February 9, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Yoruba Richen, Emma Schwartz and Scott Preston
Culture Representation: The five-episode documentary series “The Fall of Diddy” features a predominantly African American group of people (with some white people, Latin people and Asians) talking about the rise and fall of disgraced mogul/entertainer Sean Combs.
Culture Clash: Several of the people who are interviewed claim that Combs abuses his fame and power to commit crimes that allegedly include assaults, various sex crimes, racketeering and attempted murder.
Culture Audience: “The Fall of Diddy” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about celebrities and can tolerate graphic details in sex scandals.
“The Fall of Diddy” features interviews with several people (including some of his rape accusers) talking about their experiences with Sean Combs. This docuseries has a good variety of perspectives, but there’s a lack of accountability for enablers. Many of the interviewees previously told their stories in documentaries and news reports. A few are giving televised interviews about their experiences for the first time.
Directed by Yoruba Richen, Emma Schwartz and Scott Preston (who gets directorial credit on one of the episodes), “The Fall of Diddy” is produced by Maxine Productions and Rolling Stone Films. Maxine Productions is also known for the controversial docuseries “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” which premiered on Investigation Discovery in 2024. Rolling Stone Films (a company owned by Penske Media Corporation) has previously produced short documentary films in 2015 starring the Black Keys, Sheryl Crow and Ringo Starr. “The Fall of Diddy” is Rolling Stone Films’ first comprehensive investigative documentary series.
Combs was born in New York City, on November 4, 1969. He is a mogul in entertainment, fashion and alcoholic beverages. He’s best known as the founder of Bad Boy Entertainment, which launched in 1993 and includes the successful Bad Boy Records, whose specialty is R&B, hip-hop and pop. Some of the hit artists who have been signed to Bad Boy included the Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans and Danity Kane. Combs is also a music artist, producer and occasional actor. His nicknames over the years have been Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, Diddy and Love.
In September 2024, Combs was arrested on several federal charges of sex crimes and racketeering. Since his arrest, he has been held in a New York City jail without bail. Combs also has several civil lawsuits from many people who are accusing him of various sex crimes (including rape) and other physical abuse against women, men and children. In many of the lawsuits, his accusers say that they were drugged without their consent.
Combs has denied all of these accusations 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, Combs 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 Combs. Her lawsuit—which accused him of sexual abuse, sex trafficking and other physical abuse—was settled one day after it was filed. Ventura 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.
A few days after CNN televised the assault video, Combs posted a now-deleted Instagram video in which he said he took “full responsibility” for the attack on Cassie and said that this assault happened when was at “rock bottom” in his life. Combs also mentioned that he had gone to therapy and rehab, but he didn’t specify the reasons and how long he received treatment.
Combs and his representatives declined to be interviewed for “The Fall of Diddy,” which has repeated written statements from Combs’ legal counsel saying that Combs denies all accusations against him and he is looking forward to defending himself in court. All of this background information and more details about Combs’ scandals are included in “The Fall of Diddy,” which has the first four episodes giving a mostly chronological timeline of Combs’ life. Episode 1 is titled “The Making of a Mogul.” Episode 2 is titled “Empire Under Fire.” Episode 3 is titled “Untouchable.” Episode 4 is titled “The Fall.”
Episode 5 is titled “The Assistant,” and it was a sudden addition to the series, which was originally announced as a four-episode series. Unlike the other episodes, Episode 5 is half of the run time of each previous episode. Episode 5 only features journalist Mara S. Campo interviewing Phil Pines, who was Combs’ senior executive assistant from 2019 to 2021.
Campo is interviewed for other episodes of the series because she used to work for Revolt, the TV network founded by Combs in 2013. Combs stepped down from Revolt in 2023, after he was accused by more people of sex crimes. Campo says she was happy working at Revolt, and she is one of the few people interviewed in the documentary who says she never had a personal negative experience with Combs. Rev. Conrad Tiller, former minister of hip-hop for the Nation of Islam, is also interviewed and doesn’t have anything negative to say about Combs.
“The Fall of Diddy” will inevitably get compared to other documentaries about Combs, including Peacock’s documentary film “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” which premiered on January 14, 2025. “The Fall of Diddy” is the better documentary—and not just because “The Fall of Diddy” has the advantage of being a series that could have more footage than a feature-length film. Overall, the quality of interviews and the editing for “The Fall of Diddy” are superior to “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy.”
“The Fall of Diddy” has the expected chronicle of Combs’ life, from his childhood to his success as one of the richest hip-hop moguls in the world before his privileged life came crashing down on him with these scandals and legal problems. The docuseries dutifully covers the basic well-known facts of his past. Sean Combs’ 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 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, says cultural critic/journalist Touré, who has covered Sean’s career since the 1990s.
Tim Patterson, a Sean Combs childhood friend who was also interviewed in “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” says in “The Fall of Diddy” that Janice has always been a huge influence on Sean. Patterson describes Janice as being frequently abusive to Sean and says he personally witnessed Janice hitting Sean very hard. Gordon Chambers, a former Bad Boy Records songwriter, describes Janice as an ambitious hustler. Chambers says, “I think of her as the queen of that energy.” Janice Combs is not interviewed in the documentary and so far has not publicly commented on the federal charges against Sean.
Patterson says that Sean became tougher and more ruthless as Sean gained more influence and power. An incident described in the documentary is Sean shoving Christine Hylton, the mother of fashion stylist Misa Hylton, who is the mother of Sean’s eldest child Justin. (Justin was born in 1993.) Misa Hylton and Christine Hylton are not interviewed in the documentary and have not commented on this allegation. No one in Sean’s family is interviewed for this documentary either.
One thing that “The Fall of Diddy” has that no other documentary has is an interview with an unidentified woman, who says she witnessed Sean assault his then-girlfriend in 1988, when they were all students at Howard University. Sean attended Howard from 1987 to 1989, when he dropped out to pursue a career in the music business. In June 2024, Howard University announced it was severing all of its associations with Sean, including rescinding the honorary degree that the university awarded to Sean in 2014, and canceling the scholarship that was in his name.
The Howard University witness, whose face is obscured to protect her identity, says that she and her then-roommate (whom she did not name) were in their dorm room when they heard Sean outside shouting for his girlfriend, who lived in the same building, to come outside to talk to him. According to the anonymous witness, the girlfriend (whose name is also not mentioned) went outside, and the witness and her roommate could see from a window that Sean began beating the woman with a belt.
The witness says that while she and the roommate watched from their dorm window, they yelled at Sean to stop the attack, but he didn’t listen to them. She said that she and her roommate were too afraid to go outside and confront him. They also did not call for help. The witness chokes up in tears when she says she regrets not doing more to assist the assault victim. She says ruefully, “Nobody actually came to her rescue.”
“The Fall of Diddy” just has that one anonymous interview with the former Howard University student who says she saw Sean assault his girlfriend at the time, whereas “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy” has multiple anonymous interviews. “The Fall of Diddy” also mostly avoids putting vague accusations in the documentary, since the people interviewed are specific about the years and locations where they witnessed or experienced certain incidents.
From the beginning of Sean’s career, he was controversial. He started as an intern at New York City-based Uptown Records (founded by Andre Harrell) in 1990. Sean quickly rose to become an A&R executive at Uptown, where he worked with hit artists such as Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, Al B. Sure!, and Heavy D & the Boyz. Sean was working at Uptown in 1991 when he had his first big scandal.
In 1991, Sean was the chief promoter of an AIDS fundraiser basketball game at the City College of New York gymnasium. The event was oversold, and nine people (ranging in ages from 17 to 28) died in a stampede, which could have been prevented if exit doors had not been locked. The documentary includes archival footage of this tragedy.
Sean was mostly blamed for this mishandled event, he was sued over it, and he later settled out of court with the families of the dead victims. Two of these family members are interviewed in the documentary: Jason Swain (whose 20-year-old brother Dirk died) and Sonny Williams (whose 20-year-old sister Sonya died). Swain and Williams were also interviewed in “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” and they say essentially similar things in both documentaries.
On a side note: Al B. Sure! has had a longtime feud with Sean going back to the early 1990s. That feud is detailed in “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” in which Sure accuses Sean of being part of a conspiracy to kill Sure. Sure also claims in that documentary that former model Kim Porter—who was the mother of one son with Sure and the mother of one son and twin daughters with Sean—was murdered and didn’t die of pneumonia, which was her official cause of death in 2018.
Sean was fired from Uptown Records in 1993, reportedly because of ego clashes with Harrell and financial spending issues. Shortly after his ouster from Uptown, Sean launched Bad Boy. But as we all know, the controversies didn’t stop there.
In the 1990s, Sean was a key player in the feud between East Coast and West Coast hip-hop stars. By the end of the feud, two of its biggest stars were murdered in drive-by shootings: California-based Tupac Shakur in September 1996, and New York-based the Notorious B.I.G. (whose real name was Christopher Wallace) in March 1997. Both murders remain unsolved.
At the height of the East Coast/West Coast feud in the mid-1990s, Bad Boy Records rival Death Row Records, headquartered in Los Angeles, tried to set up East Coast operations called Death Row East. In “The Fall of Diddy” documentary, interviewee Dewitt Gilmore says that Sean Combs tried to run Gilmore over with a car, just because Gilmore was wearing a Death Row East T-shirt that Gilmore had gotten for free.
Gilmore says Combs (whom he did not know personally) was armed with a gun, expressed that he was offended by the T-shirt, and instigated a high-speed chase in Manhattan against Gilmore that Gilmore was certain was intended to kill him. Gilmore says he was lucky enough to escape in this car chase. Gilmore also makes it clear that he did not say or do anything to provoke Sean except wear a T-shirt that he had no idea would set someone off on an alleged rampage against him.
In the documentary interview, Gilmore still seems emotionally shaken up by the alleged incident. Either he’s telling the truth or he’s a very convincing liar. Gilmore directly addresses Sean when he looks at the camera and says: “Dude, you’re a menace to society.” Gilmore adds, “My story is just a piece to the bigger puzzle of his mayhem.”
“The Fall of Diddy” also chronicles Sean’s May 1999 assault of Steve Stoute (who at the time was the manager of rapper Nas) 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.
More trouble came in December 1999, when 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 in New York City’s Manhattan borough. 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. A pattern was emerging of Sean being involved in violent incidents but not getting prison time.
Ventura’s quickly settled lawsuit in November 2023 opened the floodgates to more accusations of Sean committing crimes that were previously not made public. And since Sean has been arrested and jailed without bail, even more people have come forward with similar accusations. These more recent accusations are the main reasons why most people will want to watch “The Fall of Diddy.”
Among those interviewed are people who say that Sean sexually assaulted them. These accusers are music producer Rodney “Lil’ Rod” Jones, who is a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit against Sean, whom he lived and worked with from 2022 to 2023; actress Kat Pasion, who dated Sean off and on from 2013 to 2021, and says their relationship ended after he raped her; and Thalia Graves, who says she was raped by Sean in 2001, and the rape was recorded on video.
Graves believes she was drugged without consent before she was raped. Graves says she met Sean because she was at the time dating a man (whom she does not name in the interview) who was a Bad Boy Records executive. A caption in the documentary says that this man says that Graves tried to bribe him to back up her claims.
In Jones’ lawsuit against Sean, Jones claims that Sean sexually groped Jones, drugged him without consent, and forced Jones to participate in sex acts with sex workers. Jones claims that actor Cuba Gooding Jr. also made sexual advances on him while Jones worked for Sean. Jones also alleges that Sean didn’t pay Jones for Jones’ work on Sean’s 2023 release “Love Album: Off the Grid.”
Pasion says that she remembers a 2019 trip that she and Sean took to the Bahamas. During this vacation, Pasion says she was watching the docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly.” Pasion vividly recalls that Sean noticed she was watching this exposé of R&B singer R. Kelly’s long history of being an accused sexual abuser. Pasion says that Sean then made this comment to her, “There’s a little bit of R. Kelly in all of us.” (In 2021, R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison for sex crimes.)
Several of Sean’s former employees are also interviewed for “The Fall of Diddy.” They include former Bad Boy Records engineer/producer Prince Charles Alexander; Dr. LaJoyce Brookshire, who was Sean’s publicist from 1995 to 1997; Rob Shuter, who was Sean’s publicist from 2003 to 2005; former Bad Boy Records producer Easy Mo Bee; former Danity Kane member D. Woods; Roger Bonds, who was Sean’s bodyguard from 2003 to 2012; Jourdan Cha’Taun, who was Sean’s personal chef from 2007 to 2010; makeup artist Mylah Morales; and Wardel Fenderson, who was the getaway driver for Sean in the 1999 Club New York shooting incident.
Fenderson gives his first on-camera interview for “The Fall of Diddy” but he doesn’t really say anything that he’s hasn’t already publicly revealed. He says that Sean offered him $50,000 to take the gun that Sean was accused of using in the shooting. Fenderson ultimately testified for the prosecution and recanted his bribed previous statements about what happened that night.
Morales (who was interviewed in “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy”) repeats her story of seeing Ventura injured with cuts and bruises after an apparent fight with Sean in 2010 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Morales says she didn’t actually see or hear Sean assault Ventura, but Morales says that she knew Sean was the only person in the room with Ventura when the injuries happened. Morales says she helped Ventura stay in a safe location and got her private medical treatment from a doctor whom Morales knows.
Morales admits that she and Ventura were both too afraid to report this incident to law enforcement or to go to a hospital. Morales ominously says of Sean Combs: “Many people are afraid of him to this day.” Morales says that she and Ventura also never spoke of this incident again after Morales helped Ventura.
Bonds and Cha’Taun say that they each witnessed Sean assault Ventura on separate occasions. However, they admit they didn’t report these assaults at the time because they were afraid of getting fired or other retaliation. Bonds says that before Sean hired him as a bodyguard, Bonds was an ex-con who had a hard time finding a job because of his prison record, and he didn’t want to face unemployment again.
Bonds comments on Sean: “He is a master manipulator.” Cha’Taun says of coming forward as a whistleblower: “I’m not afraid anymore … These people do not have the power that they think they do.”
Danity Kane was an all-female pop group formed during the reality show “Making the Band 3,” which was televised on MTV from 2005 to 2009. Sean was an executive producer and star of the show, which featured aspiring singers competing to be in a group that would get signed to Bad Boy Records. In “The Fall of Diddy,” D. Woods says she believes that she and former Danity Kane member Aubrey O’Day were fired from the group in 2008 (this firing was on the TV show) because they rejected Sean’s sexual advances.
Not all the stories about Sean are about physical violence or retaliation. His former publicist Shuter is one of the few ex-employees who doesn’t have anything bad to say about Sean in “The Fall of Diddy.” Shuter comments: “We used to call him Puff the Magic Dragon. We said that with love. He threw the best parties.”
Mark Jacobs, a director who worked for the VH1 reality competition series “I Want to Work for Diddy” (which was on the air from 2008 to 2010), describes an inappropriate situation that he experienced the first time he met Sean, which was at Sean’s house. Jacobs claims that Sean came down the stairs and was completely naked underneath an open robe. Jacobs says he was too shocked to say anything about it and didn’t want to give the impression that he was uptight.
Other media people interviewed in the documentary mostly comment on facts that have already been reported. The journalists and other media people interviewed in the documentary include Mark Anthony Neal, editor of the non-fiction book “That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader”; journalists Peter Noel, Cheyenne Roundtree and Dee Barnes; and social media personalities B. Scott and Tisa Tells.
However, former Vibe magazine editor-in-chief Danyel Smith retells her story of how Sean threatened her life and she had to go through a top-secret mission to hide magazine proofs from him and his associates. It happened after Vibe did a cover photo shoot with Sean for Vibe’s December 1997 issue. Sean demanded to have approval of the photo of him that would be on the cover.
Smith told him no because it was against the magazine’s policy for anyone outside of the magazine’s editorial department to approve the cover photos. She also declined his request to see the cover photo before it went to press. Smith said that in a phone conversation between her and Sean about this matter about the cover photo: “He said he would see me dead in a trunk if I did not show it [the photo] to him.” Smith says she immediately called Vibe’s attorney, who got Sean to fax over an apology to Smith.
However, Smith says she had to have extra security and somewhat had to go into hiding, by shuttling from office to office, in order to protect the photos and that magazine issue before everything was published. Smith gets emotionally tearful when she says she had so much trauma from that experience, she blocked much of it out of her memories and didn’t remember everything that happened until Vibe’s former research chief reminded her. Smith says that after that incident, she had a cordial relationship with Sean, out of necessity, because she says it was impossible not to be in her type of job and not have some kind of interaction with Sean.
Many of the interviewees who know Sean well have described him as having a hedonistic drug-fueled lifestyle, where people attending his most private parties were usually consuming large quantities of cocaine, ecstasy, alcohol, marijuana and other drugs. Pines says that in his job as Sean’s senior executive assistant, he was often ordered to supply drugs for what Pines says were Sean’s orgies, which Sean called Wild King Nights, also known as “freak-offs,” according to court documents. Pines says he never saw any sexual activities at these parties because he was in another room from where he believed the sexual activities were taking place.
However, Pines (who is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Sean) says that on at least one occasion, Sean pressured him to perform a sexual act with a woman with her consent, while Sean watched this sexual activity. Pines says he felt disgusted by what was happening, but he complied with Sean’s demands because Pines didn’t want to get fired. Pines says he also saw several women (usually non-famous women in their 20s) come and go from these parties. Pines claims he witnessed Sean kick one of these women.
Pines also talks about how he often had to clean up after these orgies and still gets nauseated by what he saw. What he saw won’t be fully described here, but he does describe bodily fluids such as blood and urine. Pines also says that the hotel rooms where these orgies usually took place often had significant damage that would cost thousands of dollars to repair. He comments that there was a lot of baby oil that he had to clean up, which has now made him dislike the smell of baby oil.
It should be noted that in the federal raid of Sean’s homes in Miami, Los Angeles and New York in March 2024, law enforcement found more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil. Several lawsuits accuse Sean or people who work for him of lacing baby oil with Rohypnol or GHB, which are liquid drugs that cause disorientation or unconsciousness. The plaintiffs in many of these lawsuits alleging rape say that they believe they were raped after being drugged with unknown substances.
Several people interviewed claim that Sean often likes to watch and videorecord the activities at his orgies. Sean has admitted in past interviews that he has a decadent sex life, but he says he only engages in consensual sexual activity. Pines says part of his assistant job was to erase incriminating videos and computer search histories for Sean. Pines also commented that Kristina Khorram (the chief of staff for Combs Enterprises) was Pines’ actual direct supervisor. Khorram has declined requests for interviews.
Pines, who describes himself as coming from a Christian background, gets tearful when he talks about his time working for Sean, whom Pines calls a “predator.” Like many people who worked with Sean, Pines says he was thrilled at first because he thought working for this celebrity would open up many more opportunities for him. But the dream turned into a nightmare, says Pines.
“The Fall of Diddy” certainly has enough of his former employees and former associates placing blame and telling stories. But the documentary doesn’t go deep enough in naming and trying to interview powerful people (not low-ranking employees) who knew about these alleged crimes and might have helped cover up these alleged crimes or simply enabled by doing nothing. Khorram certainly isn’t the only person who could be considered an enabler.
Sean Combs did not get his fortune from out of nowhere. He was well-funded by people at corporations that have a responsibility to know if he was committing serious crimes that could ruin people’s lives. But as is often the case, many enablers don’t care if they are profiting from other people’s pain, as long as the money keeps pouring in to the enablers. The enablers only come forward if they are forced to reveal information, or if the disgraced person is no longer of use to them.
Many documentaries about Sean Combs are being released after these scandals were made public and before his trial. Some people might question how much these documentaries might affect his ability to get a fair trial. But the reality is that these documentaries are considered news reports, which are entitled to rights that have to do with freedom of the press. Still, any documentary about Combs and his scandals will be considered too salacious and tacky for some viewers, so viewer discretion is advised. And one thing’s for sure: There isn’t a shortage of people who have things to say about this disgraced celebrity.
Investigation Discovery premiered “The Fall of Diddy” on January 27, 2025.
