Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, told a jury in Manhattan on Wednesday that her life with Sean Combs had its moments, but was largely filled with beatings, threatened blackmail and even a rape.
During more than five hours of testimony in Mr. Combs’s sex trafficking and racketeering trial, Ms. Ventura recounted how he had stomped on her in the back of his car and how she suffered a gash above her eye when he threw her against a bed frame.
She also recounted how, after the pair had dinner in 2018, Mr. Combs raped her in her living room.
“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she testified.
At the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura said through tears that after she had broken up with Mr. Combs, the trauma remained and she enrolled in treatment for drug abuse. Even so, she said, she contemplated taking her life by walking into traffic. She said her husband stopped her.
Ms. Ventura told the court she stayed with Mr. Combs despite beatings and other abuse partly because of the nagging, persistent fear that videos of their sexual encounters with male prostitutes, the hundreds of “freak-offs” that she said Mr. Combs enjoyed watching and recording, would be posted online.
Hers was not idle anxiety based on what she viewed Mr. Combs might be capable of, she said, but the consequence of repeated threats he had made to use the material to damage her if she deviated from his wishes. In one case, she described sitting beside him on a flight when he displayed for her videos that she thought had been destroyed.
“I just felt trapped,” she said.
Mr. Combs, one of the most famous names in hip-hop for decades, has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. His lawyers have argued that Ms. Ventura, and another woman who is part of the case, were willing participants in the marathon sex sessions that are at the heart of the prosecution’s case.
In bringing forward what Ms. Ventura described as threats of blackmail, the government was attempting to rebut arguments by the defense that the sex was consensual and the charges an attempt to criminalize unconventional, but lawful, behavior.
Defense lawyers are scheduled to begin their cross-examination of Ms. Ventura on Thursday.
Ms. Ventura’s matter-of-fact tone during hours of testimony disguised the extraordinary violence and dysfunction she said were part of her drug-fueled relationship with Mr. Combs, who was also her record-label boss.
“He would grab me up,” Ms. Ventura said in describing Mr. Combs during sexual encounters with the men he had hired. “Push me down. Hit me in the side of the head. Kick me. You name it.”
She read a text message she sent to Mr. Combs in 2017. “You treat me like you’re Ike Turner,” the text said, referring to Tina Turner’s former husband, who was abusive to her.
She stayed in the relationship, Ms. Ventura has said, in part because she loved Mr. Combs and in part because of how much damage she thought would result if the world, her family, her mother saw the footage.
Once when she was dating the rapper Kid Cudi in 2011, she said Mr. Combs told her, “I’m going to put out two embarrassing videos of you.” The incident on the plane followed an argument and Ms. Ventura said Mr. Combs pulled up the videos on his laptop and told her he was going to “embarrass me and release them.”
Mr. Combs’s three adult sons — Quincy Brown, Christian Combs and Justin Combs — listened to the testimony inside the courtroom — Justin with his arm draped around Mr. Combs’s mother, Janice Combs. Three of his daughters who had been attending the trial were not there on Wednesday.
Mr. Combs, wearing a cream-colored sweater and gray pants, tracked Ms. Ventura with his eyes as she walked to the witness box in the morning to begin her day on the stand. She stared ahead. Ms. Ventura’s husband, Alex Fine, looked at Mr. Combs as his wife spoke.
Ms. Ventura acknowledged hitting Mr. Combs during arguments and detailed one incident in 2009 when she punched him in the face. The pair were attending a party and Mr. Combs, seeing her speaking with a producer, called her a crude name, Ms. Ventura said. When they left the party and got into their car, Ms. Ventura said, she slugged Mr. Combs.
The prosecutor questioning her, Emily A. Johnson, asked how hard she hit him. “As hard as you can hit somebody when you’re drunk like that,” Ms. Ventura said.
She began her testimony Wednesday by detailing the aftermath of Mr. Combs’s attack on her at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016. Ms. Ventura had told the jury on Tuesday that Mr. Combs had hit her in the face during a freak-off there and she had fled.
But he followed her, wearing only a towel, and as recorded in a surveillance video shown in court — and broadcast in parts by CNN last year — Mr. Combs struck, kicked and dragged her in the hallway.
Ms. Ventura said she left the hotel and, in an Uber ride back to her apartment, took a selfie of the “fat lip” she suffered in the beating. Once she got home, a friend called the police, but when officers arrived, Ms. Ventura said she declined to identify who had assaulted her.
“Did you want to protect Sean?” asked the prosecutor, Emily A. Johnson.
“Yeah, of course,” Ms. Ventura answered.
The couple reconciled enough that, days after the assault, they appeared together at the premiere of a film she starred in called “The Perfect Match.” The jury was shown a photograph of the couple together at the premiere. Ms. Ventura said she had covered the bruises on her face with makeup.
Mr. Combs’s defense team has acknowledged he was violent during the relationship but has argued that those acts do not constitute either racketeering or sex-trafficking, the charges on which he is being tried.
Ms. Ventura’s testimony in many respects mirrors what she said in a 2023 lawsuit that accused Mr. Combs of abuse. It was resolved in just one day and Ms. Ventura revealed on Wednesday that she had received $20 million in a settlement.
Some of the text messages read in court on Wednesday displayed the extreme emotional polarity of the couple’s relationship. In one loving message she sent him on Father’s Day, she said, “You are truly the most extraordinary man,” and said she looked forward to having a child together.
“Thank you for always showing me love and happiness, the way it’s supposed to be,” she wrote. Asked by the prosecutor why she sent the message, Ms. Ventura responded, “Because I loved him and it was Father’s Day.”
She said that even after what she described as being raped in 2018, she subsequently had sex with Mr. Combs. Asked why, Ms. Ventura pointed to their decade together. “You don’t just turn feelings off that way,” she said.
The frequency and extremes of the freak-offs, which she said were held in hotels around the country, were damaging both emotionally and physically, Ms. Ventura testified. In one case, she said, Mr. Combs took her away from her birthday party to engage in a freak-off.
She said she developed mouth sores, attributing them to activities during the freak-offs, including taking drugs and performing oral sex. In a text message, Mr. Combs expressed sympathy, writing, “I’m sorry.”
But she said he would urge her to have sex at freak-offs even when she had painful urinary tract infections.
In recounting one incident from 2013, Ms. Ventura said she was with friends in her apartment when Mr. Combs entered, yelling that she was sleeping on the couch instead of packing for a trip they were taking. Though her friends sought to defend her, Ms. Ventura said Mr. Combs threw her down, and she cut her eyebrow on the corner of her bed.
Afterward, he had security take her to a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills to have the gash sutured. She said she later texted him a photo of the injury and wrote, “so you can remember.”
