wednesday, the 55-year-old was cleared of the most serious charges — racketeering, and two counts of sex trafficking related to ex-partner Casandra Ventura and another woman referred to as “Jane”.
But jurors found he was guilty of two other counts related to the transportation to engage in prostitution of both women. He will be sentenced at a later date.
We have been shown material which paints a picture of a “scary” and unpredictable boss, who would administer shocking “loyalty tests”, and whose demands grew more and more extreme.
Staff have described how his sometimes-days-long “freak-offs” were held at locations around the world, with the rapper expecting staff to prepare a bag containing “baby oil, lubricant and red lights” — to create the red-tinted ambience Combs preferred—alongside class-A drugs wherever he travelled.
‘Wild King Nights’
Inside his waterfront Miami mansion, a US$48m compound located on an exclusive man-made island, we have been told that Combs kept tight control of his inner circle.
“I’m not about to be transparent with y’all,” a groggy Combs warns staff one day in a rambling voice note posted in an employee WhatsApp group in 2020.
“There’s some dark places y’all (EXPLETIVE) don’t want to go. Stay where you’re at.”
Staff say he was intense, demanding and volatile, with some attributing his unpredictability to a lifestyle of drug-fuelled parties.
The turnover of staff was high and Combs had more than 20 different house managers join and leave in just two years across his properties, one former estates manager told us.
Phil Pines, 40, who worked for Combs as a senior executive assistant from 2019-2021, has told the BBC the mogul didn’t say a word to him when he first started his job.
“It was like an initiation,” he explains. “We didn’t speak to each other for 30 days.”
Another recent assistant, Ethan (not his real name), recalls: “He was a very ill man with different behaviours, sometimes very aggressive, sometimes very sweet.”
We have changed Ethan’s name because, like many former staff members, he still works in the high-net-worth hospitality industry and fears speaking out about Combs will hurt his career.
Ethan shows us a small scar on his forehead. He says this was the result of Combs smashing a glass against a wall in a fit of rage, and the shards cutting Ethan’s face.
Phil Pines and Ethan were part of Combs’ small group of trusted assistants and say he often played mind games with staff.
Ethan recalls one of Combs’ loyalty tests —when the star took off one of his rings and threw it into the Atlantic Ocean.
He then turned to Ethan and told him he had to go into the water to get it.
They were at a formal event and Ethan, like his boss, was wearing a smart suit. He says this didn’t stop him jumping in right away to rescue it.
In another incident, Pines says Combs called him to his residence after midnight, just so he could fetch the TV remote from under the bed he was in with a female guest.
“See? He is loyal and now he can go back home,” he recalls Combs telling her.
Pines says he felt like an animal.
But the Wild King Nights—as the rapper’s chief of staff, Kristina Khorram, referred to them —revealed an even darker side to working for Combs.
“I was asked to set up a laundry list of items for him,” says Pines. “And I thought to myself, why didn’t anybody explain this to me before?”
In one exchange seen by the BBC, Khorram texted him to warn a bag needs to be prepared for a Wild King Night in two hours.
In another, she asked for a “drop off” of seven bottles of baby oil and seven bottles of Astroglide lubricant alongside iced vanilla lattes.
“Rounding up a shelf of baby oil and Astroglide at a store is very, very humiliating. I would always pretend like I was on the phone,” Pines tells us.
In Combs’ trial the prosecution presented evidence of supplies they said were procured for “freak-offs”. A police raid on Combs’ Los Angeles mansion found drugs and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil.
From three months into his role, Pines began having concerns about the frequency of these requests.
“It became daily, sometimes twice a day, every day, and every week.”
Pines says there was a constant stream of young women who frequented Combs’ homes —apparently for sex. Young men were also called to the parties, says Ethan.
Some of these young people would appear to be friends of the star’s sons, Pines tells us, with some of the women later seen “hanging” with Combs.
Pines says he also had concerns that some of these guests —who looked like they were in their early 20s —were “too young” and “impressionable” for his then 50-year-old boss.
“I would see some women feel uncomfortable or at least look like they’d had a wild night,” says Pines.
A woman with an IV drip would usually visit the next day, he says, to help guests recover after sometimes “partying” for 24 hours non-stop without food.
Pines recalls one young guest uttering to him in distress: “I’ve never done anything like that before.”
He was instructed to drive her home from Combs’ Miami residence: “She was kind of shaking and shivering, like she was coming down off the drugs.”
The drug-fuelled nature of these nights has repeatedly been brought up during Combs’ trial. Casandra Ventura, his ex-partner of more than a decade, testified that she endured years of coerced sex with male escorts under the threat of beatings and blackmail, while Combs filmed the encounters.
She said these events would sometimes go on for days and require her to take countless drugs to stay awake.
Another woman, who dated Combs on-and-off from 2021 until his arrest last September, gave evidence that she felt pressured to fulfil his desires partly because he was paying her rent, and said the encounters left her feeling “disgusted” and in physical pain.
In his defence at trial, Combs’ lawyer said he admitted to domestic violence, but argued that all the sexual encounters were consensual, and that Combs had a “swingers lifestyle”. — BBC
