Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, began testifying for a federal jury on Tuesday morning in the sex-trafficking and racketeering case against Sean Combs. Lawyers for Mr. Combs have portrayed the relationship as loving but deeply toxic while maintaining that any sexual arrangements were completely consensual.
In the first minutes of her testimony, she was asked by prosecutors to describe the more than decade-long relationship she had with Mr. Combs.
“There were violent arguments that would usually result in some sort of physical abuse,” she answered. “Dragging, different things of that nature.”
Ms. Ventura, 38, wore a brown turtleneck dress that accentuated her pregnant belly. As she entered court Mr. Combs turned back in his chair to see her walk in. His lawyers had asked the judge to have her present on the stand before the jury entered, a request that the judge apparently denied.
In her testimony, which is expected to last through the end of the week, Ms. Ventura was soft-spoken and visibly emotional, dabbing at her nose and eyes with a tissue. She recounted meeting Mr. Combs around 2005, when she was 19.
“He was this larger-than-life entrepreneur, musician,” she said. “Was a fan of the music. I didn’t know too much about him personally.” Soon after, she signed a 10-album deal with his label, Bad Boy. At that time, she said, she and Mr. Combs still had a “platonic” relationship.
“I wanted to be around Sean for the same reasons as everyone else at the time,” she testified. “He was just this exciting, entertaining, fun guy that also happened to have, you know, my career in his hands.”
Their relationship soon became sexual. Ms. Ventura described her first experiences with “freak-offs,” the drug-fueled sexual encounters with male prostitutes that the government contends were coerced. She said those events caused her “nervousness and confusion.” She did not understand how they could be a turn-on, she said, but felt a “responsibility” to please Mr. Combs. “I was confused, nervous, but also loved him very much,” she said.
Later she testified, “Eventually it became a job for me, pretty much.”
Her husband, Alex Fine, was allowed to be present in the courtroom for the beginning of her testimony, but the judge said Mr. Fine would have to leave during a discussion about an allegation that Mr. Combs had raped her in 2018. Mr. Combs’s lawyers argued that they might need to call Mr. Fine as a witness later.
The much-anticipated testimony was Ms. Ventura’s first major public comment since she filed a bombshell lawsuit against Mr. Combs, her former boyfriend and label boss, in late 2023, in which she accused him of having instituted a system of abuse and control over her life and career for more than a decade. Combs and Ventura quickly reached an eight-figure settlement in the civil case, which led to a government investigation and Mr. Combs’s arrest in September 2024.
Though legal filings in the federal case had referred to her only as Victim-1, there was never much doubt that the singer was the witness at the center of the racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking case against him.
On the stand, Ms. Ventura said that Mr. Combs ultimately “controlled a lot of my life.” Over time, she said, the videos he shot of her during the freak-offs were “blackmail materials,” which she feared could be put on the internet.
“He had many resources to do that,” she said.
