December 7, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Alexandria Stapleton
Culture Representation: The four-episode documentary series “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” features a predominantly African American group of people (with a few white people) who discuss their connections to disgraced entertainment mogul Sean Combs, who was sentenced to 50 months in prison in 2025, for transporting people across state lines for prostitution, and who has been hit with numerous civil lawsuits accusing him of various sex-related crimes and other law violations.
Culture Clash: Combs, who has a long history of legal conflicts and getting into trouble, has denied almost all the accusations against him, while numerous people have come forward to say that the accusations are true.
Culture Audience: “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of hip-hop culture and are interested in true crime documentaries about celebrities who’ve had scandalous lives.
“Sean Combs: The Reckoning” is the last of several documentaries released in 2025 that take an extensive look into the life and scandals of disgraced entertainment mogul Sean Combs. This four-episode docuseries mostly rehashes information but is notable for some exclusive footage, including Sean Combs filmed days before his 2024 arrest, as well as the first documentary interview with Aubrey O’Day about her accusations of his sexual misconduct. O’Day, who is a former member of Danity Kane (an all-female pop singing group that used to be signed to Combs’ Bad Boy Records) did not testify in Combs’ jury trial that took place between May and July 2025.
Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Entertainment and other companies, was found guilty in the trial of the felony of transporting people across state lines for prostitution, but he was acquitted of the more serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. In October 2025, Combs was sentenced to 50 months in prison and fined $500,000. In the many civil lawsuits against him, Combs has been accused of various sex crimes, allegedly taking place from the 1990s to the 2020s. Several of the accusers say that Combs drugged them without their consent. Combs has denied almost all the accusations in these lawsuits. These facts are repeated in each episode of the documentary. Combs, his representatives, and his family members did not comment or participate in the documentary.
Combs was born in New York City on November 4, 1969. In addition to having financially successful businesses in the entertainment industry, Combs has been a mogul in fashion and liquor, as well as a recording artist, a producer and occasional actor. He became one of the first hip-hop moguls to have a net worth valued at over $1 billion, but his net worth and reputation have significantly declined since his sex scandals landed him in prison. Throughout his career, Combs has had several stage names or nicknames, including Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, Diddy and Love.
Alexandra “Alex” Stapleton directed “Sean Combs: The Reckoning.” However, most people who’ve heard about this documentary series will also know that it’s executive produced by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, a rapper/actor/producer who has had a long-running feud with Combs. Jackson’s G-Unit Films and Television production company was one of the main financial backers of the documentary. Not surprisingly, Combs’ atttorneys have blasted this documentary as a biased “hit piece” funded by Jackson, who has many reasons to hold a grudge against Combs.
What the documentary doesn’t disclose, which it should have disclosed for the sake of transparency, is that Jackson is one of a long list of men who has a former girlfriend who ended up dating Combs. Daphne Joy (also known as Daphne Narvaez), who is mostly known for being an Instagram model, dated Jackson from 2011 to 2012 and is the mother of Jackson’s son Sire, who was born in 2012. She was also reportedly a witness (with the alias Jane Doe), who testified for the prosecution in Combs’ trial and claimed that she endured several types of abuse during her relationship with Combs, which lasted from 2000 to 2024.
Out of necessity, “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” repeats Combs’ biographical information that has been in several other news reports and documentaries about him since his sex scandals got him arrested in 2024. These documentaries include Investigation Discovery’s “The Fall of Diddy” and Peacock’s “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” which were both released in 2025, before Combs went on trial. “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” is the most comprehensive of the documentaries about him released in 2025 because, unlike the previous documentaries, “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” has information about the outcome of the trial and includes interviews with two of the trial’s jurors, whose names are not revealed.
Throughout “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” there is September 2024 footage that Combs commissioned for a personal documentary. In this footage, which was filmed in the days before his 2024 arrest, he is seen greeting fans on the streets of New York City, having phone conversations with his attorney Marc Agnifilo, and living out of the Park Hyatt Hotel in New York City’s Manhattan borough. He was arrested at this hotel on September 16, 2024. The documentary includes blurry video surveillance footage (without audio) of this arrest.
Episode 1, titled “Love vs. Pain,” chronicles his life through the mid-1990s. Episode 2, titled “What Goes Down Must Come Up,” dredges up intense speculation that Sean was involved in and possibly masterminded the drive-by-shooting murders of rappers Tupac Shakur (who was killed Las Vegas in September 1996) and the Notorious B.I.G. (who was killed in Los Angeles in March 1997). Episode 3, titled “Official Girl,” takes a look at Combs’ love life and his pattern of pursuing the girlfriends of his music rivals, before and after he became a superstar in entertainment. Episode 4, titled “Blink Again,” details many of the scandals that Combs has had in the 21st century so far, including some that received testimony in his 2025 trial.
“Sean Combs: The Reckoning” includes widely reported details about his early life. His father Melvin Combs was a drug dealer/police informant who was murdered (shot to death) at age 33, when Sean was 2 years old. The murder remains unsolved. Sean’s widowed mother Janice Combs (who worked as a model, a nightclub server and a teacher assistant) then moved to suburban Mount Vernon, New York. Sean has a younger sister named Keisha, who is never mentioned in the documentary. Sean was bullied as a child. But from an early age, Janice taught him to fight back even harder against his bullies and has remained a major influence in his life.
According to Sean’s childhood friend Tim Patterson, who worked as an A&R representative for Uptown Records in the 1990s, Sean eventually became a bully himself and got worse when Sean got more fame and more money. Patterson, who is interviewed in “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” was also interviewed in “The Fall of Diddy” and “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy” and doesn’t really have anything new to say. Patterson repeats his stories about Janice hanging out with shady people whom Sean considered role models. A pimp named Alpo Martinez is mentioned in the documentary as someone whom a young Sean wanted to imitate.
The well-known details are chronicled about Sean dropping out of Howard University to pursue his dream of becoming rich and famous in the music industry. He started as a dancer in music videos and strived to work at Uptown Records, a New York City-based company founded by Andre Harrell. Sean relentelessly hounded Andre Harrell to hire him. In 1991, Harrell not only hired Sean but he also became a mentor to Sean, who lived with Harrell during Sean’s first year at Uptown. (Harrell died of heart failure in 2020, at the age of 59.)
Sean quickly rose through the ranks at Uptown, going from intern to eventually becoming vice president of A&R (artists and repertoire), a position that involves signing artists to contracts, finding songs and producers for artists, and being involved in crafting the images of artists. When he was with Uptown Records, Sean worked with artists such as Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, Al B. Sure!, and Heavy D & the Boyz. But he had clashes with Harrell over egos, creative direction for artists and financial spending. Harrell also refused Sean’s requests to become a solo recording artist at Uptown.
Sean was fired from Uptown in 1993. Shortly thereafter, he founded Bad Boy Records (which grew into Bad Boy Entertainment), whose artists included the Notorious B.I.G. (also known as Biggie Smalls), Craig Mack, Faith Evans, Total, 112, Mase and Danity Kane. Sean also became a recording artist for the label, using various stage names. In 1998, he launched his fashion label Sean John, which was an instant hit. In the 2000s, he became an actor, a TV producer/TV personality (most notably with MTV’s “Making the Band,” a reality show series that formed Danity Kane and other music groups), and a liquor mogul through a deal with Ciroc.
“Sean Combs: The Reckoning” doesn’t reveal anything new about Sean’s other scandals before the one that landed him in prison. These scandals include Sean being the chief promoter of an oversold 1991 charity fundraiser basketball game at the City College of New York gymnasium, where nine people (ranging in ages from 17 to 28) died in a stampede, which could have been prevented if the exit doors had not been locked. Sean made a public apology and was not arrested. He made financial settlements with the families of the stampede victims who died.
Also included are his legal problems for two seperate violent incidents that happened in New York City in 1999: his May 1999 arrest for beating up music executive Steve Stoute and his December 1999 arrest on weapons charges for a shootout that occurred at Club New York. Sean reportedly assaulted Stoute (who at the time was the manager of rapper Nas) in Stoute’s office because Sean reportedly disliked how Sean looked in Nas’ “Hate Me Now” music video. Sean pleaded guilty to harassment and was sentenced to one day of anger management. Stoute later sued Sean over this assault. The lawsuit was settled out of court.
In December 1999, Sean and his protégé Jamal Barrow (also known as rapper Shyne) were arrested with singer/actress Jennifer Lopez (who was dating Sean at the time) over a shooting incident that happened when an argument broke out between Sean and some other people at Club New York. The shooting injured three innocent bystanders, one of whom was Natania Reuben, who testified that Sean was the one who shot her in the face. He denied all accusations.
Lopez was not charged in the incident, but Barrow and Sean went on trial in 2001, for various weapons-related crimes in this Club New York shooting. Sean was acquitted of all the charges, while Barrow was found guilty of eight of the 10 charges and served almost nine years in prison. In the 2024 documentary “The Honorable Shyne,” Barrow (who changed his first name to Moses after he converted to Judaism) tells his own story about this life-changing scandal.
Sean has denied all accusations against him except for the one that was in a hotel security video that was first televised by CNN in May 2024. In the video, which was recorded at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in March 2016, Sean is seen in a hotel floor hallway kicking and dragging singer Cassie Ventura, who was his girlfriend at the time, after she tried to get on an elevator. Ventura is in a fetal position during this attack, and she doesn’t fight back.
The assault matches one of several accusations of abuse that Ventura described in her November 2023 lawsuit against Sean. Her lawsuit—which accused him of sexual abuse, sex trafficking and other physical abuse—was settled one day after it was filed. She was his on-again/off-again girlfriend from 2007 to 2018. Ventura (who went by the one-name stage moniker Cassie) was also signed to Bad Boy Records. Ventura testified in Sean’s 2025 trial. During her testimony, it was revealed that she received a $20 million settlement in her lawsuit against him.
A few days after CNN televised the assault video, Sean posted a now-deleted Instagram video in which he said he took “full responsibility” for the attack on Ventura and said that this assault happened when he was at “rock bottom” in his life. Sean also mentioned that he had gone to therapy and rehab, but he didn’t specify the reasons and how long he received treatment.
Unlike other documentaries about Sean,” Sean Combs: The Reckoning” doesn’t have interviews with attorneys or journalists. Instead, most of the interviews are with several of Sean’s former employees and former colleagues. Almost all of them describe him as a charismatic manipulator who is very abusive and controlling.
Some of these ex-associates walked away immediately after they witnessed or experienced abuse. Others stayed much longer—several years, in many cases. The ones who stayed the longest give the same reasons why people will tolerate criminal activity from an abuser who is rich and famous: They want some of the celebrity’s fame and fortune for themselves too. Some say they stayed out of fear and misguided loyalty. But what it really comes down to is they didn’t want to lose any of the perks or career advancements they thought they could get from being associated with Sean Combs.
In addition to O’Day and Patterson, former colleagues interviewed in “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” include Kirk Burrowes, who co-founded Bad Boy Records; Capricorn Clark, a former Sean Jean vice president of marketing who started as Sean’s personal assistant; Joi Dickerson-Neal, who used to be a music video promotion employee at Uptown Records; Sean’s former bodyguard Roger Bonds; rapper Erick Sermon; music producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones; former Uptown Records artist Al B. Sure!; and former Bad Boy executive Conrad Dimanche. Also interviewed are former Bad Boy Records artists Mark Curry; Kalenna Harper (who was in the group Diddy – Dirty Money); Brooklyn Babs (who was in the group Da Band); and Robert Curry and Willie Taylor, who were both in the group Day 26.
Roxanne Johnson, ex-wife of Craig Mack, talks about Sean being an unscrupulous businessman who cruelly exploited artists. (To be fair, that describes a lot of people in the music business.) She claims that Sean ripped off Mack, who got very little money from the Bad Boy contract. After a while, “Craig came to be very disenchanted,” she says of his business relationship with Sean. Mack (who released three studio albums) was best known for his 1994 hit song “Flava in Ya Ear,” from his 1994 debut album, “Project: Funk da World,” which was his biggest-selling album and his only album that was released on Bad Boy Records. Mack died of AIDS in 2018, at the age of 47.
Another person interviewed in the documentary is former sex worker Clayton Howard, who says he was a client of Sean’s for eight years. Howard was one of the people who testified for the prosecution in Sean’s 2025 trial. In the documentary, Howard goes into similar graphic details about being hired to have sex with Ventura, as Sean watched while wearing a mask. Eventually, the encounters would turn into Sean and Howard taking turns having sex with Ventura. Howard says that Sean often liked to film these encounters and controlled every aspect of what Howard and Ventura were ordered to do during these sex sessions. Howard also claims that Ventura introduced Howard to the drug ecstasy when he asked how Sean and Ventura were able to have marathon sex sessions for days.
Out of all the people interviewed in the docuseries, Bad Boy Entertainment co-founder Burrowes has the story that drives the narrative the most. Burrowes says in Bad Boy’s early years, Sean gave a 25% ownership stake of Bad Boy to Burrowes, while the remaining 75% ownership was put in Janice Combs’ name, so Bad Boy would be protected from any legal claims against Sean because of what happened with the stampede death tragedy in 1991. But as the Bad Boy company became more successful, Burrowes claims that Sean forced him to sign over Burrowes’ 25% to the Combs family and threatened to beat him with a baseball bat if Burrowes didn’t comply. Burrowes says he was fired in 1997, when he refused Sean’s order to alter the Notorious B.I.G.’s contract without the artist’s knowledge.
Burrowes filed a lawsuit in 2003 to get his share of royalties from the 25% ownership stake that he believes was stolen from him, but the lawsuit was dismissed by a court. In the documentary, Burrowes admits that he was a co-dependent/enabler when he worked with Sean in the 1990s. Burrowes comments that he could be considered an early member of the “Sean Combs cult.” He also says that when he first started working with Sean, Sean did not do drugs and was not a heavy drinker. Burrowes says he believes that Sean’s drug addiction began when Sean injured his hand in an assault and was prescribed Percocet.
Numerous people have come forward in media interviews and in legal documents to claim that Sean frequently abused many drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol. One thing that Sean has not denied is his participation in orgies (which he called “freak-offs” or “wild king nights,” according to witnesses and court documents), but he claims that all of the sex was consensual between adults. His obsession with using baby oil during sex has been widely reported and lampooned. A disturbing allegation that’s repeated in the documentary is that many of his accusers believe that doses of Rohypnol or other odorless and colorless liquid drugs that cause people to lose consciousness and memory were put in baby oil used in these sexual encounters and were administered to people without their consent.
Burrowes says that he saw Sean assault people, including mother Sean’s mother Janice and stylist Misa Hylton, who is the mother of Sean’s eldest child, a son named Justin. Burrowes was the godfather of Justin, who was born on December 30, 1993. Justin has been named in several lawsuits as an accomplice to his father Sean’s sexual assaults. In March 2025, Burrowes filed a lawsuit against Combs, claiming he endured years of abuse and harassment from Combs, including sexual assault and sexual harassment.
It’s a similar tale told by music producer Jones, who is also suing Combs for worker exploitation and various sex-related crimes. Jones, who was interviewed in “The Fall of Diddy” documentary, repeats his stories that are detailed in his lawsuit, such as not being for paid Jones’ work on Sean’s 2023 release “Love Album: Off the Grid.” Jones also claims that while he was working on the album, he lived with Sean and admits they indulged in a lot of drug-fueled partying. Jones says that Sean sexually harassed him and sexually assaulted him during the time he lived and worked with Sean. Jones is one of several accusers who believe that Sean drugged them without their consent on many occasions.
In the documentary, Jones also describes working in a recording studio with Sean and seeing an unidentified man who was unconscious and wounded by a gunshot, after the shooting apparently happened behind closed doors. Police were called by someone who heard the shooting, but before the police arrived, the man was taken away by people who worked for Sean. When the police arrived, Jones says that Sean convinced the police that nothing happened, and he noticed Sean and Sean’s son Justin acting very smug about it afterward. Jones, who admits he did nothing about this crime at the time it happened, never saw the wounded stranger again and doesn’t know if the man lived or died from that gunshot wound.
Dickerson-Neal is another accuser who claims that she believes Sean drugged her without her consent and sexually assaulted her. She also claims that he made a “revenge porn” video that documented this alleged assault. Dickerson-Neal, who is a plaintiiff in a lawsuit against Sean, says that the alleged sexual assault happened in 1991, the year that she found out about the sex video from a mutual friend, who said that Sean was showing the video to many people they knew. Dickerson-Neal says that she confronted Sean about the video and alleged assault, and he denied everything.
In the documentary, Dickerson-Neal gets tearful when she reads a 1992 letter that her mother wrote to Janice Combs about the alleged sex video. In the letter, her mother pleads with Janice Combs to make things right and do what she could to destroy the video. Janice apparently never responded. Dickerson-Neal says she quit working for Uptown after finding out that she was allegedly raped on video and never had a job in the music business again. Dickerson-Neal says she thinks Sean blackballed her from the industry.
Danity Kane was formed in 2005 from a talent search on “Making the Band,” which had Sean as the star and as an executive producer. When Sean was involved in “Making the Band,” every group formed on the show would get a record contract with Bad Boy. Danity Kane was the most commercially successful of these groups and was an instant hit, with songs like “Show Stopper,” “Ride for You” and “Damaged.” But behind the scenes, O’Day says that Sean’s tyrant actions were much worse than what he showed on camera for the TV series.
In the documentary, O’Day (who was the breakout star of Danity Kane) shows text messages that she says Sean sent to her when she was a member of Danity Kane and he was her boss. The messages pressure her to have sex with Sean. O’Day says she repeatedly refused to get sexually involved with him and was fired in an episode of “Making the Band” about six months later in 2008. During the episode, Sean accused O’Day of having a “promiscuous” image that was hurting Danity Kane’s reputation. Wanita Woodgett, whose stage name is D. Woods, was fired from Danity Kane at the same time as O’Day. After Ventura’s lawsuit was settled out of court, Woodgett (who was one of the people interviewed in “The Fall of Diddy”) came forward with stories about Sean verbally abusing Woodgett when Woodgett was a member of Danity Kane.
The most disturbing part of O’Day’s interview in this documentary is when she reads out loud for the first time the affidavit in a lawsuit where a female witness (who is not named on camera) claims that when she was dating a man who worked for Bad Boy Records in 2005, she happened to be in a recording studio where she opened one of the doors and saw Sean and an unidentified man sexually assaulting O’Day at the same time. The witness claims that O’Day was naked from the lower half of her body, and O’Day seemed so heavily drugged to the point where O’Day looked like she didn’t know what was happening.
The unidentified witness said that she was shocked and told her boyfriend at the time what she saw. The boyfriend, who obviously worked for Sean, told her that it was none of their business and that she should leave the matter alone and not tell anyone else. In the documentary, O’Day says she was not a drug user during this time and has no memory of this alleged assault happening. O’Day, who is visibly upset when she reads the witness statement, says: “I don’t know if I was raped. I don’t want to know.”
After Danity Kane disbanded for the first time in 2009, Sean formed the trio Diddy – Dirty Money with Harper and with former Danity Kane member Dawn Richard. Richard is another a plaintiff in one of the many lawsuits accusing Sean of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Harper describes Richard’s relationship with Sean as “weird” and claims that Richard had conversations with Sean and other people that led people to believe that Richard would be a willing participant in whatever sexual things Sean would propose.
Harper does not say in the documentary if she was ever sexually harassed or abused by Sean, but in her documentary interview, Harper comments about Sean when she worked with him: “He became my hero.” She also talks about how Sean pressured her to make a public statement in support of him after Richard filed her lawsuit against him. Harper says she reluctantly gave in to Sean’s pressure to make a public statement praising Sean, but she now says since more facts about him have emerged, her opinion of him has changed, and she no longer has hero worship of him.
Al B. Sure! (whose real name is Albert Joseph Brown) doesn’t have much to add that he didn’t already talk about in the interview that he did for the documentary “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy.” Former model Kim Porter, the mother of three of Sean’s children, was Sure’s live-in girlfriend and the mother of their son Quincy, who was born in 1991. Sean met Porter in 1990 or 1991, when she was a receptionist for Uptown. And even though Porter was in a committed relationship with Sure at the time, Sean pursued her relentlessly until she gave in, and she and Sean became a couple. Combs and Porter had an on-again/off-again relationship from 1994 to 2007.
Sean began treating Quincy as his own son and reportedly adopted him. Quincy has been using the last name Combs for years, although Sure says that Sean never formally adopted Quincy. Sean has three biological kids with Porter: son Christian Combs (born in 1998 and nicknamed King) and twin daughters Jessie and D’Lila Combs (born in 2006). In what has become a familiar story, Christian has been named in some lawsuits as an accomplice to Sean’s sexual assaults and sex trafficking. The defendants in these lawsuits have denied all the allegations.
Sean’s pattern of going after the girlfriends of music rivals also happened with Ventura, who was dating songwriter/producer Ryan Leslie when she met Sean in 2005. She was 19, and Sean was 36. It wasn’t long before Leslie was out of the picture, and Sean had taken over Ventura’s career. There have been several reports, including in this documentary, that Sean and Ventura got sexually involved with each other when he was still in a relationship with Porter. But publicly, Sean and Ventura didn’t admit they were a couple until after Porter’s relationship with Sean had publicly ended in 2007.
In “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” Sure does not mention the allegations that he made in his interview for Peacock’s “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy.” That’s probably because Sean filed a defamation lawsuit against NBCUniversal, the parent company of Peacock, because Sure claimed in “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy” that Sean had something do with the death of Porter and an alleged attempted murder on Sure. Porter died in 2018, at the age of 47. Her official cause of death is pneumonia. At the time that “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” was released in December 2025, the defamation lawsuit (which is seeking $100 million in damages) was pending and will probably be dismissed and/or settled out of court.
Clark (who worked off and on for Sean from 2006 to 2012) repeats her widely reported testimony that she gave in Sean’s trial, where she told a harrowing story of Sean forcing her to drive with him to the Los Angeles home of rapper Kid Cudi (whose real name is Scott Mescudi) in December 2011, because Sean said they were going to murder Kid Cudi. The reason, according to Clark, was Sean got very angry and jealous that Ventura was dating Kid Cudi.
Kid Cudi (who also testified for the prosecution in the trial) wasn’t home at the time. In the documentary, Clark breaks down in tears when she talks about what could have happened if Sean had followed through with this alleged murder plan. She says that her reluctance to go along with the alleged murder plan got her fired. Clark reportedly settled a wrongful termination lawsuit against Sean.
In Sean’s 2025 trial, Kid Cudi testified that his Porsche was damaged by a Molotov cocktail explosion in January 2012. In his testimony, Kid Cudi said that he believes Sean was responsible for this crime, as well as a December 2011 home break-in that occurred when no one was in the house at the time. Nothing was stolen in the break-in, but Kid Cudi tesitfied that items were moved around, and his dog was locked in the bathroom. No one was arrested for the break-in or the car vandalism.
In his 2025 trial testimony, Kid Cudi said that shortly after the Molotov cocktail vandalism of his Porsche, he had a meeting with Sean where Sean denied to Kid Cudi that he was responsible for the vandalism. Kid Cudi, who described Sean as looking like a “Marvel supervillain” during this meeting, testified that he didn’t believe Sean’s denial because a terrified Ventura had called Kid Cudi in December 2011, to tell him that Sean was furious about the short relationship she had with Kid Cudi, who thought that she and Sean had already broken up when Kid Cudi began dating her. “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” does not include this information about Kid Cudi’s testimony.
The murkiest and least-substantiated part of the documentary is in Episode 2, which repeats allegations that Sean was involved in plotting the murders of Shakur and the Notorious BI.G., whose real name was Christopher Wallace. William Leesane, a cousin of Shakur, says in the documentary: “Sean was insanely jealous of Big and [Shakur’s] friendship.” Leesane adds, “I think that now, in my mature mind, I think that Sean had a lot to do with the death of Tupac.”
This episode goes into the history of the East Coast/West Coast hip-hop industry feud in the 1990s. Sean and Bad Boy artists represented the East Coast. Death Row Records founder Suge Knight and Death Row’s artists from California, such as Shakur, Snoop Dogg (then known as Snoop Doggy Dogg) and Dr. Dre, represented the West Coast. Also wrapped up in the feud were the two rival gangs the Crips and the Bloods, with Crips publicly aligned with Death Row’s artists, and the Bloods more associated with Bad Boy’s artists.
The documentary interviews a man named D1, a former member of the Mansfield Crips, who doesn’t have anything new to add to the speculation and theories that have been floating around for decades. One of the theories is that the 1994 attempted murder (by gun shooting) of Shakur at Quad Recording Studios in New York City was set up by Sean, who had invited Shakur to meet up with Sean at this recording studio. The only new information that the documentary has is previously unreleased audio recordings of an interview that former Los Angeles Police Department detective Greg Kading did with Duane “Keefe D” Davis, who goes on trial in 2026 for Shakur’s murder. Kading is interviewed in “Sean Combs: The Reckoning.”
In the audio interview, Davis claims that he heard that Sean had put a hit on Shakur and Knight, for payment of $1 million that was to be given to alleged middle man Eric “Von Zip” Martin, a known drug dealer. Orlando Anderson, a gang member, was the alleged shooter, but Davis said that Martin only got $500,000 (and allegedly kept the money) because only Shakur was killed in the car where Knight was the driver. Anderson died in a gang-related shooting in 1998, at the age of 23. Martin died of cancer in 2012.
The people who believe that Sean ordered the assassination of the Notorious B.I.G. say it’s because the Notorious B.I.G. wanted to leave Bad Boy because of money disputes. Sean has repeatedly and publicly denied over the years that he was involved in any of these murders. There are several documentaries that go into more depth about the murders of the Notorious B.I.G. and Shakur.
One of the most talked-about aspects of “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” is the behind-the-scenes personal footage of Sean less than a week before his September 2024 arrest. Sean’s attorney have since claimed that the footage was stolen, but the documentary producers says that all of this footage was legally obtained. The docuseries actually begins with a clip from this footage, by showing Sean in a hotel room and having a phone conversation with attoney Agnifilo, six days before Sean would be arrested. “I want to fight for my life,” Sean says. “It’s really hard for me to be able to take more hits than I’ve taken.”
Sean is also seen discussing media strategy on how to repair his public image. He scolds Agnifilo for watching CNN and says that Agnifilo should be paying more attention to social media for opinions from potential jurors. He then says about Agnifilo and the other attorneys representing Sean: “Y’all are not working together in the right way. We’re losing.” He orders Afnifilo to have discussions with the other attorneys to come up with the “right solution.”
Outside of these tense conversations with his legal team and other representatives, Sean appears in public and acts like he doesn’t have a care in the world when he is approached by fans (mostly men of various ages), who praise him and asks for photos with him. Keep in mind that these fans are acting this way after the video of Sean brutally assaulting Ventura was big news and was widely seen by the general public. It’s yet another example of how many people will excuse abuse from someone who is rich and famous.
The behind-the scenes footage also shows Sean basking in this type adoration when he shows up unannounced at a diner in Harlem, a New York City neighborhood where the majority of residents are black people. Afterward, inside his car, he says with disgust that he needs to take a long hot shower and disinfect his hands because of all the people whom he had to hug. This footage is shown directly after his former bodyguard Bonds is shown in a documentary interview saying that the real Sean doesn’t like to hang out with black people who are of no use to him. Sean has a few hanger-on friends with him in the footage, including stylist Groovey Lew. Sean’s son Justin is seen briefly with him in some of the hotel room footage.
“Sean Combs: The Reckoning” does not chronicle the trial, which included testimony from Ventura. Instead, the documentary has brief interviews with two former jurors from the trial, identified only by their juror numbers. These two jurors’ comments give insight into why the jurors arrived at the verdict and why the prosecution couldn’t get a conviction on the most serious charges. There were eight men and four women on the jury.
Juror 160 is a woman in her 30s who says that she felt bad for Ventura when she saw the video of Ventura being kicked and attacked by Sean, but the juror says that Sean was not on trial for domestic violence. The prosecution used the hotel surveillance video of Sean assaulting Venture as evidence in the trial, in order to prove that Ventura had been trying to get away from Sean after a “freak-off” session. Juror 75, a man who appears to be in his 50s, is even less sympathetic to Ventura, by making this comment about why she stayed in a relationship with Sean for many years: “You can’t have it both ways.” He also describes Sean and Ventura’s volatile and toxic relationship as two people “in love.”
The jurors were not sequestered and could therefore be manipulated through social media and public opinion that the jurors were forbidden to look at, engage with, or discuss during the trial. Tisa Tells, a social media influencer who covered the trial for her YouTube and TikTok channels, says in the documentary that unidentified representatives for Sean would constantly meet with certain social media influencers in the courthouse cafeteria and other places, in order to enlist their support. Tells says she wasn’t one of those people because as the trial went on, she became more convinced that Combs was guilty and she didn’t want her reporting integrity to be compromised.
One of the basic tenets in marketing is “Perception is reality.” There are people who will never believe that Sean is guilty of the crimes he’s been accused of, while others believe he’s guilty of all the accusations against him. And there are people who fall somewhere in the middle. “Sean Combs: A Reckoning” does what it intends to do: Show, tell, and remind people of the sleaziest aspects of Combs’ life while also pointing out that there are still plenty of people who are willing to excuse all of his misdeeds and crimes because they want to focus on his work that made people happy, or they are just dazzled by his fame. Regardless of what viewers think about Combs, he can’t get away from his criminal record, which now includes the fact that he’s a convicted felon.
Netflix premiered “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” on December 2, 2025.
