120 additional sexual assault lawsuits to be filed against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs
A team of lawyers announced Tuesday that it would be filing more than 100 sexual assault lawsuits against Sean Combs, a massive legal action that appears to have few if any precedents in the #MeToo era. The lawsuits would exponentially increase the number of sexual abuse accusations against the embattled music producer, commonly known by his stage name Diddy.
“The biggest secret in the entertainment industry, that really wasn’t a secret at all, has finally been revealed to the world,” said Tony Buzbee, one of the lead attorneys, at a Houston press conference. “The wall of silence has now been broken.”
One of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Andrew Van Arsdale, who previously represented hundreds of victims in a sexual abuse lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America, called the forthcoming filings “unprecedented in scope” in an interview with The Washington Post.
Van Arsdale said Combs’s alleged victims include an equal amount of men and women, who ranged in age from 9 to 38 at the time of the attacks. The alleged assaults span a 20-year period in the 2000s and 2010s, when Combs was at the height of his celebrity. He said 120 individual lawsuits will be filed in New York, Los Angeles and Miami in coming weeks.
Combs — who has generally denied all accusations against him — has previously been sued for sexual assault nearly a dozen times, by women and men, and has been held without bond in a Brooklyn jail since he was arrested last month on federal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
Following that arrest, Buzbee and Van Arsdale’s law firms called for potential victims to come forward. Over 10 days, they received more than 3,000 responses, said Van Arsdale.
The team of lawyers narrowed that number to more than 100 cases they considered credible. Van Arsdale told The Washington Post that he was struck by the similarities in the accusations. Many of the alleged victims were trying to break into the music industry when they received an invitation to an event hosted by Combs, he said.
Van Arsdale said that the lawsuits will name a number of co-defendants, including members of Combs’s family, record labels, event venues and Combs’s associates. While attorneys didn’t share details about the alleged associates during the news conference, Van Arsdale told The Post that they include “household names.”
The victims allege that Combs also explicitly threatened them to stay silent and were scared to come forward until recently, Van Arsdale said. Combs being denied bond helped ease some of their fears, the attorney said.
Many of the sexual assault lawsuits filed against Combs within the past year contain similar details of alleged drugging and trafficking — often at parties. These accusations of physical and sexual attacks go back as far as the early 1990s and as recently as 2023.
Notable accusers include two of Combs’s former artists, Casandra Ventura (who goes by the stage name Cassie) and Dawn Richard, as well as producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, who worked on Combs’s most recent record, “The Love Album.”
Several of Combs’s alleged victims accused Combs of wielding his wealth, influence and power to traffic them and coerce them into sex acts. The media mogul has also been accused of filming the alleged sexual assaults and using them to silence his alleged victims.
In a lawsuit filed last week, one woman said she later discovered that a video of her sexual assault had been sold as pornography.
In March, Department of Homeland Security agents raided Combs properties in Miami and Los Angeles. Some of the materials recovered from the raids were shared in a 14-page grand jury indictment that was unsealed last month. According to the filing, law enforcement found defaced AR-15s and ammunition, narcotics and “more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant” that they allege may have been used in Combs’s illegal sex parties, which he called “freak offs.”
These sex parties were a frequent site of sexual abuse and violence against Combs’s victims and were frequently filmed to pressure victims to stay silent, according to the federal indictment, which was unsealed after Combs was arrested Sept. 16 in New York. The indictment also alleges that Combs used members of his staff throughout his multiple media, entertainment and lifestyle companies to help cover up his alleged crimes.
Combs is being held without bail at a Brooklyn jail, awaiting a trial that could put him in prison for life. He has denied all the charges against him as well as the claims in earlier lawsuits. However, Combs said he took “full responsibility for my actions” in a video that showed him beating Ventura in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel, after CNN published the footage
in May.
Both Buzbee and Van Arsdale have experience with high-profile cases.
Buzbee represented more than a dozen women
who accused quarterback Deshaun Watson of sexual assault. He also filed a
$750 million lawsuit against the rapper Travis Scott on behalf of the victims who died in a crowd surge at Scott’s Astroworld concert in 2021. Buzbee, a former Houston mayoral candidate, also defended Rick Perry, a former governor of Texas who faced abuse of
power charges in 2014, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton during his impeachment trial last year. In 2010, Buzbee
was part of the legal team against BP in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill case
Van Arsdale represented hundreds of clients in the Boy Scouts of America
sexual abuse case settlement in 2023. His law firm partnered with Abused in Scouting, a group of law firms that worked together to represent former Boy Scouts who claimed to be victims of sexual assault.
